A colleague of mine was trying to dump her reports on me. I forwarded her request straight to our manager: Please help Jane, shes struggling to cope.
Jane joined our department about eighteen months ago. Shes a pleasant, tidy woman, diligent in her work, and a mother of two. At first, her requests seemed harmless enough: Oh, Im stuck at the GP, could you take my call? or I need to pick up my child early from nursery, can you help load my report into the system? Just a couple of buttons. Our team had a culture of helping each other out, and I believed it was only right to support a coworker.
But theres a fine line between lending a hand and being saddled with someone elses workload regularly. After a few months, those couple of buttons turned into entire chunks of responsibilities. Jane would message me around five oclock, saying, Youre here until six anyway, and my youngest is ill. Its a classic psychological tacticmanipulators appeal to guilt and social expectations. Here, the ideal of the struggling mother is almost untouchable, and Jane rode that wave for quite a while, until I realised my energy was being drained.
Jane crafted an imagea constantly rushing, heroic woman fighting to balance home and work. The truth was simpler: our salaries were the same, the difference was that my evenings were mine, while some of her workload had migrated onto my desk. When I gently declined for the first time, citing my own commitments, I was met with passive aggression: You dont have kids, you wouldnt understand what its like to be pulled in all directions. Thats the classic trapa manipulator insists your reasons are less valid, stripping away your right to be tired.
It all came to a head at the end of the quarter. We needed to submit the consolidated sales spreadsheetsa painstaking task requiring real focus. At 4:45 p.m. Jane sent me an email with raw data and wrote: The nursery show got moved, I have to rush off. Please finish it, youre the guru, itll only take you 15 minutes, and I cant leave my child anywhere. Ill make it up to you tomorrow. Right then, I realised if I agreed, Id be signing away my free time for months to come. A direct refusal would likely bring about sulking and complaints, so I needed to change the dynamicfrom personal favours to official procedures.
I didnt reply with an angry message. Instead, I forwarded her email to our manager, David Brown, remaining completely unprovocative: Good afternoon, David. Im sending Janes message onshes having to leave her work to other team members due to family issues and cant manage her workload within office hours. Please help Janemaybe reconsider her task load or move her temporarily onto a part-time basis, so she can focus on her family without overwhelming the departments reports. Today, Im fully occupied with my own tasks and cant take on her responsibilities without compromising quality.
Clicking Send was nerve-wrackingI worried, Is this being a grass? Will everyone hate me? But Id had enough of doing someone elses job.
David responded almost instantly. He hadnt realised I was doing part of Janes work, and to him, everything had seemed fine. The next morning, Jane was called into his office. I dont know exactly what was said, but she came out visibly shaken and quiet. She never asked me to pick up or finish off her work again.
People might say, You should be kinderchildren are sacred. Of course, but kindness at someone elses expense is simply exploitation. Anyone genuinely struggling goes to their manager and arranges remote work, flexible hours, or leavethey dont secretly overload colleagues.
What I did wasnt revenge, just drawing a line. The rule in business is simple: if you silently take on someone elses job, everyone assumes youre fine with it. The stream of requests from Jane dried up. Now, our interactions are formally polite, and the department runs as usual. Turns out, Jane manages perfectly well by herself when she isnt trying to shift her responsibilities onto others.
