Why Your Yes Isn’t a Promise Yet and How Tech Leaders Build Shared Understanding
Written by David Perry, Executive & Leadership Coach
David Perry is an Executive and Leadership Coach who integrates mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and ontological coaching to help leaders lead with greater awareness and authenticity. His work bridges a lifelong career in technology with a deep commitment to human growth and connection.
It happens so quickly in the meeting. Someone asks, you say yes, and somewhere you’ve already decided to deliver something different. The problem isn’t that you can’t say no. It’s that you’re committing before either of you knows what was really requested.
“This isn’t what I asked for.”
Three weeks ago, your VP asked in passing whether your team could “make our reporting dashboard faster” before the next board meeting. You said yes on the spot because you already knew the bottleneck was in the data pipeline, so that’s what your team rebuilt. Query times dropped by half, but when she opened the dashboard in front of the board, the charts she cares about still took eight seconds to appear.
You delivered. She feels let down. Neither of you said anything untrue.
You’re not bad at your job. You’re excellent at it. You saw the real problem and fixed it. What you never checked was whether you were both solving the same problem.
Why do tech leaders say yes too fast?
The reflexive yes is not a character flaw. It’s the absence of a process, sitting inside a company culture that treats pushback as a betrayal of the collaborative team spirit.
Most of us were never taught how to make and respond to effective requests, so the body does the evaluating instead. Watch closely next time, and you may notice it: a slight lean forward, a tightening in the chest, a breath held longer than usual. Agreement arrives first because it is fast, it feels cooperative, and it spares you an uncomfortable conversation.
The pattern is strongest in the most helpful people. In their Harvard Business Review research on collaborative overload, Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant found that 20 to 35 percent of value-added collaboration comes from only 3 to 5 percent of employees. Those people become bottlenecks and burnout risks precisely because they are so helpful. If you’re the person everyone brings their requests to, you are probably one of them.
What happens to a yes that isn’t quite a yes?
Look closely at many quick yeses and you’ll find something else underneath. The agreement is spoken, but a different plan is already forming in your head: a smaller scope, a later date, a better technical approach than the one requested. It’s a counteroffer, delivered silently.
There are two common reasons. The first is conflict avoidance. Saying yes ends the conversation, while proposing different terms opens up a new, maybe more contentious, one. The second is explanation fatigue, which is especially common among senior engineers. The alternative would mean walking someone through technical details they may not follow, and it feels faster to build the right thing and let the result speak.
Either way, the renegotiation doesn’t disappear. It’s postponed to delivery, where it arrives as a surprise. The requester believes they received a promise. The leader believes they kept one. Both are disappointed, and neither quite knows why.
What makes a commitment real?
Here is the distinction: a yes isn’t a commitment until both people share the same understanding of what is being asked.
This idea comes from ontological coaching, building on Fernando Flores’s work on the language of commitment, including his collaboration with Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd. In that view, a clear request names its conditions of satisfaction (what done looks like) and a time frame. Every request also rests on a background of obviousness: the assumptions each person takes for granted and therefore never says.
In technical organisations, those backgrounds rarely match. Going back to the dashboard example, “faster” meant one thing to the VP watching it load in a board meeting and something quite different to the engineer who knew exactly where the latency lived. Saying yes to that sentence meant agreeing to an ambiguity. Each of them filled the gap with their own picture.
A yes before shared understanding isn’t a promise. It’s a guess with a deadline.
How do you build shared understanding?
Before choosing a response, get the real shape of the request. A few questions, asked out loud, do most of the work:
What does done look like for you?
What is the real deadline, and what happens if this waits two weeks?
What does this assume my team already has?
Then play it back in plain language: “So by Friday you’ll have X, and it will do Y. Is that what you need?” If the other person hesitates or adds something, you didn’t have a shared understanding yet. Better to find out in fifteen seconds than at the sprint review.
In the dashboard case, one question, “Which part needs to be faster for you?”, would have surfaced the gap in a single exchange.
Notice that none of this requires a technical explanation. Shared understanding lives at the level of outcomes, not architecture.
One more question is for you alone: what is my body doing right now? If you notice the lean, the held breath, the rush to be helpful, take one full exhale before you speak. That breath is often the difference between reacting and responding.
What are the 4 honest responses?
Once the request is clear, you have four honest answers, not two.
1. Yes: A full, clear commitment
Use it when the request is aligned, resourced and worth the trade-off. Say it plainly. A clean yes builds more trust than a reluctant one. “Yes, we can own this. I’ll have a plan back to you by Thursday.”
2. No: A clear, respectful decline
Use it when the request doesn’t fit. A real no needs clarity and respect, not a long justification. “We can’t take this on right now. It would come directly out of the migration work you asked us to prioritise.”
3. Counteroffer: Yes, on different terms
Most technical leaders already make counteroffers. They just make them silently, at delivery. This moves the conversation to the moment of the request, where it costs almost nothing. “We can’t do both before the board meeting. We can speed up the charts you’ll present and fix the pipeline the following week. Would that work?”
4. Not yet: A commitment to respond later
Use it when you don’t yet know which of the other three is true. It interrupts the reflexive yes and gives you room to think. It is also a promise, so name when you’ll answer and keep it. “I want to give you a real answer, not a reflex. Let me look at what’s on our plate and come back to you by the end of the day tomorrow.”
What if you can’t keep your promise?
Even a clear promise can run into reality. Priorities shift, a dependency slips, an estimate turns out to be wrong. That isn’t where trust breaks. It breaks when the requester finds out at the last minute, or on the deadline itself.
There is a difference between keeping a commitment and honouring it. Harvard economist Michael Jensen and his co-authors describe honouring your word as either keeping it or, as soon as you know you won’t, saying so to the people counting on you and dealing with the consequences. You can’t always keep a promise. You can always honour it by telling the other person the moment you know it won’t be met, so you can both plan around it. A delay flagged three weeks early is a planning conversation. The same delay revealed the day before is a breach.
In practice, it sounds like this, “I committed to Friday, and I now know we won’t make it. Here’s what we can deliver by then, and here’s when the rest will land. What does that change on your side?”
Renegotiating early is simply a counteroffer made with better information.
What is really damaging the relationship?
The fear behind the reflexive yes is that a boundary will cost you the relationship. Research undermines that fear. In five experiments involving more than 2,000 participants, Julian Givi and Colleen Kirk found that people consistently overestimate how negatively others react when they decline. Their findings were published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Those who were turned down mostly assumed the decision had been carefully thought through, and were far less hurt than expected. The studies examined social invitations rather than workplace requests, but the misjudgment is the same one that plays out in leadership teams every week.
Look at what is actually eroding trust: deliverables that don’t match what was expected, teams absorbing commitments they never agreed to, and a leader praised for flexibility while others carry the cost.
People don’t lose faith in leaders who say no clearly or counteroffer openly. They lose faith when what arrives isn’t what they thought they were promised.
How can you practise this week?
Pick the next request that makes you want to say yes before you’ve thought about it. Take one breath. Ask what done looks like, and play it back. Then choose one of the four responses deliberately.
Before you answer, ask yourself one question: am I saying yes to what was asked, or to what I’ve already decided to deliver?
Where does this practice lead?
Shared understanding is a small practice that opens onto a bigger shift, from absorbing requests to coordinating commitments. It also reveals something about the observer you are being when a request arrives, and that’s where lasting change begins.
The technical leaders who come to be seen as leaders, and not only as experts, rarely have more willpower than their peers. They have the presence to slow down at the moment of the ask.
If the reflexive yes is costing you or your team more than you’d like, I offer a complimentary First Look conversation. We’ll take one recurring request pattern and explore what changes when you build shared understanding first.
Read more from David Perry
David Perry, Executive & Leadership Coach
David Perry is an Executive and Leadership Coach dedicated to helping people lead with awareness, compassion, and integrity. He integrates mindfulness and ontological coaching to support meaningful transformation in how leaders see themselves and the world. With more than three decades in high tech-including pioneering work in early RAID data-storage systems, David bridges the precision of engineering with the depth of human understanding. As a Mindfulness Meditation Teacher, he guides leaders to move beyond striving and return to presence, where clarity and authentic leadership naturally emerge.
