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During a face2face with my n+2, he once told me « manage your manager ». I discovered later that he had been forced to hire my n+1 but did not like him at all. And that the message was basically: « he is a bozo whereas you a competent engineer. Don’t be fooled by the organization chart. »

So sometimes saying no to your n+1 is totally in line with your n+2 :)

By the time a company is that dysfunctional, why bother? Just do the minimum to get paid.

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.

My company is insanely profitable, plagued with bozos as middle managers. But after some years you have your network of righteous fellows, and live with them much more than with your organization chart. So that is not a big deal.

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.

> Just do the minimum to get paid.

Who wants to live like this?

Conservation of energy is highly selected for biologically.

I don't want to live like this. It's miserable, but not as miserable as putting in effort to change a dysfunctional organization that doesn't want to change.

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.

What were the clues, in hindsight?

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.

I’ve seen a situation like this. The n+2 changed jobs, leaving the employee reporting to an n+1 who now hated them and no n+w to back them up.

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.

On a related tangent:

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.

In a similar boat right now. The org is good. So is the culture. The manager is also good. But the work....! Neither learning something nor finding any alignment. Really confused.

I personally don't think ultimatums are a tool that you should ever employ in an employment situation outside of collective action.

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.

The ultimate exists whether or not you communicate it. I would hope that with enough tact that truth could be communicated.

Just be careful - some will see it as having their arm twisted. You may get what you want in the short run, but in the long run, when you negotiate with leverage, people dislike that.

It is the nuclear option, and you will lose the trust of your leadership chain.

The main thing is that if someone isn't going to do something in normal circumstances, an ultimatum is really for yourself to be done with waiting.

Ever is too strong, but remember the less often you give an ultimatum the more powerful it is when you do. When you have a long standing reputation (must come first) as a 'team player' a sudden ultimatum will get a lot of attention, but it will be years before you can give another.

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)

Sounds like what you are really trying to say is "I want to change teams".

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

> but I don't like my current work and if it doesn't change for the better

I try really hard but never understand where does this belief comes that you have to love your work.

That is part of what I would be politely saying to my boss.

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.

Saying "no" can get you into trouble in a hierarchy. There are many ways leading to no without saying "no", such as:

• 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 I tell someone to do thing A and they look into it and decide to not do it, the reason better be a whole lot better than I didn’t feel like it or I wouldn’t be promoted if I did that.

The solution is to have a conversation with your manager about the work you want to take on, not to play word games where you pretend to take on a task but don’t do it.

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

> 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.

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 think it is a wrong take of what he said. There are many cases when you can say no to small tasks or projects if you can prove they are low value and there are better items on the list. I do that all the time and none of my managers had a problem with it, in the past decade most of my managers let me pick what I want to work on because they know I can prioritize better than they can.

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.

In many occasions, if there's a proposal for something very stupid or pointless I've found it's better to just say "yes", knowing full well the thing will never get done. The manager didn't really want the thing. He wanted a good happy meeting and to hear "yes".