Dear Ron,
My boss recently gave me a reporting assignment that’s started to take up a lot of my time, saying he gave it to me because he trusts me. While the task started off being rather simple, it’s now ballooned into one where I often have to work weekends to get it done. I’m afraid to complain given the precarious state of everyone’s job these days, but this is really killing me. What can I do?
These are undoubtedly tough times and difficult ones in which to figure out what, if any, leverage you’ve got as an employee. But assuming you’re in relatively good standing with your boss — and it sounds like you are — I’d try laying the situation out for him in terms of trade offs. You want to say something like, “Here’s what I’m doing and working on. I’m aware that everyone’s been asked to do more and I’m happy to keep working on this project for you, but it’s started to take up a lot more time of my time and if you really want me to do this right, you’ll have to take Task X off my plate.” That would let you signal your appreciation for the situation, while also making him see clearly all the things you have to do and letting him prioritize your tasks. It’s also important to present potential solutions to the problem, rather than simply saying that you don’t know what to do.
One of my clients, a senior manager on the rise at a big accounting firm, found herself in a similar situation a few years back. Her boss asked her to prepare a weekly summary for the group that initially involved compiling some basic information but later became a whole process of regularly checking in with everyone on the team to find out what they were doing and planning to do. Her boss loved the reports, but my client felt he didn’t understand how much extra work it required.
So she did what I advised, laid everything out on the table for him, and wound up asking for more money to do it (remember, this was a few years ago when you could still plausibly ask for more money). It turned out he couldn’t give her any more money, but he did ultimately give her an increase in title that allowed her to delegate some of the work to her peers and get out from under the crush of her work.
Now if you do all this and your boss still doesn’t budge — and there’s a chance he might not in this climate — then you need to start thinking whether there are other bosses you can work for within your company that would represent a better situation for you. But you still might have to just suck it up for a while.
