Description
Susan Loring remembers working for a yes man. “ Oh God, I’m so glad I’m not there anymore,” she
moans. It wasn’t just the overabundance of work. Her boss reported to the company founder, who
shared with him lots of new ideas that required major changes to projects well underway. Then, the
moment of untruth always came for her yes man: He never pointed to the merits of the old plan or the
flaws in the new one. The yes man caved.
“What a wonderful idea!” Ms. Loring recalls him saying. “We’ll have it for you on Monday.” Whenever
she said “ no” to her boss, she was told she didn’t get either “ it” or “ the big picture.” And there was
always someone willing to bend to her yes man, making her look worse. “So you give up. You turn into
the worst thing possible, which is a yes man’s yes man,” she says.
Her yes man became a founder favorite while Ms. Loring “had a stomachache every day getting ready
for work.” Yes men, defined as stooges, flunkies, and push-overs, are so full of following that they can’t
lead. They head up the corporate ladder because their agreeability is in direct proportion to their lust for
power. Yes, men create a make-work marathon, darting goals and work-life imbalance. They render
their staffers as goose chasers, wasting time if not company money. Everyone gets tired working for the
yes man, longing for a can’t- do spirit. The problem is you can’t say “no” to a yes man. Having rarely
uttered it, they don’t value the currency of a “no.” This is not about the get- lost “no,” but even the most
well-reasoned, softly peddled, bad- for- the- bottom- line “no.” No matter how deftly delivered, a “no”
to a yes man is transformed into one of corporate America’s most career- limiting charges: You’re not a
team player. . . .
This would be amusing if human yessers didn’t seem even more satirical. One middle manager at an
the insurance company has a yes- man supervisor who tells his boss, “I was thinking the same thing myself.”
That was said when his boss’s boss wanted a group that worked on compliance to do a task better done
by accounting. “ It made absolutely no sense,” she says. Similarly, Linda Shoemaker, a former salesman-
ager had a boss who would say, “ ‘ No’ is not in my vocabulary!” And she routinely got sent on the make-
work missions, like reorganizing the office files. Near the end of three weeks, her boss told her it needed
to be done differently, even though she had checked with her twice. It was deflating, to put it mildly.
Working for yes men, notes Robert Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford University,
“just ss.” Because a yes man can’t filter out extraneous tasks the way good leaders can, he says, his
staffers are “cognitively overloaded and condemned to do many things, almost all of them badly.”
Innovation also takes a hit. “In an organization where innovation happens, very often people ignore
orders and don’t do what they’re told,” he says. To avoid pointless tasks that a yes man has green-
lighted, says Prof. Sutton, you can try to reason with facts. Or you can implement the best of bad
alternatives, which may actually cost the company less than full compliance: “ You say you’re going to
do it and you do it slowly and incompetently,” he says. That maneuver can make the boss’s interest in
the request fade fast, he says. . . .
Lee Folger, a former salesman, is a recovered yesser. He used to yes his clients constantly only to
discover that on a few occasions, he couldn’t deliver on promises. The failures torched his credibility. So
after he learned his lesson, instead of yes, he’d say, “I’m just not sure we can meet your expectations.”
It’s better managing but he misses seeing the satisfaction, even the romance, in the other person’s eyes.
“ It’s like a wonderful, romantic dinner— and someone stops the record.”
For Discussion
1. Have you ever worked for a yes man? What was it like?
2. How would you describe Susan Loring’s work attitudes while working in her previous job? Explain.
3. How does the perception process explain the behavior of yes men?
4. To what extent would a yes man likely possess the Big Five personality dimensions? Explain your
rationale.
5. How can employees combat the stress of working for a yes man? Discuss.