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Not the asshole, they’re mad because they have to work now.

How do you plan to manage a bunch of people that don’t respect you?

No, you’re right to set boundaries.

People will always want you to do stuff that’s outside of your classification. The key is to be “too busy” when it doesn’t advance your career, and willing to learn when it does. Ideally, you don’t have to directly say no. When you hit the balance right, they stop asking.

the trick is just learning how to tell people No

its a balancing act that takes some finesse and if you are going to be a manager soon, you might look into how it is done

Im not sure if I could explain it but it usually involves listening to the request, rewording the request and repeating it back. And then explaining the situation as you see it (why you will say no) and then when they have understanding of the situation, you explain why you are saying no.

From my personal experience, this works out pretty well but there is always that one off that blows up in your face. When that happens just face it head on and as time goes on it usually gets better and requires less work when you have to say no

You are not the asshole, and the people who are will, of course, make you feel like you’re being one.

INFO: did you tell them no in a polite way or were you shitty about it?

it might be unfair to ask as this is just based on your username but:

do they resent you for taking smoke breaks?

do they know you’re a furry?

Not the arsehole but you do need to say no more often, you saying yes all the time is why you get badgered so much.

Nah, definitely not the asshole. It’s pretty clear that they are just upset by no longer having their laziness enabled.

One important component of assertiveness that I taught to my former clients was that everyone has an inherent right to refusal. You can say no, and you’re not obligated to provide any justification.

Obviously you ought to provide context when appropriate and in work situations if you want to keep your job. But I was in similar situations where I would refuse leadership’s direction on reasonable grounds/different department’s duty. I would not let notorious department heads throw me under the bus, and I’d save emails to call them out on their bullshit in the email chain they lied/blamed me. I would refuse orders to over-bill and call out managers/leadership trying to push us grunts to commit medicaid fraud/waste, even in the middle of their meetings announcing the directives.

I wasn’t liked by those toxic people in the organization, but they learned respect/fear me and a lot of my peers/my team would tell me they appreciated me speaking up when they were afraid to. My supervisor told me after I had her come into our boss’ office with me to confront our boss over unwarranted criticism about me. Afterwards my supervisor told me: “I wish I could talk to leadership like that… but I’m too afraid to lose my job.”

I was never fired but I did leave the job when I got really sick with covid + RSV + pneumonia, a secondary bacterial infection in my lungs, pleurisy, and then long covid. The healthcare industry in my region was so strained, we had so many people quit due to toxic leadership/over-worked/burned out, and the policy was not hiring replacements and instead pushing the load on the remaining employees. I probably would’ve quit if I hadn’t gotten sick.

But I’m proud that I always stood by my principles even when it meant disobeying/confronting superiors. My stubbornness and threshold for confrontation also made me a damn good client advocate. That was what I was most known for. I kept residential care and assisted living facilities in check, hotlining them and aiding state government investigations. It was usually stealing client funds or meds, but I also uncovered neglect and abuse.

I can be wrong and an ass at times, just like all of us. But if I feel strongly convicted about something, peer-pressure or fear of losing my job won’t stop me from holding my ground.

I think you’re doing the right thing standing your ground. I would appreciate you being the one to put yourself on the line for my benefit as well, if I worked in your department. That is a quality I would want in my manager. Rather than rolling over and accepting additional work/disruptions to your department’s actual duties.

No, you’re not the asshole. But I’m the guy who won’t do shit unless it’s explicitly part of my job description.

I can’t imagine a universe where what you did makes you an asshole.

That’s a toxic work environment in the making. Always call out that kind of behavior.

Not the asshole. They are trying to get something for nothing it sounds like. You had evry right to do and say what you did. “Sorry, you have to do your own job” shouldn’t be something that you have to say, but you will need to say it, probably more than once.

No, you’re not an asshole, the other person is the asshole by de facto demanding you to do their work (when people get all pissy if you say “no” for something they “asked” you for, they weren’t really asking).

If you want to preemptivelly remove or reduce the risk of others accusing you in some way of “meaness” (such “asking” and the “meaness” accusation on refusal being quite a common strategy of people who were far too spoiled as kids and never really grew up - they do it because the “oh, look at poor little me” worked when they were kids to reverse adults’ “no” responses), provide some kind of “yes” under conditions and a time frame entirelly defined by you, something like “I would love to help you but I’m really busy at the moment with higher priority work. If I get the time I’ll come around and help you with that”. From this point either go down the line of “never having the time” (i.e. you don’t do it and have no intention of doing it, and if confronted just provide vague “I couldn’t get around to doing it” or just “I forgot and now it’s too late” reasons that can’t really be disproven by the other person) and they’ll eventually give up on asking you that (being pissy about people being too busy with more important work doesn’t really work as well as being pissy about an outright “no”), or you go down the line of “helping others help themselves” (i.e. you do some of the work as long as they’re right there also doing the work with you or take them to the right person to ask for help if there is one and wait with them while they ask and next time around when they come to you, ask them “have you asked person X already”).

Personally the way I solved my own “not wanting to be seen as not nice” way back when I started working was a mix of prioritization (i.e. “I’ll help you when I have the time”, and I genuinelly meant it but in practice I rarelly had the time) and helping people help themselves (i.e. “I’ll explain you how you do it while you do it yourself” and afterwards for subsequent requests just asked “have you tried already what I taught you last time?” and not help until they did which usually resulted in them solving the problem themselves) though this was in software development and people came to me to solve the kind of problems that had to do figuring something out, diagnosing a problem or implementing a certain kind of functionality, so I could do the whole “teach them whilst they do it themselves” thing.