How to push back politely but effectively?

[Peewee233]

Hi All,

Sorry for the length of this.

I’m very new to my role as a senior member of staff (I won’t give too much away in case I’m recognised) in a large multinational. The company, despite its size, is very light on staff and has always worked that way. As such, where other similar companies would employ 15-30 people who do my role, mine employs 2 and we have external companies to lean on.

Since starting, my manager (who is great) has assigned which areas of the business each of us will be responsible for but my counterpart has been on leave for a while and asked me to cover a few small tasks whilst they’re away. This was fine but the team responsible for the these tasks has started to cross the line and I’m looking for advice on how to push back effectively but politely.

The team emailed me copying in managers stating I needed to visit a site and spend a few days with them doing something that’s not in my remit. Instead of asking I was told to schedule time for this. My manager has been clear I need to set boundaries and so I politely refused explaining my responsibilities and workload but offered a Teams call to see if I could help. I got a lot of pushback from someone who’s been at the company for years but is quite junior and a short lecture about the importance of face to face contact.

Another person on the team invited me to a call with only one days’ notice sending me several large documents to review. I’m swamped with workload so I wasn’t pleased but I went and identified lots of failings, misunderstandings and was able to advise them on a new direction to take. Their faces lit up and they immediately started listing all the activities they want me to be involved with. I’m suspecting my counterpart isn’t always very effective. I explained that I’m not responsible for this part of the business and my colleague will manage it going forward but after the call I was inundated with emails with tasks they want me to do. One called me to introduce themselves and despite me explaining dozens of time on the call that I don’t have capacity to do this work and my colleague manages this and is back next week, since the call I’ve been bombarded with requests all ending with “thanks for your support on this”.

I discussed this with my manager yesterday to make sure I was right in thinking this wasn’t my job and they were very clear that it wasn’t. They offered to deal with it (and will be speaking to their manager) but asked if I was happy to push back. I don’t want to have to run to them for help this early on so I said I was happy to. A few emails I’ve responded that my counterpart is back next and will deal with this then but this hasn’t stopped them. I’ve been sent share point links and enormous documents to review since saying no and the companies they work with are now also bombarding me with emails, and so how do I respond to these emails?

They’re all very “nice” but they’re not listening when I say no.

I'm sorry that's really tough. My honest advice? Just ignore the emails, and let your manager deal with it. It's their job. I think women often want to take on and save the world and in corporate life it's not possible - I always think: what would a man do in my position? And in this case I think he would ignore emails / forward them to the colleague responsible with the others on cc / reply to them politely that thank you for sharing xyz document, unfortunately this is not in your current remit and you have other pressing priorities and please be patient to wait for other colleague to come back. Ask ChatGPT for a polite push back email and use it as a base for your push back email! Good luck!

I would send an auto response to any emails from them all. Just a one liner.

Thank you for your email. I have forwarded on so X colleague can pick this up on return from leave on X date.

Obviously your colleague who's on leave is very ineffective, or a complete shirker!

Pretty much this.

You've told them it's not your job it's someone else's. So forward all of the emails onto the person who's job it is.

Perfectly polite but at the same time doesn't invite a reply

Thank you. I’ve just opened my emails to find a follow-on from her email yesterday evening (containing all the documents and lists of things to review and write) asking for a meeting today to go through it all and finalise everything. She’s really trying to bully me in to this which is counterintuitive (she’d know if she knew me better) as I’d been willing to help as a much as I was able to but now she’s in her own!

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll put a response to her recent email together now and hopefully she’ll stop.

This is perfect.

How did it go @Peewee233 ?

@kusswell thanks for everyone’s help and advice.

I think it may have worked. I declined a meeting request with a response reminding them that I was busy with workload for my own projects, that their’s was run by my colleague who would be back next week and so they would have to wait until then. I said that if anything came up in their project that related to mine I would be happy to advise (this is within my remit) but that my colleague would be doing the work from now on.

The meeting was cancelled and then an email followed saying it was understandable that I wouldn’t have time and they’d submitted the work (not exactly what I said to do but that’s for my colleague to deal with). I have a few others putting pressure on me but I’ll keep pushing back.

Well done! If it carries on make your emails shorter and shorter. Do less and less defending and justification. They know it isn't your job! Aim for single sentence replies. Stand firm.

Decline the meeting.

EDIT - I see you have and that appears to have worked - result!