Who’s your boss?

Your boss is whoever assigns you work.

Whoever the org chart says you report to isn’t just free to assign work to you. That’s their job description.

But many of us let colleagues be our bosses too. After your official boss has already given you enough work to keep you busy, these coworkers ask you to do them a favor, which as a practical matter means adding their favors to your already overstuffed inbox.

But the problem isn’t your infringing colleagues themselves. If it was, you’d just say no and that would put an end to it.

Nor is it a character flaw on your part – an insufficiently durable spine.

It isn’t a failure to maintain a catalog of clever comebacks either. Sure, we all wish we were snappy answerers. But in most business cultures, sharp comebacks accomplish little, other than branding you as an unpleasant person.

The problem is deeper. It’s the collection of social norms that makes turning a colleague down difficult. Faced with these norms you need … call them “counter-norms” to get you through the ordeal.

The counter-norm is more than a comeback, and more even than comebacks plus comebacks to comebacks. It’s a dialog architecture, that consists of four parts: diplomacy, your façade, an offloaded solution, and the big close. In more depth:

Diplomacy: That diplomacy matters is hardly a new thought. It’s how to avoid gaining a reputation as an unpleasant person. And while it’s been described as knowing to say “Nice doggie!” while searching for a rock, what it mostly entails is maintaining the line that separates empathy from agreement.

Façade: Your façade is your poker face. It’s the self-control that gives you an expression and body language that conceal your desire to perform an anesthetic-free splenectomy, right now and right here in the cube farm.

Offloaded solution: Just saying no, to quote Nancy Reagan speaking in a different context, doesn’t work. It sounds rude to our own ears, let alone those belonging to the person you’re turning down and everyone else in earshot. “No” with a rationale is a whole lot gentler on the diplomacy scale.

But rationales tend to be event-driven and short-lived. Claims of excessive business fall into this category. A rationale gets you off the hook temporarily, but tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that you’ll find yourself right back where you started, searching for another fresh, new, and plausible rationale.

You need something more durable, even in the face of well-rehearsed comebacks. That’s where “offloaded solutions” – solutions that solve your colleague’s problem without your involvement – come into play.

Here’s what an offloaded solution looks like when released into the wild:

A colleague and teammate asks if you can put a quick spreadsheet together for them. You respond with a rationale: “I just can’t right now. I already have a full plate plus a list of back-burner items that need my attention.”

But your colleague plays this game to win. They’re better at it than you are. They respond, “Please? You’re good at Excel – this won’t take you more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

It’s a one-two punch – a compliment, coupled with rationale-rejection. Offer another rationale and your rationales become excuses – you’re still stuck, and the dialog has damaged your image as well.

Compare this outcome to what you get with an offloaded solution:

“Ten or fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes more than I can give you. Here’s what I recommend: Our on-line training includes some very good Excel courses. Take a couple of them, then have a whack at putting together your own solution. Email it to me, along with a written account of the problem you’re trying to solve and I’ll take a look.”

“This way you won’t only get the spreadsheet you need, but all the spreadsheets you’ll need in the future, too.”

Big close: This is what blocks your interlocutor from continuing to pester you. A good general-purpose example:

“And now I really have to get back to what I was working on. Good luck with the on-line training.” Then swivel your chair back to your keyboard, dismissing your colleague from the fray without ever feeling or looking like a bad person.

Bob’s last word: This isn’t all that different from HBR’s famous “Who’s Got the Monkey” article, except that the HBR article’s focus was keeping delegated tasks delegated.

That’s important, too, but in the absence of techniques it’s one of those things that’s easier to say than to do.

Bob’s sales pitch: I just know you know people who know people, all of whom should know about KJR if they don’t already. Forward your favorites to them, and encourage them to subscribe, too.

It’s a good way to establish yourself as a thought leader.

Now showing on CIO.com: A shot across the bow of XaaS, which, for unaccountable reasons stands for “Everything as a Service,” even though “Everything doesn’t start with an “X” and XaaS doesn’t include Everything.

Take a look at “XaaS isn’t everything — and it isn’t serviceable.”

COVID-19 was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020 by the World Health Organization.

That was the disease. Disinformation about COVID-19 reached pandemic proportions on March 12, 2020, as assessed by yours truly.

The COVID-19 pandemic has entered a strange phase, in which the risk of contracting the virus, driven by ever more contagious variants, continues to oscillate in waves. At the same time the risk of hospitalization and mortality from the virus has plummeted, thanks to near-miraculous achievements on the part of the biomedical research community in the form of rapidly developed vaccinations and effective treatments.

The COVID-19 disinformation pandemic, in contrast, continues to induce inflammation. Its etiology: the production of “alternative facts” and spurious statistics designed to appeal to those who subscribe to a good-guys/bad-guys worldview.

Example: The perception that being vaccinated doesn’t reduce COVID risks continues to be popular among a certain class of opinionator, armed with persuasive-looking but flawed statistics and positioned for high visibility in the popular media.

Revealing the flaws in their statistical reasoning depends on opinionators whose highest-visibility platforms are publications such as Scientific American – not where most citizens flock to develop their opinions. See the graph that follows (spoiler alert):

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Nonetheless, for several reasons it’s time for organizations to revisit their COVID-19 policy. First and foremost, as of this writing and as noted above, the combination of currently available vaccines and clinically valid treatments – and yes, I mean Paxlovid, not quack therapeutics like Ivermectin – have made the consequences of an employee violating your COVID-19 policy less dire than they were in the early stages of the pandemic.

Second, as compared to 2020, the power dimension of the employer/employee relationship has shifted significantly in employees’ favor. As a practical matter, terminating an employee for violating policy probably harms the employer as much or more than the employee.

And third, the logic of targeting a policy to a single specific malady is increasingly tenuous.

The original purpose was to help create and maintain a safe work environment. But even before COVID-19, contagiously ill employees who came in to the office endangered their colleagues – not as severely as COVID in the pandemic’s early days, but of severe enough discomfort and debilitation to matter regardless of the specific malady.

Shortly before the first COVID-19 vaccines were released (late July, 2021) I suggested this COVID-19 policy:

All employees who:

  • Enter our facilities …
  • Enter a client’s facilities …
  • Perform any of their responsibilities face-to-face with colleagues regardless of location …
  • Enter our facilities …
  • Enter a client’s facilities …
  • Perform any of their responsibilities face-to-face with colleagues regardless of location …

… must be fully vaccinated. Refusal to comply with this policy can result in termination or reassignment to a position all of whose duties can be performed remotely. If the result is reassignment the company reserves the right to adjust compensation to make it commensurate with the new position’s pay structure.

This policy applies to all employees and contractors, other than those who can perform all work remotely.

What should change?

Mandating vaccination made sense when vaccines were effective against the most prevalent variants, and when the consequences of failing to comply concerned employees more. But that ship has sailed and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.

Also, as mentioned, broadening policy beyond COVID and only COVID would mean requiring employees to be fully vaccinated against everything that’s contagious and for which we have effective vaccines. This just won’t fly, regardless of the wisdom of being fully vaccinated.

Bob’s last word: Encouraging employees to be fully vaccinated is a matter of helping them stay healthy. Our arsenal of safe and effective vaccines is one of the blessings of modern medicine.

But mandating them? For better or worse the time for that has come and gone.

The alternative: Instead of mandating vaccination, requiring all contagiously ill employees to stay home makes all kinds of sense.

It makes all kinds of sense, that is, if their employer makes PTO policies more generous, so that ill employees no longer have an incentive to show up for work at the office, giving the gift that keeps on giving – a disease.

Bob’s sales pitch: Need help thinking through a situation you or your organization is facing? That’s what I do, and if you read KJR on a regular basis you should have a pretty good sense of the perspectives I bring to such things.

And you can get my help in increments as small as an hour.

Just let me know what you need.

Now showing on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide:A CIO’s guide to guiding business change.” Because As CIOs re-think IT’s role in the enterprise, leading or facilitating business change is central to the conversation. Here’s one way IT can and should regain center stage.