Practical tipps on how to escape being a scapegoat for work

Remind yourself constantly: your long-term goal is to build a healthy win-win relationship with your company. It is not about willingly sacrificing your time or being a charity pot doing tasks unrelated to your profession. It doesn’t make you look bad. It makes others view you as someone who respects and values own time.

Katie

Kind individual stigma

Answer these three questions honestly:

1. Have you ever been asked by your team to do additional tasks not related to your work in any meaningful way?

2. Have you been too soft lately in pushing back repetitive requests for helping with tasks beyond your regular workload?

3. Does it make you feel sad, used & distracted from your main purpose of work at your company?

Status quo

It is not that I am not able or willing to help. I just think that to dos have to be distributed fairly. This is especially true for startup companies where hierarchy is rather flat and task division is rather flexible. Also small teams within larger corporations tend to find the kind “scapegoats” who would take over less desired tasks.

You have been very nice and landed into the perfect trap of taking care of all sorts of small tasks. People expect that YOU will keep on doing it. You feel like you can’t say “no” to it anymore because these admin tasks have become your new unspoken routine. As a result, what you get is no added value for you, but very comfortable for your employer.

If you don’t want to be a scapegoat of side-tasks forever and regain control over your core professional routine, follow these rules to (gradually) change the situation:

Step 1 Know your “Joker” to play it right

Write down all your key do tos in one list and always prioritise them. It sounds simple, yet we oftentimes are so worked up that we actually forget what we came to do on the first place. These are the core tasks you are hired and paid to do. They will be used in your professional performance review(s) and should always be your number ones. They are your “Joker” cards, so play them wisely!

Step 2 Keep it diplomatic, keep it British

Don’t refuse doing the admin tasks straight away, but say that you need to get focused on your core tasks for now and might help out later. Also mention that you will get back to them later. Don’t say no straight away. But don’t say yes blindly.

Step 3 Refuse to be manipulated

Whenever you mention “maybe”, people keep on (subconsciously) manipulating you into saying the “usual” yes. Don’t fall into that trap anymore. Even though it might make you feel emotionally bad at first, you free yourself from the task ballast that bring 0 value added professionally. You don’t say “no”, you said maybe, so you don’t have to feel bad anyway. Feel free to play the grey zone.

Step 4 Remind yourself – you are NOT a charity pot

These are not your best friends. Even if you insist they are, your best friends would never delegate these tasks. They would instead help you with them. If people do this to you and not to other employees, they know this one little thing. You will be the one kind enough to do this while rest of your team members know their monetary value and value of their time to the company.

Step 5 “Win-win” instead of “one family” mindset at work

Be careful with one family mindset in your company. These are loud words similar to democracy in politics that mean all and nothing. They are often used by leadership to form a confirmatory mindset and pursue their own objectives. Filter the messages and think for yourself before sacrificing your private time and skill development you could have gained instead performing your core tasks.

Once your work stops being win-win, you should seriously question whether there is a new opportunity waiting for you out there. The fact is, we live in a world where win-win employee-employer relationship is a healthy working relationship and anything else I call toxic.

Key Takeaway

I am a very kind person and people know it. I know that my kindness has its implications on my work. Once it distracts me from my core tasks, my core performance just has to drop.

In my first job, I did admin, marketing, analytics, and then I ended up being overseen in my first promotion opportunity. I was asking myself – why didn’t I get 2+ merger & acquisition projects needed for my promotion while my colleagues did? The truth was: I have worked hard enough, but not smart enough.

So I have decided, I didn’t want to do it to myself anymore. This was one of the best career decisions I made in my life as it freed up capacity for learning so much about the core area of my work – acquisition of companies. It kept my “free riders” puzzled for a while, but it has been keeping me professionally and personally sane and healthy ever since.

Decide how you want it to be for yourself. Love and respect yourself enough to tune your routine to a level where you will be respected and valued by your employer. By doing this, you are not trying to disrupt company culture. You just refuse to be sucked into taking on some irrelevant to your key job tasks.

Katie