The Focus Crisis: How to Say No at Work and Get Promoted for It

I think there's a difference between being productive and promotable. If you're a professional who constantly delivers results but keeps getting passed over for a promotion, this episode is gonna change the way you think about your career. Rob Zelinka is a CIO who spent thirty years leading enterprise technology teams, who learned the hard way that being the hardest worker in the room is not what always gets you to the next level. Today, he breaks down the strategic skills that separate people who do great work from the people who actually get promoted for it.

By the end of this conversation, you have a framework for saying no at work that protects your priorities, builds credibility with your leadership, and positions you as the strategic thinker that they want to promote. Welcome to the Leadership Sovereignty Podcast, where professionals learn to navigate challenges at work through the power of leadership principles. I'm Ralph Owens, Chief Information Officer in the financial services industry, alongside my co host Terry Baylor, the CEO of a healthcare tech startup.

Together we've spent decades building teams, transforming organizations and coaching individuals through the moments that define their careers. We unpack the mindset, strategies, and habits that help you lead with confidence, expand your influence, get promoted, and increase your income. Now let's dive into today's episode. Yeah.

Patty Alarillo, is is the person that mentored me. She's written several books. Just a spectacular leader. She is so versed and skilled at getting the most out of people.

And here's the challenge, the higher up you go in your career, the more prone you are to this, for lack of a better word, godlike concept. Hey, I got here. You know? I know what I'm doing.

Sometimes we need to be humbled, and Patty was the person that humbled me at a stage in my life where I needed to be humbled. Wow. Wow. That's heavy.

That's heavy. Thank you for sharing that. That's awesome. That's awesome.

Let's move on to the next point. How to say no at work without hurting your career. This is a good one. Is a good one.

Is a good one, because a lot of people fall into that trap of, I gotta say yes to everything. Otherwise, they're gonna look at me as incompetent, or that I'm not good enough for the role, and things of that nature. Rob, why are professionals so afraid to say no in the workplace? Yeah.

Well, Ralph, it's basic fear. No one wants to be viewed as the person of no. The fear of refusing a task, how will that damage my reputation of being a team player? Will someone not come to me?

It goes back to as children, if we played a sport, baseball, basketball by the way, I was not a good basketball player because I was the shortest kid on the team, but I finally got thrust into the game, and I was afraid. What was I afraid of? Failure. And so at the end of the day, I think we have to learn how to manage our fears, our anxieties.

Failure is okay. We're going to fail. We learn from the failure. We grow from the failures.

But I think at the root, Ralph, people often are afraid to say no for the fear of what that will mean to them. Will somebody pass them over for that next promotion or next task? Will they get demoted? That's good, that's I got a question around there, Rob.

So you have a person who, let's say that they have just always performed, right, and I think one of the things that I definitely wanna kind of bring out, because I think this is one of the things as I was in management and leadership, executive management, how do you continue to You know, you have so many wins behind you, right? How do you continue to pursue the wins ahead of you? And on one end, have a precedent that you've set, right? How do you continue to maintain that thrust in the Now with the framework of, okay, this one I just can't support.

How you leverage your wins to balance the no, I guess is what I'm trying to say. How can someone do that? Because not every decision that your leader has brought to you, you've always been on board with. I mean, you navigate how it?

Yeah, it's really a profound question, Terry. At the end of the day, I go back to the KPIs, the metrics that are materially important, the needle movers for our company, for the people we serve, the communities we're in. At a high level, it's a strategic negotiation, quite candidly. It's about redirecting without resisting to protect the space that we need for essentially what are our core responsibilities.

And I think when leaders see that we have the capability of thinking in a bigger context, seeing the bigger picture, so to speak, they recognize that sometimes saying no is the right thing. And I often say this, as long as we have situational awareness, by saying no to this, we're probably saying yes to something else. We want to make sure that that yes we're committing to is the right yes. That's so good.

So Rob, let's just dig into that just a little bit more, because I think you touched on something very profound. You said that as a leader, you know, you've had people who were direct reports to you, people who you may say, hey, I want to do this, I want to do that, and they actually say no. Yep. They're not saying no to say I'm being, you know, disrespectful or defiant, but they're saying, Rob, I would recommend that we probably focus on this.

Yeah. To tell the people why that's such a critical skill to have if you want to be promotable. Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph, this takes a little time. So anytime I come into a new organization, people are getting to know one another, and sometimes there's barriers that have to be broken down. So for example, in the last two organizations I was a part of, I had to break down barriers from prior leaders who had more of a command and control style of leadership. And, by the way, I I had that style of leadership when I first started, and it was beaten out of me, not literally, but figuratively.

And here's how the conversation went. I had someone below me who had retired from the military, and of course I just thought, well, there's nothing more there's no more profound example of command and control style leadership than someone in the military. So I told him, I want you to do this. I want you to do it this way, and I want it done by this date.

Do you have any questions? And his response, it was funny. I didn't find it humorous at the time. I do now.

He said, Yeah, I have one question. Why are you asking me if I have a question if you've told me what to do, how to do it, and when to have it done by? I thought he was kind of being a jerk. And he pulled me aside.

He said, Look, Rob, I'm older than you. This is my first civilian job after retiring from the military with a storied career. Mhmm. I see leadership in you.

This might seem unorthodox, but I'm gonna give you feedback. That's where I learned feedback is a gift. What we do with it, completely up to us, but I try to do everything I can with feedback because someone is investing in me, and they are wanting me to be the best I can be. So to that end, I changed my leadership style the very next day.

Wow. So back to your question, I try to create a culture of psychological safety, where people check their egos and their titles at the door, and we are all equals there to solve a specific problem, drive a specific outcome, but we're there together. But it takes a little time for people to believe you are what you say you are, because if they had been in an environment where they had a command and control style leader, and they were not interested in creating and fostering an environment where psychological safety is the foundation, where people can speak their mind.

Tell you, Rob, I don't agree, and here's why. Rob, I think you're missing a key element. Let me open your eyes to it. I walk in, and we've heard these cliches before, Ralph, Terry, but they're so true.

I really sincerely try to move into a room where I am literally the dumbest person in the room. I surround myself with people that are smarter than I am, more knowledgeable, more experienced. Why? Because I want to learn from them, and I want to grow, and I want them to push me in the same way I'm gonna push them.

That's how you build trust. Mhmm. If you don't have trust with your team, you are not gonna execute. Going back to the football analogy, Tom Brady is not gonna hand off to a running back that fumbles a ball every time he hands it off.

Not gonna throw to Rob Gronkowski if he can't catch. By the way, why did he throw to Rob Gronkowski all the time? Because he caught the ball, and he could advance the ball, and that's how we win in life, advancing the ball. That's good.

Man, that's good. Yeah, Rob, I wrote down a couple things, man, that are just, actually three things. I believe this is a whole topic in and of itself, redirecting without resisting. That is profound.

Is Terry, we the call Jedi. Is the Rob, we talk about EQ as almost a Jedi type power, Right? And that is a Jedi move. Oh my god.

Me share something with you guys here. So yesterday, just yesterday, one of my people was extremely frustrated with his interaction with another executive leader at the company. And he's my barometer. He's the type of person that is chilled all the time.

If he gets upset, you know you have a problem. Right? And so he was he was asking me. He said, Rob, I'm just I had to walk away.

I was so frustrated. And I said, yeah. He says I I said, that happens. And I said, let me share something with you.

You have to use Jedi mind tricks. And he said, no. Because you again, going back to learning the person, I knew he was a huge Star Wars fan. Mhmm.

And I said, think back to Obi Wan Kenobi and what he taught. You have to learn the language of the person, how they operate, what motivates them, and speak in that language. Mhmm. And essentially, what you're doing is you're driving them to the outcome that you want to get, but they're the one doing the driving, and they don't even realize they're doing the driving until all of a sudden they realize, oh my goodness, he used Jedi mind tricks on me.

So thanks for the reference to the to the Jedi, Ralph. Yes, that's awesome. I love that. That is spot on.

Learn the language, yes. No, I mean, this stuff is, you know, feedback is investment. Oh, It's killing. Yeah, yeah, that is killer.

That is killer. Go ahead, Ralph. Now just what I'm getting out of this is this, that mature focus, right, your ability to be able to redirect, right, without, you know, refusing and being able to ask the right questions and lead people, it builds credibility. Right?

That builds credibility that plays to your favor when you wanna be promoted later. Because again, Rob, you've been there, right? You've had to promote people. Some of the things that come to mind when you're looking at, is this person ready?

Are they mature? Can they focus, or do they get distracted all over the place? Things of that nature. So that is fantastic.

Any other thoughts on that, Rob? Well, so you mentioned promotable. I think there's a difference between being productive and promotable. For example, we have what I call Steady Freddies on our team.

These are people that are not interested in climbing the corporate ladder, but they're highly productive people, and they're very valuable. As a leader, you have to determine who your Steady Freddies are, who are the ones that are emerging that have the potential to grow. And then again, having the potential to grow and being able to grow, two different things as well. There's lots of people with potential.

We can never extract the potential out of them. You know, when I think of what are the characteristics of a promotable leader, I think about how their productivity produces a specific positioning. Those people tend to focus on leveraging their work, which prepares them today to solve the problems of the day, but prepares us for tomorrow, and that's how they position themselves to bring more value. That's so good.

That's so good, that's so good. Yeah, it brings a thought for me, I've worked with people and I've seen folks who were great, you know, at doing what they do, and they were put in a leadership or managerial role and they struggled the entire because they weren't willing to let go of whatever that thing was that made them who they were, right? I mean, we all know this, what got you there, we've heard it before, what got you there won't keep you there. It's as simple as that.

You know, Terry, it harkens me back to something Ralph said about being a desktop support engineer. I started my career there too, and my job was to I'm going to date myself here, but it's okay. I think everybody knows that I have the stars, the bars, and the scars over thirty years. Nice.

I was responsible for building Windows 2,000 laptops. Wow. Everybody had Windows 2,000 on their laptop, and I had this system. So historically, you'd take them out of the box and you'd go through all the prompts, and it was laborious.

It would take you a couple hours per machine. Well, you had a team of twenty, thirty, 40, multiply the time out. That's weeks. Right?

So I learned the art of scripting at a young stage in my career. And I had this process down and it was scripted, it wasn't documented. It was all up in my head. And then all of a sudden, someone did what we tend to do in technology, promote the most knowledgeable skilled worker into a leadership role, and they'll just figure it out.

Exactly. And I that's where my command and control style came in. And like you just said, Terry, I had to do it all myself. No one could do it the way I wanted it done, and therefore I hovered over people.

And I corrected every step because I sought perfection. And I realized that's not a sustainable model, and it wasn't until someone had the courage and commitment to me to grab me and figuratively shake me. Literally, they grabbed me by the arms, and they say, Rob, I want to challenge your thought process. Now I had to be receptive.

I had to open my heart, my mind, and my soul, and humble myself to realize that while I might have been the best engineer that ever graced that company, as a leader, I had a big gap. Had to change my thought, because a leader is able to get the most out of their people and make sure that they're put in positions to be successful. And it's going back to that weight room analogy. When you see someone and you know, let's just say for the first time they're going to try to bench press 300 pounds, and they don't think they can do it, but you as the trainer know they can.

So you're there, and you're spotting them, and they're struggling, you can see the right hand is their dominant arm, so it goes up, the weights are tilting. As a trainer, you know exactly how to push them, how to motivate them, what to say, what not to say, when to grab the bar, when to give them just a little nudge. That's leadership. Yeah.

You know, when you put the little finger on there, you're really not doing anything, but it's like you're lifting it up. Exactly. They're like, you have is a finger. You're spot on, right?

But that finger was all they needed to get to get that. And once they achieve that once, they're gonna do it again. And then you know what they're gonna come back and say? Yeah, Terry, it's time for us to go up to let's get to 03:15 next.

Yep. Yes. You know what's so powerful about that analogy? Is the fact that, to Rob, to your point, the ability was already there.

Terri, to your point, the finger just got them to believe they could do it. Yes. Yes. Right?

And that's the most powerful thing about what we do as leaders is we see that potential, we see that ability in there, we ought to help them believe that they can do it. Just to show how our professional lives and our personal lives are integrated, I have an 11 year old son, and he plays baseball, and he's been appointed as one of two team captains for a 13 and under team. So he's two years younger than the rest of the kids on the team, but his coach sees leadership in him, but he's really struggling right now.

So he's making lots of errors. He's getting in his own way. That happens in life. We get in our own way.

We're our own worst enemy, so that's manifesting itself into bad behaviors. So he cried last weekend. The coach gave him the old line from the movie years ago, There's no crying in baseball. And then he threw his helmet, and he was benched, as he should have been.

Right? And so I had this conversation with him about leadership, and I brought him back to the Los Angeles Dodgers, and I asked him, Who's the captain of the Dodgers? He says, It's Shohei Ohtani. I said, I want you to think about something.

What because my son was really frustrated that one of the members of his team happens to be a little girl, got her first hit, scored a run, stole a base, and he was embarrassed that a girl performed better than he did. I said, Well, that's life. I said, As a captain, what I want you to see is you need to be the first kid out of the dugout to congratulate her. Pat her on the back and say, You did a great job.

You scored a run. You got on base. You did all the things we need to do to be successful, to move the needle, as Ralph says. In the same way, when she strikes out, you're the first out of the dugout to pat her on the back and say, It's okay, Lily.

You get them next time. Now, when Lily is getting in her own way and you see it, you're the first one out of the dugout to kick her in the butt and say, Lily, you've got it in you. We need you to get your head in the game. And you could see he was processing.

Ralph, I've led people over thirty years, the hardest thing to do is get your kid to listen to you. So back then I got an 11 year old to listen to me, that was success. It manifested itself the very next week in practice. So Tuesday night, my wife said, Rob, he listened.

You should see him. He's like a different kid. Go ahead, Terry, you had a comment. No, no, that's a great story that leads into what I was gonna say.

So I was speaking with one of my clients this morning, and he was sharing with me about, he was like, Terry, I got a little homework for you. I'm like, okay, what is that? He was like, when is the next marathon in Houston? I'm like, bro, I got a story for you.

So I'm not gonna tell the story now. But at the end of our conversation, I was like, hey, I'll do that research with you and I'll run it with you. And I shared with him because I had gone through the experience before and I think this kind of caps your story along with what Ralph was stating. I said, there are only two other things in my life that compare or that are like, this is just under these two other things, right, when I ran that half marathon.

It was getting married and having children. The sense of self accomplishment, I think that the term I stated to him was the level of awareness and accolade of self, what self could do. It was a self awareness. I don't know how many times in life do we really feel proud of ourselves, but when you accomplish something and you overcome something that you didn't know you could do, or it was a level of awareness, and it sounded like to me your son had that level of awareness and wherewithal to say, Hey, you know what?

I went to another plateau at this moment in my life. And that is one of the most rewarding things, not from a self of glory, but it is a humbling to realize, I didn't think I could, but I'm somewhere I didn't imagine I could be. I'll share another story. I beg your indulgence.

Life's about stories, Right? Yes. We love it. So in my intro, told you I didn't expect to be in technology.

I was there by accident. I was going to graduate high school, and I was going to go to college to become a Spanish teacher because I love teaching people. And Spanish I learned Spanish from baseball. And so it but here's the challenge.

I like nice stuff, and teachers don't necessarily make a lot of money. Hey, And you got to balance so I remember here I was. I sat in the kitchen with my father and my mother, and I said to my father, Dad, I'm not going go to college. And he said, Really?

I said, Really? He said, What are you going to do with your life? What are you going to do with yourself? I said, I'm going go and work in technology.

He says, Really? He says, What do you know about technology? I said, Not a damn thing, but I'm going to learn it. I know people.

And he says, Rob, for goodness sakes, you're not even 20 years old. You don't know people. And he wasn't wrong, okay? But I was so defiant, Terry.

So I said to him, Well, I'm going to figure it out, dad. And he said, Rob, if you do not go to college, you will be the biggest disappointment in my life. Imagine your father saying that to me. Wow.

Ralph, I got up. I looked at him. My lip was quivering. I said, dad, I'm gonna prove you wrong.

And I turned my back on my father and left his house. I grabbed the door, and in my head, I said, what the hell are you doing? Just go to college. But here's here's the situational awareness that I had.

My dad never went to college. My dad never graduated high school. He had to do it the old fashioned way. His school was the school of hard knocks.

Right? And he just wanted better for his son. So fast forward thirty years now. I'm boarding an airplane coming home to Houston from Rio.

My dad calls me. He said, Rob, I just had dinner with your wife and your son. My son was a baby at the time. I said, Thanks, dad.

I'm glad someone's having dinner with my family. I'm out of the country. Right? He said, I want you to know how proud I am of you.

And I said, Wow. I mean, my eyes welled up. My voice cracked. I said, Really?

He says, I am. I said, Dad, do you know what's so ironic about this? He says, I know. I said, Do remember the last thing you said to me thirty years ago when I got up from your kitchen table?

He says, I do. He said, You proved me wrong. Wow. And boy, that was so powerful.

Now here's one other thing, and we talked about accolades. This is a cool thing for me. This is where those accolades mean something, because there's people behind us that got us to where we are. My dad was one of those forces.

Mhmm. I happen to have been blessed by being one of a select few people that was on the Wall Street Journal tech council. So I was I was part of that council, and and a couple times a year, they publish a full page ad with all of the names of the people, the leaders that are framing technology for the future. My dad has one of those framed in his Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow. That's a great story, Rob.

I will tell you, man, one of the things that brings to mind for me, and I tell folks this story who have that kind of because we all have some element of that in our childhood, right? And I remember there was a story, and Ralph you'll appreciate this because I heard this story from Joel Osteen and he said that he was talking about his dad and his dad was really trying to do something different similar to you. And years later, of course, he's successful, whatever, and he was still thinking about, man, my dad did this and that, and he said, God spoke to his heart and said, look, your dad did the best he could with what he had.

Could you have done better? And looking at it with that framework, right? Because you understand, no matter where I am and what I've done, at the end of the day, I'm standing on Willie George Baylor Sr. Shoulders.

There's no doubt about that. I'm standing on Maddie Baylor's shoulders, right? Because of the platform that they created for us to launch from, man. Really appreciate you sharing this story.

I hope that our listeners, if you're in a similar situation like that, just the amount of gratitude and grace in that story both ways, right? There's amount of gratitude and grace both ways, Rob. So I really appreciate you sharing that story, man, and you know, there's always a segment that we're gonna talk about this, so look, look, God is great and man, he ushered in a tool called forgiveness. Bro, all of us, sisters, brothers, let's all exercise that tool, man.

Is one of the most valuable tools in humanity, so let's exercise that. I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on that myself. There was a point in time as a man that I came to that same conclusion that Rob came to. We tend to pattern our lives based on what we think we didn't have when we were young, or based on who didn't support us.

I was just telling my wife this story this morning, how when I graduated high school, my dad was like, I'm not paying for you to go to college, you need to get a blue collar job. But But it didn't hit me until later, same thing with Rob, that he was doing the best he knew how to do. And really, he was doing better than the generation before him. He was trying to get me to have the same success.

He wasn't trying to limit me. He was basically giving me advice based on what he knew and his experiences, right? Yes. Rob, same thing, you know, years have gone by, and I've been able to achieve a few things, and he would just tell me all the time how proud of me he is, right?

And had to learn, and this is the point that I just really want to make for all the listeners out there who are holding a judgment, or someone who has spoken something negative over you in the past, you don't know what that person was going through that made them say what they were saying, right? And you have to give them grace, to Terry's point, in forgiveness, right? Because they were probably doing the best they could with what they had, right? So I don't want to miss that point, because that was big for me.

It was big for me and my development as a man to say he wasn't trying to hold me back, he was only trying to help me based on what he knew. So Rob, thank you for sharing that, man. Really helped. Great story.

I love it. Ralph, one thing you said that resonated with me there, and I learned this lesson as well along the way, and this is a really in your face comment, so just hang with me for the moment. So when someone speaks badly about us, you're exactly right. We have no sense for what's happening in their lives at that moment in time.

But let's just say it doesn't matter what's happening necessarily. It's really not our business what people think of us at the end of the day. Only thing we can control is how we respond to them, not how they react and what they do. That's on Yes, sir.

Sir. Terry and I have said that same thing on this podcast. It doesn't matter what happened to you or what somebody said about you. The only thing that matters is how you choose to respond.

Yes. Because that is 100% in your power to control. You bet. Yes.

Yeah. No. That's awesome. That's awesome.

Thank you for listening to the Leadership Sovereignty Podcast. If today's conversation helped you grow in your leadership, influence, or your career, take a moment to visit leadershipsovereignty.com. There you'll find exclusive resources, free guides, and ways to stay connected to our community of leaders who are building purpose and success.

Don't forget to rate, review, and share this episode with someone who's on the rise in their career. Until next time, lead boldly, lead with purpose, and continue to walk in sovereignty. Take care.