One of the harder things I’ve had to do since taking on leadership roles is learn how to say no. This doesn’t seem like it would be hard, but trust me, if you’ve lived a life of wanting to say yes (to make someone happy, to make something new, etc.) it isn’t easy. Saying no comes in many more forms than simply “no.” itself. Maybe you have to tell someone that what they did is not acceptable work (“This is not good, and here is why: …”). Maybe you have to tell someone that the plan they’ve come up with is unrealistic (“We don’t have the resources to do that, and what you want is not higher priority than any of the N things we are doing now.”). Maybe you have to tell a customer that no, what they want not being part of the product is not a defect but rather a request for custom work that will cost extra.
Maybe you have to tell someone that no, they no longer have a job on your team, effective immediately. The person who can do that without losing sleep the night before is not someone I’d like to meet. I’m thankful that I haven’t yet had to cross that managerial Rubicon, though I have come close a few times.
But there’s a reason that economics is called the dismal science; its conclusions are as inescapable as they are uncomfortable at times. When you operate in the real world of resource constraints, where time is not unlimited, budgets are not infinite, and you have finite staff, your choices are always on some level OR, not AND. OR means that for every X you say yes to, there are N >= 1 Ys that you must say no to. (OK, to satisfy the pedantry brigade preemptively technically this is XOR not OR, but you lot can go back to reading assembly language manuals now.) That you don’t have a choice about saying no in some way doesn’t make the process feel any better; loss aversion is a powerful thing when what you are losing is the potential of having said yes to something. I can only hope that with practice I’ve gotten better about doing it both more efficiently and more politely.