Maybe age? You are new? Or better than others at saying 'no'?
I would definitely not get too arrogant that you don't have this problem, just that you haven't been swamped yet. Haven't pushed this threshold.
On other end of spectrum, I've also encountered people that are always 'chill', and don't have this problem. But they are also not the people moving the needle, or being assigned the difficult tasks.
It's a balance. Sure, it's easy to not have this problem simply by not pushing yourself. But the ones that do push themselves and get overwhelmed, or have difficulties, are also not a good example.
I can appreciate that, but let me share my experience at a position I had as I've dealt with this a lot and the work became untenable. The team I lead is pretty good, not perfect of course, but we tend to get the desired results and even more for the most important clients/issues, and we do pretty well with clients on the soft-skills side, so clients typically like the team I work with.
While this seems like we'd be a fairly carefully protected resource, over time, just everything started being thrown at us, including stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with our team. It's a big international company with different managers on other teams coming and going, so it's never clear who in the company knows about our team yet.
- early on, it was just a few people making requests directly to me, and a small portion of my day was turning down these requests
- as time went on, the team grew, we succeeded more, and more and more irrelevant requests started coming. We turned them down, but the amount of requests and the irrelevance and importance of the requests were all increasing, the latter two often linked very closely together
- at some point, we started getting exceptional push-back when we turned down requests. the first few times were rough; manageable, but I had to dedicate a few meetings/days to getting rid of this request and the requestors were very upset when I turned them down
- eventually it got to the point where a good 40-50% of my week was dealing with irrelevant requests and increasingly aggressive resistance when I turned it down
- the requestors around this time began just trying to circumvent me; find the people on the team I was leading who were not as good at saying "no", and getting the tasks in that way. I had to eventually put a full stop on requests that didn't come via a specific channel; this in turn resulted in a lot of drama from other teams complaining we were being prima donnas, and arguing with higher management if we should have the _right_ to insist on requests coming via a specific channel (something basically every team does...), which eats up more of my time as I'm having to explain to execs that have absolutely no idea about this aspect of the company, but believe the requestors when they say "yes, this team must solve this", keeping in mind that the task has absolutely nothing to do with our team, they just want us to deal with it
- a corollary to the above point, keep in mind the requests are still coming in while this debate is happening since the debate is whether or not we can restrict the channels for making requests, so my teammates are still being harassed every day by these requestors
- finally we get "approved" for the right to a dedicated single channel for the requests, and the requestors just ignore it anyways; there is no reprimand for the persons not following the approved process, and the entire debate was a pointless exercise
- I'm spending 80% of my time now arguing with these requestors and telling why we're rejecting their requests. Most of these requestors are repeat visitors, so it's not like they don't know these reasons and rules, they just don't care, they don't want to deal with the shitty task they made
- eventually, the requestors realize they don't need to request it to me, they just need to request it to an exec who has _some_ oversight over our department, give those execs enough worry to convince them we need the best, and the requests are routed to my teams. so I end up accommodating and adding meetings with these execs on the regular in hopes that they at least ask me if this really needs my team or not (spoiler: most never ask, they just lay down their decree and expect it to be done). My week is now about 95% just telling people to knock this shit off, but the tasks keep coming
- my team is burnt out, we're absolutely fed up with all the work, and even worse, we're having troubles sorting when we really do need to be on a task as there are just so many, so actual projects we _should and could have helped with_ are now in trouble as they got deprioritized. these are indeed important projects that need us, and by the time we get to them, they're in such bad shape due to mismanagement and awful decisions that it's a ton of work to get the project off life-support, and that is typically as far as we can take it before we have to shift the focus to another dying project
There's a lot here, but remember, my team is filled with IT specialists and we're supposed to be helping on specific difficult projects that align with our specialties and nothing more. Yet now more than 90% of my job is just solving arguments or problems that other teams created, doing work that has 0 to do with our team's original focus, struggling to keep the projects that are our focus just barely treading water, and constantly having to explain to extremely aggressive and emotional people that their personal unwillingness to have tough conversations with clients or their unwillingness to fix their own mistake is their problem to solve, not ours.
I absolutely can empathize with the article as it's basically all I do at my work anymore, and it's really awful to wake up and wonder "who's bullshit am I going to have to deal with today?" when I should just be setting up a few environments and writing a bit of code while mentoring the team I'm a part of. The fact that everyone participating in this EFT has been told in no ambiguous terms many times why their requests are bad and not for our team, but I guess the company decided at some point we're just going to waste everyone's time arguing on such things instead of doing IT work at some point.
Guess I missed that meeting in favor of explaining to some exec why the project their team proposed is basically giving away thousands of work hours for free just because some sales team didn't have the courage to tell a small and awful client "nah we aren't doing that"
I've been running long comments like this through chatgpt and omg, it summarizes this giant wall of text perfectly. I swear this stuff is going to put therapists out of business.
set aside 10% of your team's time to do these unwanted jobs. Say yes to the bulk of them but explain that it will take a long time to complete the task. Ignore all complaints that these tasks are taking too long. If they complain to senior management then give senior management the choice, you either do your main task or you do these unwanted tasks - their choice.
While I understand what you're saying, I think the part maybe I didn't express well is that there isn't a 10% of the team time to give anymore. The items that our team was always most successful on now compete with all these other tasks and the team has more or less shifted into a very generalized and vague team without any specific goal, reason, or projects that best utilize our skills and interests.
The EFT here creeped in and more or less turned a team that always succeeded on the goals they were actually hired and trained to accomplish and now is being held responsible for the success/failure of so many other teams, including those that have nothing to do with any of our specialties. We lost members who went on to better things, and to this day I still am only happy for them that they were able to make that change when they did.
It's not about whether or not we _can_ accomplish the load, and that's not what the article is about. It's about others pushing their items they don't want to deal with onto others, and how much effort goes into that from the others instead of just doing their work, and how EFT is toxic once it becomes accepted for persons to engage in EFT.
