So sometimes saying no to your n+1 is totally in line with your n+2 :)
I’m with the other commenter: If you find yourself in a situation this dysfunctional, you’ve already lost. Blowing off your boss to appease your skip level isn’t guaranteed to work out, even if the skip level likes you.
Either way, that’s not relevant to this blog post. The author said they were just going to say “no” to assigned work, which isn’t going to work out.
I mean it. I want to work for a company where everyone is working towards the common goal of making the company profitable. But there comes a point where the company is overrun by politics and selfish and harmful decisions.
By the time dysfunctional company politics empower a "bozo", why should I stress or put any care into such a company? I'll just do the minimum.
But I agree that promotion is not exactly an option, as I would become crazy only surrounded by bozos.
There is also an expert path, for people wanting to be promoted, but for their technical excellence. Guess what? There too, the political tricks have led to empower not so excellent people, i.e bozo-compatible ones.
Who wants to live like this?
Consider this example: I once worked for a contracting agency and we were on a project that was going really poorly and so I put in some effort to improve things and try to make it better. Things were not improving, people were angry with me. Eventually I learned that the person I was working for wanted me to fail, because he wanted to use a different contracting agency, so he wanted me to fail and look bad to give him an excuse to switch to a different contracting agency. But, then people even higher in the organizations were friends with my contracting agency and so I stayed on the contract and kept doing an honest but minimal amount of work. My boss literally wanted the project to fail.
It's fairly common for organizations to become this screwed up, and yes, it sucks to work for them, but it sucks even more to burn yourself out trying to change them when they don't want to change.
I wonder if someone can get scent of 'want you to fail' early, so one can play their cards a bit differently armed with this knowledge.
Does anyone have any advice on how to politely say "I like the company, I want to stay, but I don't like my current work and if it doesn't change for the better I'm going to leave in 6-months".
I once tried to say this as politely as possible, but I think I might have been too polite and tactful and they didn't understand. I had a date in mind, and had a conversation 6-months, 3-months, and 1-month before I left. When I announced my departure they tried to get me to stay.
You can just leave off the ultimatum and attempt to improve your situation by communicating it in a way that is directly actionable (I'd like to work on X instead of Y, can you arrange that?). You'll have your own internal deadlines of course, but you shouldn't communicate them.
if like many you switch jobs every few years you can never develop that reputation needed for an ulimatum in the first place. (Staying for years is never 100% in your power but some jobs have better chances of it)
It is the nuclear option, and you will lose the trust of your leadership chain.
Or maybe "I want to work on ____ new project, and my working this would be beneficial to the business because ____". But you have to have a real case for it and for why you are the right person for it
I try really hard but never understand where does this belief comes that you have to love your work.
The truth is some jobs suck so much that I refuse to do them long term, and other jobs suck but I can do them long term.
I once left a job after I was so stressed I got shingles, I believe it literally would have killed me had I stayed.
• I'll look into it
• I'll see what I can do
• I'll review that right away
This isn't me saying "say these things", I'm just pointing out this is an age-old problem, and saying "no" inwardly is different than saying it outwardly. Various ways of inquiring about options are also commonplace.
If you say you’ll review something or look into it, you still have to follow through on it. Using those phrases to dodge the work isn’t much different than failing to do the work. It will be noticed
I've had a lot of success in asking "are you asking me to do this or telling me", when I've been tasked with something I think is extremely dumb.
If the response is "I'm asking", then I will usually respond with some variation of "can you assign it to someone else, or better yet, throw the task in the garbage".
If the response is "I'm telling you", then I'll go on a spiel about how I think it's incredibly stupid and the people involved in this decision are bad at their jobs, then get on and do it.
But if you're reading this, there is a good chance you are American, so take this advice with a massive grain of salt as I'm not. The culture here in NZ sounds extremely different to almost everything I've read on this forum.
I never saw someone saying no without a reason and if there is a reason, then there is a discussion around it, one can be right or wrong about it but it is usually easy to clarify and move on. It is not the "no" or a spoiled 5 year kid, it is the "no" of an experienced professional that values their time and priorities.
This is the wrong lesson to take from this situation.
If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination.
The appropriate response is to communicate. The OP arrived in this situation because they didn’t communicate anything about promotion expectations for two years. Discuss your desire to take on more important tasks in those 1 on 1 meetings and do it early. The fatal mistake in this blog post was waiting two long years before revealing the desire to pursue promotion, then being surprised that past performance did not meet expectations for something that was never discussed. You need to be periodically asking for feedback.
A perfect manager would have brought up the question and asked if promotion was a goal earlier on. However, in my experience this conversation is a lot more contentious than I assumed as some people prefer to be comfortable in their role and interpret unprompted promotion discussions as uninvited pressure or a subtle threat that it’s “up or out”. As an employee, you can’t wait around for your manager to bring up topics you want to discuss. You have to state your goals and ask for alignment.