A reader writes:
I work in higher education, and like many groups in the sector, we’ve had severe funding cuts. We’re now on a second round of redundancies.
However, even before this, my poor manager was a fine demonstration of the Peter Principle — this is her first time in a role of this type, and she was already absolutely out of her depth.
She’s already been struggling for a while. She can’t keep up with the volume of the work (it’s a busy, demanding role, but the person who hired me in the role was busy but managing in normal working hours) and can’t make independent decisions. She defers to others and/or wants sign off on everything — colleagues and I frequently have to step in to cut through the information she’s been given and explain quite obvious courses of action, and/or develop plans which would historically have been done by her role holder. She will also occasionally get really lost in the weeds and in micromanaging unimportant details (like the number of columns in a spreadsheet).
She’s nice enough, I have a lot of sympathy for her, and I obviously don’t know all of the demands on her, so perhaps she is totally fine on things that are invisible to me. But I’m basically not managed and work pretty much independently, just keeping her in the loop about my projects.
This is generally fine with me, and I’m senior enough to be able to work independently. But I’m noticing a worrying trend where she is offloading things on me that are really part of her role, partially because I’m sometimes spotting Big Wrong Things that affect the whole organization and bringing this up to her. So two questions:
1. Do you have any suggested scripts to politely make it clear that what I’m being asked to do is not my job, but hers? This occasionally extends to a more junior colleague also line-managed by her (again not very well), who will get stuck with a project they don’t feel well equipped to deal with and will ask for advice, and once I point out the really glaring big neon sign issues, will go “I don’t know how to do this,” and suddenly it will be my project and responsibility. (And after a bit of back and forth of trying to get them to do it, I’ll just fix it because it’s often easier to just fix it rather than trying to coach them through fixing it — which is their line manager’s responsibility).
Please help me say no, in polite British! (Did I mention that we’re all British? The only colleague who is successfully says no is American. She just says, “I’m NOT doing that” and I’m in awe of her and would like to be her when I grow up.)
2. Should I stop flagging up Big Wrong Things because when I do, fixing them magically becomes my responsibility? For example, I spotted an IT issue where we’re paying quite a bit for a service that we already effectively get for free: we’re replicating an existing system and paying for it. I’ve now been tasked with figuring out how to migrate to the free system and work out practicalities, which is the sort of thing that is actually solidly in my boss’s ballpark. At the same time, I’d have to be really disconnected and uncaring about my work to do this, and despite everything I actually really like my job, and what we do makes a real difference to the world.
Both of these issues are going to get worse as we’ll have fewer people, and I understand we all need to pitch in more. But I’m a bit worried about being the sorter outer for lots of people, and effectively doing part of my boss’s job.
Ha, well, even as a fairly plain-spoken American (who, I need to warn you, does not speak polite British), I find your American colleague’s “I’m NOT doing that” to be an extreme outlier of bluntness for an office. It’s useful for demonstrating that the world will not implode if you say no! But it’s a lot blunter than you need to be.
When your boss asks you to do work that should be her job, not yours, you could say:
* “I think that is more your purview than mine — can I leave it with you?”
* “That’s pretty far out of the scope of my role; I think it would normally land with you.”
* “I”m pretty swamped with X and Y and couldn’t take this on without pushing those back.”
And when your more junior coworker doesn’t know how to do something, rather than stepping in to do it yourself, be more vigilant about sending her back to your boss: “I know you haven’t done this before. Can you talk with Jane about how to approach it? She should coach you through it, but you may need to tell her that you need her help.”
I don’t think you should stop flagging big problems — but that doesn’t mean you need to be the one to fix them. You just need to get really comfortable saying, “I don’t have room on my plate to take this on” (and all its varieties, as described here) and maybe, “I think this needs to fall to you, not me, since it’s going to need a manager’s authority.” And the way you get comfortable saying that is by … well, starting to say it. It will feel more natural in time. It’s nowhere close to your coworker’s “I’m not doing that,” so remind yourself that if it’s fine for her to say that, it’s definitely fine for you to say this far softer version.
