I used to work for a "NO" at almost any cost guy. He ended up shouting at me (and I shouted back) over a literal "this will take me exactly five minutes in SQL if I am being lazy about it" request that he said the requestor should have asked for two weeks ago, and they ought to have to wait. Now, at the end of his career, he works as an assistant (to someone who is almost an assistant themselves), where once he was the head of the department. He worked pretty hard for that reputation and it eventually caught up with him. Of course, it was still a ding on my review at the time but whatever.
On the other hand, too much "yes" can keep you away from your actual duties, you end up greasing a lot of wheels instead of making formal fixes, and you can saddle yourself with a lot of obligations from what you thought were one-off deals. You can be mired in place by a spider's web of dotted-line relationships, and often yes to one person, right now, means that someone else's possible yes gets blocked and you get problems from there. And, frankly, you can end up doing work better suited for someone else. That road ends up in being taken advantage of.
My only "solution," such as it is, is not to maintain just a middle stance, but to slightly vacillate back and forth from it, as time and your mood allows. This can cause people to actually evaluate whether or not you are the person who needs to do this. If you start gathering up all kinds of extra responsibilities, those need to be communicated, first verbally and then in writing, in numerous directions.
Tightrope walkers do not stay exactly in the middle, but move slightly back and forth to maintain balance, and that is what I advocate.
I used to work for a "NO" at almost any cost guy. He ended up shouting at me (and I shouted back) over a literal "this will take me exactly five minutes in SQL if I am being lazy about it" request that he said the requestor should have asked for two weeks ago, and they ought to have to wait. Now, at the end of his career, he works as an assistant (to someone who is almost an assistant themselves), where once he was the head of the department. He worked pretty hard for that reputation and it eventually caught up with him. Of course, it was still a ding on my review at the time but whatever.
On the other hand, too much "yes" can keep you away from your actual duties, you end up greasing a lot of wheels instead of making formal fixes, and you can saddle yourself with a lot of obligations from what you thought were one-off deals. You can be mired in place by a spider's web of dotted-line relationships, and often yes to one person, right now, means that someone else's possible yes gets blocked and you get problems from there. And, frankly, you can end up doing work better suited for someone else. That road ends up in being taken advantage of.
My only "solution," such as it is, is not to maintain just a middle stance, but to slightly vacillate back and forth from it, as time and your mood allows. This can cause people to actually evaluate whether or not you are the person who needs to do this. If you start gathering up all kinds of extra responsibilities, those need to be communicated, first verbally and then in writing, in numerous directions.
Tightrope walkers do not stay exactly in the middle, but move slightly back and forth to maintain balance, and that is what I advocate.