Culture of Yes. Just Say No.

Think about those times in your life when you learned the most – those life lessons that enriched your experience and made you the leader you are today.

Did those lessons come from moments that were handed to you on a platter by smiling admirers?

Mine sure didn’t.

Those pivotal moments of growth and development emerged as a result of being challenged, facing into obstacles with hard work and sweat equity. We need to be challenged to grow, as individuals, in our careers, and collectively as companies.

That’s why a Culture of Yes is so toxic … and dangerous.

The Two Types of Yes Cultures

Sometimes, Yes Cultures emerge unseen and unfelt; we don’t even know we’re in one. Other times, Yes Cultures are frequently discussed as a noted cause of employee disengagement within our organizations.

However they come to be, Cultures of Yes seem to emerge in one of two forms:

1.    The Purposeful Yes Culture: In this scenario, a leader intentionally creates a culture where no one ever says no. The leader directs, and the workers follow. Challenging instructions or ‘taking initiative’ just isn’t part of the corporate culture or its lexicon.

2.    The Organic Yes Culture: This type of Yes Culture develops over time through subtle cues delivered by management and embraced into the culture of a company. These messages make employees realize that honest opinions, feedback, and alternate answers just aren’t welcome and, in fact, may be detrimental to their respective careers. ‘Yes’ is the answer to give because it’s the only answer that will be accepted.

How to Tell if You’re Already in a Culture of Yes

Cultures of Yes exist. A 2018 PwC whitepaper found that more than half, 55 percent, of companies fail to give their employees true autonomy, while 70 percent of the study’s more than 1,200 respondents cited a high degree of autonomy as important. For the purposes of its study, PwC defined autonomy as the ability to influence one’s project assignments, work team assignments, and the structuring of one’s workday.

If you’re surrounded by people who need direction before making any decision, who are afraid to take risks, and who aren’t empowered in their roles, then you may just be working in a Culture of Yes.

Maybe these people even feel engaged, even if they’re not empowered or fully effective because the company has succeeded in hiring employees who seek out Yes Cultures. Or, maybe the politics of your organization – domineering bosses, lack of opportunity for people to offer opinions – have created the Culture of Yes. If people are unhappy being directed, you’ve got disengagement. That means a lack of motivation, slippage in quality, and … a lack of care arising in the execution of job duties.

Employees may want to give more. But they can’t. They’re being stifled.

And that’s dangerous.

Why Yes Kills

Whether you have an organic Culture of Yes, or one that’s been purposely and carefully cultivated over time, there’s danger. Because you’re operating on the whims of one person or a cohort of like-minded people, you’re missing out on perspectives and other angles from which to view an issue or come to its solution. If you contemplate just one solution to each issue that ever comes up, you’re missing out on skills-building opportunities, business process innovation, and development processes that could help you build both your business today and your succession plan for tomorrow. 

In a Yes Culture, your leaders aren’t growing either. Without adversity, it’s hard to get growth. Even if you read about learning, it’s the hands-on experience that drives growth. By forcing leaders to defend their ideas or plans against challenges, those ideas and plans change and improve. But, it takes bravery to put an idea out there for possible rejection. And, without that, our leaders don’t grow. They stop learning. And companies and their think tanks become stagnant cesspools of let’s-do-what-worked-before thinking. Innovation dies.

 The ‘Throat to Choke’ in a Culture of Yes

A familiar adage in management says that you can’t delegate accountability. And that’s true – especially in a Culture of Yes. When a Culture of Yes exists in a workplace, it’s because leaders have allowed it to grow, neglected to stop it, or have actively cultivated it. There’s no one else to blame.

Good Leaders Let Others Lead

Good leaders aren’t always the ones who are right. They’re the ones who listen, and who make great decisions. Good leaders respect and reward people who innovate, come up with great ideas and have the courage to give voice to them. Good leaders don’t always have to be right, or the smartest ones in the room (or email chain). They don’t have to have a perfect batting average. They respect teamwork and value the input of subject matter experts.

Cooperation and empowerment make sense. Research cited by Harvard in 2018 showed that employee empowerment in the workplace is directly correlated with improvements in job satisfaction, employee engagement, job performance, and employee loyalty.

Let’s Argue. Because We Might Discover We’re Both Wrong.

Adversity leads to innovation. Someone notes a problem and then conceives of an idea to solve it. When we welcome the delivery of ideas from our people, instead of directing them to be compliant yes people, we get innovation, better ideas, and we may avoid a lot of the issues that we might have otherwise faced. Adversity brings out the best in our people: the best ideas, the best effort, the best morale, and … the best workplace.

Even if you’re stuck in the mire of a Yes Culture, there’s hope! In its 2019 whitepaper, Secure Your Future People Experience, PwC states that 70 percent of companies believe that creating worker autonomy is important for the future. We just have to get there. It’s worth the effort.