March 20, 2019 • 25 mins
Contrary to popular belief, you CAN say no to your boss -- as long as you do it the right way. Alison walks you through how to do it, what to say, and what not to say.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
My colleagues will stop commenting on everything I get. My
assistant rolls eyes at people and meeting Why does my
coworker keep taking credit for all my ideas? Have any
wisdom for me? Hi? I'm Alison Green. Welcome to the
Aska Manager podcast, where I answer questions from listeners about
life at work, everything from what to say if you're
allergic to your coworkers perfume to what to do if
you drink too much at the company party. Let's get started.
(00:28):
My mail at the Aska Manager website is full of
letters from people who are really unhappy about something their
boss is asking of them, but aren't sure if they
can push back, or very commonly, are pretty sure that
they can't push back because they've internalized the idea that
you're never supposed to say no to your boss. They're thinking,
is that part of the deal when you have a
(00:49):
job is that you're just supposed to put up with
whatever is asked of you, or that if you do
push back, you look like a prima donna or difficult
or not a team player, or any of the other
weird words that we hagged people with. But the reality is,
in many cases, you absolutely can push back or say
no to something that your boss is asking of you.
(01:09):
It's just the weird power dynamics of work that are
making you think that you can't, but really you can.
You just have to do it judiciously, not every day,
but you can do it. And on today's show, I
want to talk about exactly how to do it and
go through some examples of times where you might want to,
and we'll talk about exactly how to do it, what
to say, and what tone to use. The first thing
(01:33):
to know about pushing back with your boss is that
saying no doesn't have to be a really aggressive or
hostile thing. In the vast majority of cases, it's not
going to be no, I refuse to do that. It's
about approaching the conversation in a collaborative way. There's a
problem and you're hoping that the two of you, you
(01:54):
and your boss can solve it together. So that means
that you're going to say things like we'd originally agreed
to X, and that was important to me. Is there
a way that we can make that work? Or I'm
concerned about why if we go that route, Or I
don't have time to do why this week, but I
could to X, or I have a lot of concerns
(02:16):
about X. Could we talk about whether there might be
other options? So you see, it's not just no, it's
politely collaboratively conveying I'm not as on board with this
as you might have hoped or expected. What can we
do instead? And if your manager is a decent manager,
she's going to want to hear this when you're feeling
(02:36):
that way. She might not be delighted about it, but
good managers don't want good employees to be miserable, and
they want to know when they are risking that, and
they want the chance to figure out if there's a
different approach that both of you can live with now.
To be clear, they don't want to hear that every day.
And also, to be clear, the answer won't always be yes,
(02:58):
we can change it. But when you feel strongly about something,
you can, and you should speak up. Plus, sometimes you
need to speak up when you disagree with something because
the reason that you disagree is that you have information
that your manager does not have. And this is something
that I think people really frequently don't realize, Like maybe
your boss is telling you to do X, and you
(03:20):
think the client will hate X, and the reason that
you think that is that you have been in meetings
with the client where they have said that they would
hate X, and your boss hasn't. In a case like that,
you have a professional obligation to speak up and tell
your boss to share the information that you have that
she doesn't have, and that might change her perspective if
she did another way. I see this come up all
(03:42):
the time is about workload. So so often people who
are overworked think, well, my boss must know how high
my workload is. She's the one assigning me all of this,
after all, and if she keeps piling things on me,
she just must not care and she expects me to
just somehow get it all done. When in reality, sometimes
(04:04):
that's true. But sometimes oftentimes your boss doesn't realize how
overloaded you are. She is probably not paying nearly as
much attention to your workload as you are. She's counting
on you to speak up if it becomes a problem,
and when you don't say anything, she has no way
of knowing. I can't tell you how often I've seen
this dynamic play out, with the employee becoming more and
(04:26):
more frustrated and demoralized and burned out, while the manager
has no idea and would step in and fix the
workload problem if she knew. Not always, of course, sometimes
you get a manager who really doesn't care, but enough
times your boss would want to know, and so you
should speak up. And that could be anything from a
big sit down conversation about your workload overall, or it
(04:49):
can be a simple hey, to make sure that you know,
it's going to take me two days to do it
this way, but if we do X instead, it would
just take a few hours. So not adversarial, collaborate of
working together problem solving. Okay, that is the overall framework
that I want you to have in your head as
we talk about this, But let's go through some specific
(05:10):
examples so that you can see what it sounds like
in a variety of different situations. I dug into some
past ask manager letters to find some examples of times
when people did need to say no to the brass
so that we would have some concrete scenarios to talk about.
I once had a letter from someone who had been
in their job for a while but got a new manager,
(05:31):
and the new manager kept asking them to do things
that were really not their job and where there were
actually specific reasons for why it wasn't their job and
someone else was supposed to be doing those things. And
the person writing to me, I didn't know if the
new boss was giving them these assignments just because he
was new and he didn't realize what the system had been,
(05:52):
or if he was now changing things and specifically making
it this person's responsibility. And so the letter writer was
trying to figure out how do I raised this without
sounding like I'm just flatly refusing to do it. So
in a situation like that, you could say I wanted
to check with you. You have asked me to do
some projects recently, like X and Y, and I was
of course happy to help out in a pinch, but
(06:14):
because it's come up a few times, I wanted to
let you know that historically that type of work has
been done by the X department, and the reason that
people in my job aren't supposed to do it is blank.
And I figured you didn't have that context yet, and
so I should fill you in. So you're approaching this like, oh,
here's this useful thing that you would probably appreciate, knowing
(06:34):
you're not dancing around it or acting hesitant to say it.
It's just, oh, here's this piece of info you probably
don't have. And then if the boss pushes back anyway,
you could say, well, of course, willing to try that
out if you want to change that, but I want
to make sure you know it would be a pretty
significant change to my role, which would concern me because
(06:54):
of blank. Before we make the change, could I tell
you a bit more about why we ended up divided
things this way. But let's change the situation a little bit.
Let's say that your boss is asking you to do
something that you really don't want to take on. If
you are a good employee who is generally helpful and accommodating,
there is room for you to speak up. Now. If
(07:15):
you are not a good employee, or if you have
a track record of pushing back on everything, then no.
But let's assume that you're in good standing. And let's
say that the thing your boss is asking you to
do is let's say heavy travel, and you don't want
to do heavy travel. And maybe you even took the
job in part because it didn't involve heavy travel. So
(07:37):
you could say, you've been asking me lately to do
more traveling, and I get why it would be useful
to have another person on the team who can travel.
But I want to be honest, I really dislike every
traveling and I actually changed into this field to get
away from doing it. I hadn't realized it would become
part of my role here. Is it something that you're
committed to having the person in my job do or
(08:00):
is there any flexibility? So, in other words, just be straightforward.
You're not going at it like like you're the opposition
to your boss. You're not the adversary. And you're also
not dancing around it and hoping they'll pick up on hints.
You're just laying it out. The key to talking about
this without being insupportinate is that you're not saying that
you won't do it. You're just giving your boss relevant
(08:22):
context that they might not have, some of which might
be that it would significantly change your job satisfaction, which
is something that any good manager will want the chance
to at least factor into their thinking, even if they
ultimately decide to make that change anyway. So, again, more language.
To be honest, I took the role in part because
(08:43):
it didn't involve acts or to be upfront, it's not
a change I would be thrilled about because of blank
or so forth. Of course, whether and when to do
this depends on things like how reasonable or unreasonable the
request being made of you, is how much your employer
values you and how much good will you've built up,
(09:06):
and you do need to do it judiciously. If you're
pushing back on every request, you're going to pretty quickly
run through the political capital that you need. And of course,
ultimately your manager does have the ability to say, sorry,
this is the job, now take it or leave it.
If that happens, you need to decide if you're willing
to stay in the job knowing that these are the
conditions you would need to accept. But much more often
(09:28):
than people realize, there will be room to push back
or renegotiate. Let's go to an ad break here, and
then when we come back, I'm going to have lots
more examples of times when you might need to say
no to your boss and how to do it. So
(09:48):
let's say that you're in a situation where you're being
asked to take on something that you just don't have
time to fit in with the rest of your workload.
A decent manager is going to want to hear that
you're concerned about it, so you should speak up. It's
possible that when you talk it through, you'll find that
the deadline is not as firm as it originally seemed,
or that your boss is more open to pushing it
(10:09):
back once she hears that it's causing problems. You might
find out that it's fine to use shortcuts that you
had assumed wouldn't be okay, or that it's really just
one particular piece of the project that has to be
ready on time. Who knows, maybe none of that would
be true, but it's worth having the conversation. The best
way to approach it is to explain what you can
do and offer some options for how to proceed. So,
(10:32):
to give you an example, you could say, I can
have an outline and most of a draft ready to
go by Thursday. I probably wouldn't have it completely polished
until Monday. Would that work? Or so to get this
done by Thursday, I would need to push pretty much
everything else back, which means that I wouldn't finish up
X and Y until next week. Would that be okay?
(10:54):
A lot of times that's going to solve the problem.
Sometimes managers give deadlines that sound reasonable to them, but
they're very open to modifying them. When you explain what's
needed and why. But what if your manager tells you know,
you need to stick to the original deadline with no
modifications and you can't push any of the other work
back if you really don't believe that you can meet
(11:16):
that deadline. Sometimes it can make sense to say something
like I hear you and how important it is to
get it done by that, and I'm going to do
everything that I can to make it happen. But I
want to be transparent with you that I am concerned
that factors X and why. I mean, I think it's
going to take longer. Let me really push on it
over the next day, and then update you once we
(11:37):
see where we are. So with that kind of language,
you're showing that you get it, you're taking it seriously,
but that you also don't want to promise something misleading,
and you're going to see what you can do and
come back and update her when you have a better
idea of that. Okay, let's get into some more specific examples.
Let's do one. This is the one that I hear
from people about a lot which is being expected to
(11:59):
you is your own personal cell phone for work. Some
people are fine with this because they don't want to
have to carry a work phone and a personal phone.
But there are a lot of good reasons not to
agree to use your personal phone at work, especially because
some companies will have you installed an app which will
allow them to remotely wipe your phone when you quit
(12:19):
or your you terminate your employment for any reason, and
that is not them just remote wiping their data. It
can mean wiping all of your data from your phone.
So if you are using your personal cell phone at work,
make sure that you read what you're agreeing to. And
if you're not sure about the remote wipe, ask your
I T people. Anyway, if your employer suggests that you
(12:40):
do this, that you use your personal phone as your
main work phone, and you don't want to do it,
you can just be very matter of fact, Oh, I'd
rather not use my own phone. Can I use a
company provided one instead? And if that doesn't work, then
you know I'm not comfortable with the stipulations that are
attached to this, like the remote wipe. What do I
need to do to get a company phone instead? Okay,
(13:02):
how about a situation where you're being asked to do
something unreasonable. Let's say that you're being asked to work
around the clock day after day. Sometimes you can just
use a very simple statement that you just aren't going
to do something the exact way that it has been requested.
So you might say, well, i can't work twelve hour
days every day this week, but I'll be able to
(13:22):
do A B and C this week, not D an E.
Let me know if you want me to prioritize those differently.
So just matter of fact with that one and see
what happens. Or how about a situation where your boss
is asking you to do personal favors for her, things
that really aren't your job or anyone's job, like running
(13:43):
personal errands or even leaning her clothes. I say that
because I've actually had a fair number of letters over
the years about varieties of the situation. I once had
someone whose boss was asking her to write his papers
for a class that he was taking on his own
time him and I had a letter from someone whose
boss would ask her employees to do really personal favors
(14:06):
like driving her to the dentist or borrowing her shoes.
That shoes is a real example stuff that you might
ask a close friend, but which definitely isn't appropriate for
a manager to ask employees. So with something like that,
where someone is so oblivious to boundaries, sometimes the best
thing to do is to just always have reasons why
(14:28):
you're not available for the thing, like oh sorry, I'm
just about to get on a conference call, or no, sorry,
I've got plans at lunch so I can't drive you.
But you can also address it more big picture, if
you're up for that. You could say something like, you know,
I don't know if you realize that you often ask
us for pretty personal favors like borrowing clothes or driving
(14:49):
you places, and because you're the boss, there's pressure to
say yes. That wouldn't be there if you weren't the boss,
And that's a tough situation to be in, especially when
it would conflict with something work related. I figure you
didn't realize how often it was happening, so I wanted
to mention it to you. It can be a tough
one to pull off. You won't always be comfortable doing it,
(15:10):
depending on the dynamic with your boss, but some relationships
are going to allow for it. Or with that boss
who wanted the employee to write a paper for his class,
you could say, hmm, I don't really feel right doing
work for a class outside of the office, especially when
I've got my hands full with X and have X
be a work related project. If your boss then offers
(15:34):
to relieve you of ex so that you have more
time for his paper, you could say, Oh, I'm sorry,
I really don't feel right about doing that. Let's do
another weird one. I had a letter a while back
from someone who worked remotely but had to travel to
the company headquarters once a month, and the company was
trying to reduce expenses, and so instead of putting her
(15:56):
up in a hotel while she was there, they were
having her sleep in the office on an air mattress.
And she felt awkward about it for all of the
obvious reasons, but that's not even why she was writing it.
And she wrote in because for her upcoming trips, someone
else was going to be staying in the office, and
so they were going to have her stay at the
CEO's apartment. Well, he stayed in some other property that
(16:17):
he owned. And this wasn't even the first time they
had had her do this. They had made her do
it one time before, and he would come by in
the morning each day she was there to get ready
for work. So super uncomfortable, not something that you should
expect when you're traveling through business. So let's say that
you're in that bizarre situation. Sometimes it's almost harder to
(16:39):
figure out how to say no in a situation like
this because it's so weird, and the fact that they're
asking you to do it like it's no big deal
tells you that they aren't playing by the same rule
book as the rest of us, which can make it
harder to know how to approach it. But you can
be pretty straightforward and assertive. So in this situation, you'd say,
(17:01):
you know, I understand that we're trying to save money,
but I am not well rested when I sleep in
the office, so I'd like to start booking an economy
price hotel instead. And when they proposed the CEOs apartment thing,
you could say, you know, actually, I would prefer not
to stay in his house because last time he kept
needing to come by to pick up his things and
get ready, which wasn't really conducive to having a comfortable
(17:22):
private place to stay. So I want to book an
economy hotel instead, and I'll keep the price as low
as I can. So just politely assertive, you know, this
won't work for me, but I hear your concerns. Let's
do this other thing instead. We'll do a final break here,
and then when we come back. I want to talk
about a really big important category of times when you
might need to push back, and that is when your
(17:44):
employer is doing something that's illegal. Stay tuned. I get
a ton of letters from people who are wondering if
that's something their workplace is doing that is likely illegal.
They're often wondering what their next move should be. And
(18:05):
because most people don't know what to do if their
employer is violating their legal rights at work, they often
either threaten legal action too quickly or they know what
speak up at all because they're not sure what to say.
So first, before anything else, you want to make sure
that your employer really is breaking the law. People sometimes
assume that the law entitles them to things that aren't
(18:27):
actually enshrined in law, particularly in the US, like fair
treatment or paid vacation days, or a warning before being fired.
So first make sure that you really are facing a
legal violation. If you are, sometimes people think the first
step must be to talk to a lawyer and file
a lawsuit, but much of the time that won't be necessary.
(18:50):
It might be, but jumping straight there can really poison
your work environment when you don't need to. To To be clear, it's,
of course you're prerogative to talk to a lawyer and
persue legal action at any point if you want to,
but often you can get what you want in a
more low key way. Often the first step is to
just talk to your employer, because a lot of the
(19:10):
time they genuinely don't know that what they're doing is illegal,
which I know sounds ridiculous, but it's often true, especially
with smaller employers, and often they will back down when
you point out the law to them. That even if
you don't think that's the situation, you know, even if
you're pretty sure that they are well aware of the
law and they just don't care about following it, it
(19:31):
can still be helpful to approach the conversation as if
you're assuming that they don't know and you're just helpfully
bringing it to their attention, and that you're assuming that
of course they would want to know if they are
breaking the law. Approaching it that way will usually get
you a better outcome. Then, if you go in making
it clear that you think your managers are flagrant lawbreakers
(19:52):
right from the start. And when I say better outcome,
that means not only the legal problem stops, but also
that you preserve reasonably good relations with your employer. You
won't always be able to do that, but when you can,
it's usually in your best interests too. And I want
to be really clear, I'm not suggesting that you tolerate
illegal behavior in order to maintain good relationships. I'm saying
(20:15):
that you can often get both things, the illegal behavior
stopped and preserving the relationship. Not always, but enough of
the time that it usually makes sense to try, and
then if that doesn't work, you can escalate if it's needed.
So let's take a really common example. In the US,
all jobs are classified as either exempt from overtime or
(20:35):
non exempt from overtime. If you are classified as non exempt,
meaning that you are supposed to be paid overtime, and
that is not up to your employer, it's based on
the type of work that you do, then you have
to receive overtime pay when you work more than forty
hours in a week. But a ton of people who
should be getting overtime paid don't. Let's say that that's you,
(20:55):
and that your company expects you to work overtime without
extra pay. You could say something like, you know, we're
actually required by federal law to pay over time to
people in my job category. I can definitely work the
overtime if you want me to, but the company is
required to pay for it, and I wanted to make
sure you knew that so that we don't get in trouble.
Or let's say that you are religious and your boss
(21:18):
is requiring you to work on a religious holiday when
plenty of non religious employees would be available to cover
that shift. You could say, Oh, that is actually a
religious holiday for me, and because I know we're required
by federal law to accommodate religious practices, could we schedule
someone else for that day instead of me. Now, note
that the tone here is collaborative. It's not adversarial, and
(21:41):
that is important. Instead of saying you are breaking the law,
you're saying we could get in trouble for this, and
that is because you're The tone you want is that
you're looking out for the company's interests. You're not making
a legal threat. It's the same tone that you would
use if you were advising your boss on some legal problem.
(22:01):
Totally unconnected to you. There's no overt threat of legal action.
It's just, oh, we could get in trouble for this.
The reason for doing it that way is that your
goal here is not just to a certain legal rights,
although that is part of it, but also to keep
a good relationship. And it is far less likely to
happen if you wield the law like a weapon, because
(22:22):
fair or not, the reality is that few relationships are
unaffected when you start making legal threats. You still have
the option of taking legal action if you need to,
but you're more likely to get a good outcome by
starting out this way. This actually came up on the
Aska Manager website recently. Someone asked about the right tone
to use when you're saying this kind of thing, and
(22:43):
a commenter said something that I thought was perfect. They said,
I think in situations like this, it helps to imagine
a situation where you would genuinely have the emotion that
you want to convey and then mimic that tone. Like
if I were in a parking garage with my friend
who wasn't allowed to park there and they to leave
the car in an illegal spot. My Oh, I'm worried
(23:03):
we could get in trouble would be very sincere. And
that's exactly right. That's the tone. It says, I'm looking
out for everyone here, not I'm going to take you
to court. At least that's where you start. You might
need descalate, but you start there. Now, what if you
talk to your employer and you point out the law
but nothing changes. At that point, you have a decision
(23:24):
to make about how far you want to push the issue.
One thing that you can do to explore your options
at that point is to just talk with a lawyer,
and that doesn't bind you to taking legal action. It's
just getting more information. And sometimes a lawyer can do
things that aren't bringing a lawsuit but still get the
problem solved, Like they can advise you to present things
in a certain way, or they can write a letter
(23:46):
in your behalf or so forth, and they can talk
through the options with you and the upsides and downsides
of each. But in most cases it makes sense for
your first step to just be that straightforward conversation and
that might be all you need. Okay, those were a
lot of examples, and hopefully it helped to hear them
out loud. And if you have found this kind of
sample language esful. You might really like the Aska Manager
(24:07):
Book because it is filled with sample language for all
sorts of situations at work, including things like pushing back
with your boss. If you want to check it out,
it's called Ask a Manager, How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues,
lunch stealing bosses, and the rest of your life at work,
and you can order it on Amazon or anywhere books
are sold. Before we wrap up, I have an announcement
about the show. Next week's episode is going to be
(24:30):
the final episode. I really loved doing the show, but
I also need to make room for other things, other
work and things like seeing my husband occasionally and sweeping.
So I'm taking my own advice that I give to
people who are overworked, and I'm cutting some things back.
I'll talk a bit more about the decision on next
week's episode, which will also feature a bunch of Q
(24:51):
and A with callers as well. Okay, that is it
for today, Thanks for listening, and I'll be back one
more time next week and
My colleagues will stop commenting on everything I get. My
assistant rolls eyes at people and meeting Why does my
coworker keep taking credit for all my ideas? Have any
wisdom for me? Hi? I'm Alison Green. Welcome to the
Aska Manager podcast, where I answer questions from listeners about
life at work, everything from what to say if you're
allergic to your coworkers perfume to what to do if
you drink too much at the company party. Let's get started.
(00:28):
My mail at the Aska Manager website is full of
letters from people who are really unhappy about something their
boss is asking of them, but aren't sure if they
can push back, or very commonly, are pretty sure that
they can't push back because they've internalized the idea that
you're never supposed to say no to your boss. They're thinking,
is that part of the deal when you have a
(00:49):
job is that you're just supposed to put up with
whatever is asked of you, or that if you do
push back, you look like a prima donna or difficult
or not a team player, or any of the other
weird words that we hagged people with. But the reality is,
in many cases, you absolutely can push back or say
no to something that your boss is asking of you.
(01:09):
It's just the weird power dynamics of work that are
making you think that you can't, but really you can.
You just have to do it judiciously, not every day,
but you can do it. And on today's show, I
want to talk about exactly how to do it and
go through some examples of times where you might want to,
and we'll talk about exactly how to do it, what
to say, and what tone to use. The first thing
(01:33):
to know about pushing back with your boss is that
saying no doesn't have to be a really aggressive or
hostile thing. In the vast majority of cases, it's not
going to be no, I refuse to do that. It's
about approaching the conversation in a collaborative way. There's a
problem and you're hoping that the two of you, you
(01:54):
and your boss can solve it together. So that means
that you're going to say things like we'd originally agreed
to X, and that was important to me. Is there
a way that we can make that work? Or I'm
concerned about why if we go that route, Or I
don't have time to do why this week, but I
could to X, or I have a lot of concerns
(02:16):
about X. Could we talk about whether there might be
other options? So you see, it's not just no, it's
politely collaboratively conveying I'm not as on board with this
as you might have hoped or expected. What can we
do instead? And if your manager is a decent manager,
she's going to want to hear this when you're feeling
(02:36):
that way. She might not be delighted about it, but
good managers don't want good employees to be miserable, and
they want to know when they are risking that, and
they want the chance to figure out if there's a
different approach that both of you can live with now.
To be clear, they don't want to hear that every day.
And also, to be clear, the answer won't always be yes,
(02:58):
we can change it. But when you feel strongly about something,
you can, and you should speak up. Plus, sometimes you
need to speak up when you disagree with something because
the reason that you disagree is that you have information
that your manager does not have. And this is something
that I think people really frequently don't realize, Like maybe
your boss is telling you to do X, and you
(03:20):
think the client will hate X, and the reason that
you think that is that you have been in meetings
with the client where they have said that they would
hate X, and your boss hasn't. In a case like that,
you have a professional obligation to speak up and tell
your boss to share the information that you have that
she doesn't have, and that might change her perspective if
she did another way. I see this come up all
(03:42):
the time is about workload. So so often people who
are overworked think, well, my boss must know how high
my workload is. She's the one assigning me all of this,
after all, and if she keeps piling things on me,
she just must not care and she expects me to
just somehow get it all done. When in reality, sometimes
(04:04):
that's true. But sometimes oftentimes your boss doesn't realize how
overloaded you are. She is probably not paying nearly as
much attention to your workload as you are. She's counting
on you to speak up if it becomes a problem,
and when you don't say anything, she has no way
of knowing. I can't tell you how often I've seen
this dynamic play out, with the employee becoming more and
(04:26):
more frustrated and demoralized and burned out, while the manager
has no idea and would step in and fix the
workload problem if she knew. Not always, of course, sometimes
you get a manager who really doesn't care, but enough
times your boss would want to know, and so you
should speak up. And that could be anything from a
big sit down conversation about your workload overall, or it
(04:49):
can be a simple hey, to make sure that you know,
it's going to take me two days to do it
this way, but if we do X instead, it would
just take a few hours. So not adversarial, collaborate of
working together problem solving. Okay, that is the overall framework
that I want you to have in your head as
we talk about this, But let's go through some specific
(05:10):
examples so that you can see what it sounds like
in a variety of different situations. I dug into some
past ask manager letters to find some examples of times
when people did need to say no to the brass
so that we would have some concrete scenarios to talk about.
I once had a letter from someone who had been
in their job for a while but got a new manager,
(05:31):
and the new manager kept asking them to do things
that were really not their job and where there were
actually specific reasons for why it wasn't their job and
someone else was supposed to be doing those things. And
the person writing to me, I didn't know if the
new boss was giving them these assignments just because he
was new and he didn't realize what the system had been,
(05:52):
or if he was now changing things and specifically making
it this person's responsibility. And so the letter writer was
trying to figure out how do I raised this without
sounding like I'm just flatly refusing to do it. So
in a situation like that, you could say I wanted
to check with you. You have asked me to do
some projects recently, like X and Y, and I was
of course happy to help out in a pinch, but
(06:14):
because it's come up a few times, I wanted to
let you know that historically that type of work has
been done by the X department, and the reason that
people in my job aren't supposed to do it is blank.
And I figured you didn't have that context yet, and
so I should fill you in. So you're approaching this like, oh,
here's this useful thing that you would probably appreciate, knowing
(06:34):
you're not dancing around it or acting hesitant to say it.
It's just, oh, here's this piece of info you probably
don't have. And then if the boss pushes back anyway,
you could say, well, of course, willing to try that
out if you want to change that, but I want
to make sure you know it would be a pretty
significant change to my role, which would concern me because
(06:54):
of blank. Before we make the change, could I tell
you a bit more about why we ended up divided
things this way. But let's change the situation a little bit.
Let's say that your boss is asking you to do
something that you really don't want to take on. If
you are a good employee who is generally helpful and accommodating,
there is room for you to speak up. Now. If
(07:15):
you are not a good employee, or if you have
a track record of pushing back on everything, then no.
But let's assume that you're in good standing. And let's
say that the thing your boss is asking you to
do is let's say heavy travel, and you don't want
to do heavy travel. And maybe you even took the
job in part because it didn't involve heavy travel. So
(07:37):
you could say, you've been asking me lately to do
more traveling, and I get why it would be useful
to have another person on the team who can travel.
But I want to be honest, I really dislike every
traveling and I actually changed into this field to get
away from doing it. I hadn't realized it would become
part of my role here. Is it something that you're
committed to having the person in my job do or
(08:00):
is there any flexibility? So, in other words, just be straightforward.
You're not going at it like like you're the opposition
to your boss. You're not the adversary. And you're also
not dancing around it and hoping they'll pick up on hints.
You're just laying it out. The key to talking about
this without being insupportinate is that you're not saying that
you won't do it. You're just giving your boss relevant
(08:22):
context that they might not have, some of which might
be that it would significantly change your job satisfaction, which
is something that any good manager will want the chance
to at least factor into their thinking, even if they
ultimately decide to make that change anyway. So, again, more language.
To be honest, I took the role in part because
(08:43):
it didn't involve acts or to be upfront, it's not
a change I would be thrilled about because of blank
or so forth. Of course, whether and when to do
this depends on things like how reasonable or unreasonable the
request being made of you, is how much your employer
values you and how much good will you've built up,
(09:06):
and you do need to do it judiciously. If you're
pushing back on every request, you're going to pretty quickly
run through the political capital that you need. And of course,
ultimately your manager does have the ability to say, sorry,
this is the job, now take it or leave it.
If that happens, you need to decide if you're willing
to stay in the job knowing that these are the
conditions you would need to accept. But much more often
(09:28):
than people realize, there will be room to push back
or renegotiate. Let's go to an ad break here, and
then when we come back, I'm going to have lots
more examples of times when you might need to say
no to your boss and how to do it. So
(09:48):
let's say that you're in a situation where you're being
asked to take on something that you just don't have
time to fit in with the rest of your workload.
A decent manager is going to want to hear that
you're concerned about it, so you should speak up. It's
possible that when you talk it through, you'll find that
the deadline is not as firm as it originally seemed,
or that your boss is more open to pushing it
(10:09):
back once she hears that it's causing problems. You might
find out that it's fine to use shortcuts that you
had assumed wouldn't be okay, or that it's really just
one particular piece of the project that has to be
ready on time. Who knows, maybe none of that would
be true, but it's worth having the conversation. The best
way to approach it is to explain what you can
do and offer some options for how to proceed. So,
(10:32):
to give you an example, you could say, I can
have an outline and most of a draft ready to
go by Thursday. I probably wouldn't have it completely polished
until Monday. Would that work? Or so to get this
done by Thursday, I would need to push pretty much
everything else back, which means that I wouldn't finish up
X and Y until next week. Would that be okay?
(10:54):
A lot of times that's going to solve the problem.
Sometimes managers give deadlines that sound reasonable to them, but
they're very open to modifying them. When you explain what's
needed and why. But what if your manager tells you know,
you need to stick to the original deadline with no
modifications and you can't push any of the other work
back if you really don't believe that you can meet
(11:16):
that deadline. Sometimes it can make sense to say something
like I hear you and how important it is to
get it done by that, and I'm going to do
everything that I can to make it happen. But I
want to be transparent with you that I am concerned
that factors X and why. I mean, I think it's
going to take longer. Let me really push on it
over the next day, and then update you once we
(11:37):
see where we are. So with that kind of language,
you're showing that you get it, you're taking it seriously,
but that you also don't want to promise something misleading,
and you're going to see what you can do and
come back and update her when you have a better
idea of that. Okay, let's get into some more specific examples.
Let's do one. This is the one that I hear
from people about a lot which is being expected to
(11:59):
you is your own personal cell phone for work. Some
people are fine with this because they don't want to
have to carry a work phone and a personal phone.
But there are a lot of good reasons not to
agree to use your personal phone at work, especially because
some companies will have you installed an app which will
allow them to remotely wipe your phone when you quit
(12:19):
or your you terminate your employment for any reason, and
that is not them just remote wiping their data. It
can mean wiping all of your data from your phone.
So if you are using your personal cell phone at work,
make sure that you read what you're agreeing to. And
if you're not sure about the remote wipe, ask your
I T people. Anyway, if your employer suggests that you
(12:40):
do this, that you use your personal phone as your
main work phone, and you don't want to do it,
you can just be very matter of fact, Oh, I'd
rather not use my own phone. Can I use a
company provided one instead? And if that doesn't work, then
you know I'm not comfortable with the stipulations that are
attached to this, like the remote wipe. What do I
need to do to get a company phone instead? Okay,
(13:02):
how about a situation where you're being asked to do
something unreasonable. Let's say that you're being asked to work
around the clock day after day. Sometimes you can just
use a very simple statement that you just aren't going
to do something the exact way that it has been requested.
So you might say, well, i can't work twelve hour
days every day this week, but I'll be able to
(13:22):
do A B and C this week, not D an E.
Let me know if you want me to prioritize those differently.
So just matter of fact with that one and see
what happens. Or how about a situation where your boss
is asking you to do personal favors for her, things
that really aren't your job or anyone's job, like running
(13:43):
personal errands or even leaning her clothes. I say that
because I've actually had a fair number of letters over
the years about varieties of the situation. I once had
someone whose boss was asking her to write his papers
for a class that he was taking on his own
time him and I had a letter from someone whose
boss would ask her employees to do really personal favors
(14:06):
like driving her to the dentist or borrowing her shoes.
That shoes is a real example stuff that you might
ask a close friend, but which definitely isn't appropriate for
a manager to ask employees. So with something like that,
where someone is so oblivious to boundaries, sometimes the best
thing to do is to just always have reasons why
(14:28):
you're not available for the thing, like oh sorry, I'm
just about to get on a conference call, or no, sorry,
I've got plans at lunch so I can't drive you.
But you can also address it more big picture, if
you're up for that. You could say something like, you know,
I don't know if you realize that you often ask
us for pretty personal favors like borrowing clothes or driving
(14:49):
you places, and because you're the boss, there's pressure to
say yes. That wouldn't be there if you weren't the boss,
And that's a tough situation to be in, especially when
it would conflict with something work related. I figure you
didn't realize how often it was happening, so I wanted
to mention it to you. It can be a tough
one to pull off. You won't always be comfortable doing it,
(15:10):
depending on the dynamic with your boss, but some relationships
are going to allow for it. Or with that boss
who wanted the employee to write a paper for his class,
you could say, hmm, I don't really feel right doing
work for a class outside of the office, especially when
I've got my hands full with X and have X
be a work related project. If your boss then offers
(15:34):
to relieve you of ex so that you have more
time for his paper, you could say, Oh, I'm sorry,
I really don't feel right about doing that. Let's do
another weird one. I had a letter a while back
from someone who worked remotely but had to travel to
the company headquarters once a month, and the company was
trying to reduce expenses, and so instead of putting her
(15:56):
up in a hotel while she was there, they were
having her sleep in the office on an air mattress.
And she felt awkward about it for all of the
obvious reasons, but that's not even why she was writing it.
And she wrote in because for her upcoming trips, someone
else was going to be staying in the office, and
so they were going to have her stay at the
CEO's apartment. Well, he stayed in some other property that
(16:17):
he owned. And this wasn't even the first time they
had had her do this. They had made her do
it one time before, and he would come by in
the morning each day she was there to get ready
for work. So super uncomfortable, not something that you should
expect when you're traveling through business. So let's say that
you're in that bizarre situation. Sometimes it's almost harder to
(16:39):
figure out how to say no in a situation like
this because it's so weird, and the fact that they're
asking you to do it like it's no big deal
tells you that they aren't playing by the same rule
book as the rest of us, which can make it
harder to know how to approach it. But you can
be pretty straightforward and assertive. So in this situation, you'd say,
(17:01):
you know, I understand that we're trying to save money,
but I am not well rested when I sleep in
the office, so I'd like to start booking an economy
price hotel instead. And when they proposed the CEOs apartment thing,
you could say, you know, actually, I would prefer not
to stay in his house because last time he kept
needing to come by to pick up his things and
get ready, which wasn't really conducive to having a comfortable
(17:22):
private place to stay. So I want to book an
economy hotel instead, and I'll keep the price as low
as I can. So just politely assertive, you know, this
won't work for me, but I hear your concerns. Let's
do this other thing instead. We'll do a final break here,
and then when we come back. I want to talk
about a really big important category of times when you
might need to push back, and that is when your
(17:44):
employer is doing something that's illegal. Stay tuned. I get
a ton of letters from people who are wondering if
that's something their workplace is doing that is likely illegal.
They're often wondering what their next move should be. And
(18:05):
because most people don't know what to do if their
employer is violating their legal rights at work, they often
either threaten legal action too quickly or they know what
speak up at all because they're not sure what to say.
So first, before anything else, you want to make sure
that your employer really is breaking the law. People sometimes
assume that the law entitles them to things that aren't
(18:27):
actually enshrined in law, particularly in the US, like fair
treatment or paid vacation days, or a warning before being fired.
So first make sure that you really are facing a
legal violation. If you are, sometimes people think the first
step must be to talk to a lawyer and file
a lawsuit, but much of the time that won't be necessary.
(18:50):
It might be, but jumping straight there can really poison
your work environment when you don't need to. To To be clear, it's,
of course you're prerogative to talk to a lawyer and
persue legal action at any point if you want to,
but often you can get what you want in a
more low key way. Often the first step is to
just talk to your employer, because a lot of the
(19:10):
time they genuinely don't know that what they're doing is illegal,
which I know sounds ridiculous, but it's often true, especially
with smaller employers, and often they will back down when
you point out the law to them. That even if
you don't think that's the situation, you know, even if
you're pretty sure that they are well aware of the
law and they just don't care about following it, it
(19:31):
can still be helpful to approach the conversation as if
you're assuming that they don't know and you're just helpfully
bringing it to their attention, and that you're assuming that
of course they would want to know if they are
breaking the law. Approaching it that way will usually get
you a better outcome. Then, if you go in making
it clear that you think your managers are flagrant lawbreakers
(19:52):
right from the start. And when I say better outcome,
that means not only the legal problem stops, but also
that you preserve reasonably good relations with your employer. You
won't always be able to do that, but when you can,
it's usually in your best interests too. And I want
to be really clear, I'm not suggesting that you tolerate
illegal behavior in order to maintain good relationships. I'm saying
(20:15):
that you can often get both things, the illegal behavior
stopped and preserving the relationship. Not always, but enough of
the time that it usually makes sense to try, and
then if that doesn't work, you can escalate if it's needed.
So let's take a really common example. In the US,
all jobs are classified as either exempt from overtime or
(20:35):
non exempt from overtime. If you are classified as non exempt,
meaning that you are supposed to be paid overtime, and
that is not up to your employer, it's based on
the type of work that you do, then you have
to receive overtime pay when you work more than forty
hours in a week. But a ton of people who
should be getting overtime paid don't. Let's say that that's you,
(20:55):
and that your company expects you to work overtime without
extra pay. You could say something like, you know, we're
actually required by federal law to pay over time to
people in my job category. I can definitely work the
overtime if you want me to, but the company is
required to pay for it, and I wanted to make
sure you knew that so that we don't get in trouble.
Or let's say that you are religious and your boss
(21:18):
is requiring you to work on a religious holiday when
plenty of non religious employees would be available to cover
that shift. You could say, Oh, that is actually a
religious holiday for me, and because I know we're required
by federal law to accommodate religious practices, could we schedule
someone else for that day instead of me. Now, note
that the tone here is collaborative. It's not adversarial, and
(21:41):
that is important. Instead of saying you are breaking the law,
you're saying we could get in trouble for this, and
that is because you're The tone you want is that
you're looking out for the company's interests. You're not making
a legal threat. It's the same tone that you would
use if you were advising your boss on some legal problem.
(22:01):
Totally unconnected to you. There's no overt threat of legal action.
It's just, oh, we could get in trouble for this.
The reason for doing it that way is that your
goal here is not just to a certain legal rights,
although that is part of it, but also to keep
a good relationship. And it is far less likely to
happen if you wield the law like a weapon, because
(22:22):
fair or not, the reality is that few relationships are
unaffected when you start making legal threats. You still have
the option of taking legal action if you need to,
but you're more likely to get a good outcome by
starting out this way. This actually came up on the
Aska Manager website recently. Someone asked about the right tone
to use when you're saying this kind of thing, and
(22:43):
a commenter said something that I thought was perfect. They said,
I think in situations like this, it helps to imagine
a situation where you would genuinely have the emotion that
you want to convey and then mimic that tone. Like
if I were in a parking garage with my friend
who wasn't allowed to park there and they to leave
the car in an illegal spot. My Oh, I'm worried
(23:03):
we could get in trouble would be very sincere. And
that's exactly right. That's the tone. It says, I'm looking
out for everyone here, not I'm going to take you
to court. At least that's where you start. You might
need descalate, but you start there. Now, what if you
talk to your employer and you point out the law
but nothing changes. At that point, you have a decision
(23:24):
to make about how far you want to push the issue.
One thing that you can do to explore your options
at that point is to just talk with a lawyer,
and that doesn't bind you to taking legal action. It's
just getting more information. And sometimes a lawyer can do
things that aren't bringing a lawsuit but still get the
problem solved, Like they can advise you to present things
in a certain way, or they can write a letter
(23:46):
in your behalf or so forth, and they can talk
through the options with you and the upsides and downsides
of each. But in most cases it makes sense for
your first step to just be that straightforward conversation and
that might be all you need. Okay, those were a
lot of examples, and hopefully it helped to hear them
out loud. And if you have found this kind of
sample language esful. You might really like the Aska Manager
(24:07):
Book because it is filled with sample language for all
sorts of situations at work, including things like pushing back
with your boss. If you want to check it out,
it's called Ask a Manager, How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues,
lunch stealing bosses, and the rest of your life at work,
and you can order it on Amazon or anywhere books
are sold. Before we wrap up, I have an announcement
about the show. Next week's episode is going to be
(24:30):
the final episode. I really loved doing the show, but
I also need to make room for other things, other
work and things like seeing my husband occasionally and sweeping.
So I'm taking my own advice that I give to
people who are overworked, and I'm cutting some things back.
I'll talk a bit more about the decision on next
week's episode, which will also feature a bunch of Q
(24:51):
and A with callers as well. Okay, that is it
for today, Thanks for listening, and I'll be back one
more time next week and
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