Ask a Manager

A reader writes:

How do I decline taking on tasks outside of my immediate roles and responsibilities without coming off as insubordinate or not a team player?

I work in a field where it’s pretty standard to take on some administrative burdens in addition to our core responsibilities. However, in my experience, these tasks seem to be disproportionately allocated to women. I’m eight years into my career path, upper middle management, with an advanced degree in a technical specialty. I started a new role last year that was a significant step up in both seniority and pay. I felt like I had finally accomplished something. Then, a few months after I started, our department admin unexpectedly resigned. My (female) manager’s manager proceeded to divvy up her responsibilities among me and the other managers at my tier. Being new and a people pleaser, I of course stepped up to the plate and took on the extra work with a smile. This went on for a few months until we were finally able to find a replacement. In hindsight, I realize that I was assigned the most demanding, time consuming, and asinine tasks. And of course now that I’m an expert on those tasks, any time our admin is out, you guessed it, I have to fill in for her.

Having reflected on my previous work experiences, I realize that this is a pattern for me. I do such a great job at these menial tasks that I become the point person for admin work. In my previous roles, I didn’t feel like I could say anything because I wasn’t senior enough, but now that I am, I don’t know how to put my foot down and say “respectfully, no.” I’m about to start looking for a new position and I want to make sure that I don’t fall into the same pattern and set the tone for the whole experience. At the end of the day, I’m being hired for my technical background and expertise … not to be a glorified administrative assistant. How do I respectfully decline requests for admin support when they’re coming from my superiors (as opposed to my peers)? One work-around that I’ve found so far is delegating the work to someone more junior under the guise of professional development – I still have to be involved and invest my time, but at least I’m not stuck with the majority of the work. In this most recent job, though, this wasn’t an option.

I don’t mind doing my fair share, but I also want to focus my time and effort on my actual job. I know that this issue will continue to come up as long as I stay in this industry.

This is such a thing for many women, still.

Most of it is sexism — women are still disproportionately the default choice for taking notes at meetings, ordering lunch, organizing team events, and, yes, providing coverage for admin staff. It’s super-common for people to turn to women when those tasks need to be done, regardless of their actual jobs, and even when there are men available in the same or similar roles.

Some of it, though, comes from women stepping up when we shouldn’t — because we’re conscientious, because we’ve been socialized to be helpful, and because it’s just plain awkward to say, “No, I’m not going to do that.” (To be clear, this isn’t the case for every woman; plenty who are assigned this kind of work aren’t stepping up to volunteer for it.)

And as you point out, once you start doing it, it can be hard to stop because you become the person with the track record of doing it well, and who has all the background info from last time, and whom people are now used to turning to.

That means that resolving to deal with this now as you’re changing jobs is good timing. If you’re careful not to fall into the same pattern at the new job, it’s likely to get easier over time to stay out of it, since you won’t be burdened with having been the go-to person for the admin work previously.

So how do you do that? First and foremost, don’t volunteer for those admin tasks, ever. Don’t volunteer to take notes, don’t volunteer to get coffee for the meeting, don’t volunteer to cover for the admins when they’re out. Even if you wouldn’t mind doing some of those things, and even if the need feels urgent, don’t volunteer for them. If the need is that urgent, someone else can step up. And keep in mind that while it’s easy to feel that volunteering for support tasks will demonstrate you’re cooperative and a team player (or that not volunteering for them will make you look insufficiently conscientious), if you look around, you’ll see that lots of people are valued without ever doing those tasks.

If someone tries to assign them to you anyway, in many cases you can push back. If it’s coming from a peer or someone else without authority over you, respond by citing higher priorities — “I’m on deadline this week” or “I’ve got my hands full with X right now” — and feel free to redirect them toward someone who might make more sense given the context (“I’ve got my hands full with X, but you could see if Joe is available”). If the request is coming from your manager, that’s trickier and you’ll need to judge how much room for pushback there is … but often it’s fine to say to your boss, “I’m swamped with X right now, so unless you object, I’ll see if Joe can do this” or “I’m swamped with X right now and it would be hard to fit that in. Okay for me to just keep focusing on X?”

And if you start to see a pattern developing where work is being distributed in an inequitable way, especially along gender lines, name what you’re seeing and ask to change it. For example: “I’ve noticed that tasks like XYZ are disproportionately falling to the women on our team. Can we change that?”

I do want to acknowledge that you noted that some amount of administrative work is expected by everyone in your field, so it might not be as simple as saying a blanket no every single time. But what you can do is carefully calibrate the amount of admin work you accept to match the amount you see male colleagues taking on and ensure you’re not doing more. Also, as often as you can, pick the tasks that are most likely to advance your career; for example, covering the phones probably won’t do that, but acting in a support role for your boss at a board meeting might bring you more benefits.

Originally published at New York Magazine.

I’m off today. This was originally published in 2017.

A reader writes:

I’m a programmer who is in my eighth month at my current job. I’m a woman in my late 20s and have never held a job for a full year before–while most of the jobs I’ve had have been internships or temp/contract jobs, I’ve quit one that made me miserable and been laid off from another. Because of all this, I am trying to stay at the current job for at least two years before I seriously look for something else.

It’s not terrible. In the context of “I am trying to pay my bills in a way that doesn’t destroy my health or make me miserable,” it is better than most jobs. But I often get extremely stressed out and come home exhausted most days, and I think a big part of it is that I get too personally invested in the work.

I get really emotional about the quality of other people’s work. Although I am the youngest and most junior person on my team, the new project we are starting is in a software framework I am more familiar with than most of my coworkers. In addition, people are used to working on an old legacy site without much quality control and basically no testing, so as they move on to working on the new site, they carry a lot of bad habits and make a lot of avoidable mistakes.

In addition, the project is pretty disorganized–our project manager and our team lead both are busy with other projects in addition to this one, and it’s unclear what deadlines mean or what we should prioritize, and when I try to ask about it I don’t get answers that are helpful. Often people are defensive. There have been multiple times I’ve asked what the status of a project is or what testing will be done before we demo something, and the response I get is some variation of “what, you think I’d put this out without testing it?” When I try to bring up resources people could learn about to save time and prevent errors, I am often met with “we don’t have time for that.” People are often sarcastic or snarky or derail serious conversations with jokes.

I find this all very frustrating. I’ve had varying levels of success discussing individual problems with individual people. Sometimes it works–one of the worst offenders in terms of making jokes apologized to me after he crossed a line and I got upset with him–and sometimes it doesn’t, as with the aforementioned defensiveness, or when the more senior people on the team insist that we don’t have time to write documentation or teach people how the technology works so they can write good code. It affects me because I’ll work hard on something and someone else will change it without understanding what they’re doing and suddenly what was carefully organized code is full of errors and bugs. I try hard to communicate well and listen to others but it feels like sometimes I may as well be talking to a brick wall.

And I tend to get emotional. I’ve cried at work, I’ve cried after work, I’ve been too angry to concentrate, I’ve avoided telling anyone about problems because I’m afraid to get shot down, I’ve spent hours ranting to friends and family about it. The emotional attachment is making me less effective in communicating about the problems. I think I’m coming off as neurotic and nitpicky and out of touch. My concerns get dismissed a lot (I think some of this is rudeness or sexism but it would be easier to navigate if I were less invested and better at picking my battles).

If the circumstances were different I’d be looking for other jobs but as it is I would like to build a solid work history and also, I have no guarantee that the next place would be better. I wish I could stop caring so much, that I could just go to work and do my job and come home and stop thinking about it.

For context, I am diagnosed with anxiety and depression but I am handling them to the best of my ability. I take antidepressants, I have a prescription for anxiety meds to take as needed, I exercise most days a week, and I do talk therapy. So while my mental health issues surely contribute to the problem, I am pretty maxed out in terms of what I can do about them, and so I really want to focus on developing a better attitude and coping skills towards work. Do you have any advice for putting a reasonable amount of effort into my work and letting it be “just a job” to me?

Being personally invested in your work is a double-edged sword. On one hand, personal investment in your job makes work more interesting and fulfilling, and generally keeps you productive and showing up when you’d rather stay at home and sleep.

But when you’re more upset that things aren’t going well than the people above you are, and when that frustration is interfering with your quality of life, you’re too invested. It doesn’t make sense to pour more emotional energy into worrying about problems than the people whose job it is to fix them.

And really, it is someone else’s job to worry about these things. As the most junior member of your team, it’s not yours. That doesn’t mean that you should disengage entirely, but it does mean that you should get really clear in your head on what is and isn’t within your control — and what you are and aren’t being paid to worry about.

To be fair, it can be hard to do that when your colleagues’ disorganization directly impacts you. If you can’t get clear answers about deadlines or priorities, that’s legitimately frustrating. But it’s also true that sometimes there’s a certain amount of ambiguity at work, and you’re expected to roll with it. Sometimes the answer really is “there’s no specific deadline for this but it’s a moderately high priority.” Sometimes the answer really is “the priority level depends on information we don’t have yet.”

Or sometimes it’s just disorganization and bad management. But when that’s the case and you’re in a junior position, often the only thing you can do is accept that this is how your office functions and mentally move on.

That’s going to be a helpful approach to take more broadly too. There can be real relief in telling yourself, “This isn’t the way I would do it, but that’s not my call to make. I’m going to focus on my piece of the work and do that really well, and I’m leaving the rest to people here who are being paid to care about that.”

Speaking of which … it sounds like you might be creating some of your own frustrations when you try to help other people do their jobs better, like when you asked what product testing someone was planning, or when you suggested resources people could use to save time and prevent errors. Those were perfectly fine things for you to do, but now that you know that this particular team doesn’t welcome that kind of input, it doesn’t make sense to keep providing it and thus perpetuate a cycle that feels torturous to you. It’s okay to decide, “For whatever reason this team doesn’t want that kind of input, so I’m going to stop offering it.”

For what it’s worth, part of the reaction you’ve received to those things may be that you’re coming across to your more senior colleagues as if you think you know better than them. And maybe you do! The things you’re taking issue with sound like reasonable things to be concerned about. But it’s also true that sometimes it makes sense to make trade-offs in one area of a project in order to put resources or time into another, and sometimes things that look like obvious mistakes to one person are actually smart compromises because of time constraints or higher priorities. That’s not to say that you’re definitely wrong about the things that bother you. You might be perfectly right. But it can be helpful to remember that you don’t have the same vantage point on the work that your colleagues do, and they may genuinely know things that you don’t. Even if that’s not the case, though, when you’re the most junior person and no one else sees it your way, and they already shut you down when you tried to make your case, you’re not in a great position to push your point.

Lest you think that I’m telling you not to speak up about things that truly do matter, a good test is to ask yourself: Will this matter to the company or to me personally in six months? In a year? The vast majority of the time, the answer will be no. On the rare occasions that it’s not, that’s when you press the point.

But truly, the biggest thing here is to get really clear on the reasons why you have this job. You’re not there to solve all your company’s problems. You’re there to do a good job on your small piece of the whole, to do decent work that pays you, and to build a stable work history. That’s it! Maybe there can be something freeing in that — in knowing that you are excused from solving your team’s problems. You can finish up your work day and go home and enjoy not thinking about your job. At some point you’ll probably have a job where that’s not the case. But right now it is, and there’s liberation in embracing that, if you choose to take it.

I’m off today. This was originally published in 2018. I have expanded it to slightly to include some of my additions from the comments on the original post, such as sample book titles.

A reader writes:

I came across the discussions of porn at work earlier, which got me questioning something I do. I tend to read romance novels and explicit stories from online repositories on my personal phone when I have spare moments, such as on a scheduled break. Other than AAM, this is my main source of entertainment in situations where I don’t have access to my video game console at home, can’t work out, and can’t watch YouTube due to bandwidth, volume, or other concerns.

These stories are all text-based and never illustrated (so no one would glance over and notice anything offensive), but most are more graphic than 50 Shades of Grey (though some are tamer, i.e. regular stories that happen to just have a sex scene). I usually predownload the stories, but if I don’t I bring them up on a phone data connection since there’s not convenient wifi where I work, and these sites aren’t likely vectors of malware like most porn sites (curated content with basic HTML, no external links, and no ads). I had previously thought of reading these as a harmless way to decompress, but the recent-ish discussions about porn on AAM talking about everything from IT risks to hostile work environments has gotten me rattled. Am I doing evil where I thought I was simply taking my mind off work during a break? Would it change things if I was opening them on workplace wifi/reading in a semi-public break room vs a semi-private bathroom stall/a given gender/whatever?

Are you doing something evil? No.

Are you doing something inappropriate at work? Maybe, but it depends on the details.

If what you’re reading is hardcore and graphic as a general theme throughout the story, not just in a scene or two, I’d say that’s inappropriate for work. It’s true that people are far less likely to accidentally see it on your screen than if you were looking at visual images, but it’s not impossible. But more to the point, you really just shouldn’t be steeping yourself in graphic sexual imagery at work, even if that imagery is created by words rather than pictures or video.

To be clear, the inclusion of sex scenes doesn’t on its own make a book inappropriate to read at work.  Lots of good literature includes sex scenes. The issue would be with stories where graphic sex throughout is the whole point. [We’re talking here about the genre with titles like Busty Alien MILF Gets Punished and Amanda Meets a Dirty Priest (I made those titles up; don’t go looking for them) … not Philip Roth or Henry Miller or even romance novels.]

One good litmus test is: Would you be embarrassed if your boss caught you reading it at work? If yes, then even though you’re on your own non-work device and you’re not using your company wifi, that’s a sign that it’s probably too much for work, even on a break.

But there’s erotic writing that does pass that litmus test. For example, it shouldn’t be a big deal if your boss spotted you reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover (widely considered good literature) on your lunch break. In some offices (not all), you might even get away with 50 Shades of Grey, just because it became popular enough to be seen more as a mainstream book and less as erotica, although it’s iffy. (This is probably where I should confess that in high school, I once openly read Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker in an English class where I was bored. A paper copy, with the cover clearly visible. I was a brash child.)

The most important litmus test, though, is this: Is the whole point of the book to sexually arouse you?  If so, that automatically moves it into the “nope, not for work” category — because it’s not okay to intentionally sexually arouse yourself at work, even on a break. If it’s the written word version of porn, it’s not for work.

I think those litmus tests trump the other factors you asked about, like being in a semi-public area vs a bathroom stall, or being a particular gender. And of course, work wifi gives you a different level of exposure, but the same principles apply.

Read an update to this letter here.