How to say no to your boss

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 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.

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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? 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

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

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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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