It's Not My Job!

Have you ever been asked at work to complete a task you felt could only fall in the ‘perform other duties as assigned’ category of your job description?  Or perhaps you perceive there are others in the organization far better equipped to perform said task?  Or maybe there are others that should be performing the task, but aren’t, and now you have to pick up their slack?  Diagnosis:  ‘It's Not My Job’ syndrome.  Course of treatment:  Bite the bullet and do it.  Or read on.




Generally, it’s not the best career move to tell your boss “It’s not my job” when asked to do something.  Besides, your boss wouldn’t hear that anyway.  Your boss would hear ‘I’m too good for this’ or ‘I’m not a team player.’  Nothing earth shattering here.  Some articles on this ‘Not my job’ topic include CBS News, The Business Journals, and Personal Branding Blog.

In many cases, being assigned a task outside the scope of normal duties is really a symptom of two different problems:  time constraints and higher priority tasks.  If you had some excess capacity in your schedule or nothing very pressing going on at the moment, you would likely feel much less of an urge to say ‘It's not my job!’  Since that likely doesn’t happen often, the real problem is inadequate staffing or management inability to balance staff workload. 

So next time, instead of uttering the career-killing ‘It's not my job,’ maybe ask some questions.   For example: 

• I can gladly help out on this, but since this task takes considerable time to complete, have we explored the possibility of bringing in a temp or hiring a part-time/full-time person for this?
• That seems like a job better suited for Person A or Department B, don’t you think? 
• I’ve been helping out with this task for a while now, but it is starting to take away from my time/focus on these other projects we both agree are more important.  Can we work with other individuals/departments to reallocate this task appropriately?

At a minimum, these are far less inflammatory responses.  Ideally, this may help get the root problems addressed.  One last point.  This same issue could be found at any level in an organization, not just the lower levels only.  This issue could easily be found in a top level COO/Regional GM discussion or a lower level line supervisor/hourly employee discussion.