Learn to Say “No” to Extra Work

Stop doing tasks that won’t get you promoted!

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I imagined myself in the following scenario: I’m running a small company, and we’re throwing a going away party for Mike. I need someone to organize the party. Should I ask Sue or Dan? Both are members of my sales team.

I’m gonna ask Sue. She’s organized the last five parties, she knows the drill, and she always does a great job. Plus, I know she’ll say yes.

Dan, on the other hand, has never organized anything and he doesn’t want to do it. Also, he’s really busy. Why bother him?

So I ask Sue, who says yes, like she always does. She plans the party, either during her work day or after — I don’t know, and I don’t care — and then she leads the event. It’s a great party. Everyone is happy, though Sue looks a little tired, and she didn’t land a new client this week. But Dan did. That’s one reason why Dan makes more money than Sue, and I’ll probably promote him next year.

But wait. Why don’t I ever ask Dan to help out? Why do I always ask Sue? I’m even angrier about my decision because I’ve been on Sue’s end of it — saying yes to a thankless task outside my job description (and feeling guilty if I say no).

Arggggghhh.

Need a note taker? Ask a woman. Cover for someone who’s out? Ask a woman. Join the committee to (fill in the blank)? Ask a woman.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve never been more passionate about a Wells $treet column than I am about this one. The following is an epiphany that’s taken me (checks calendar, frowns) 61 years to learn.

Companies and organizations have created all kinds of programs to hire and promote women, yet many women don’t move up. Some even get burnt out and quit. Why? Often it’s because they overload themselves with extra tasks that help the organization but don’t help their own careers. These are tasks that men often decline to do (if they’re even asked).

The scenario I posed above is now backed by research conducted by a group of highly successful women who formed The No Club. The women — mostly scholars — first met a dozen years ago over a bottle of wine to admit that their professional lives were out of control.

Linda Babcock is an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who initiated The No Club. “I thought I needed an intervention.”

Back in 2010, her calendar was filled with meetings, taking her away from conducting academic research — the job she was hired to do. Research would raise her profile, earn her grants, get her invited to “prestigious talks.” It made her nuts to realize that while she spun her wheels with nonessential committee meetings, her colleague, George, sat in his office… and conducted research. “He talked about what he was doing all day, and I looked at what I was doing all day — and we have the exact same job.”

Here are other women she asked to share that wine (whine?) with:

Brenda Peyser was then the associate dean of the public policy school at Carnegie Mellon. Brenda admits she was always the first person to offer help but never got any credit for it.

Laurie Weingart is a professor in the university’s business school who didn’t think she had a problem. She just assumed her packed schedule was “business as usual.” The group soon pointed out that she was being delusional.

Lise Vesterlund teaches economics at the University of Pittsburgh, a woman who kept several different calendars and lived by her to-do lists. (This. Is. Me.) “I felt like if I just was running a little bit faster, I would be able to catch up,” she says. “I ended up with hypertension and in the hospital.”

Laurie, Lise, Linda and Brenda/Carnegie Mellon University

These smart women were exhausted and resentful. So they started The No Club to hash out strategies for prioritizing their work and learning to say “no” to other tasks without being penalized.

Since that first get-together in 2010, the women have not only worked on themselves, but they’ve done groundbreaking research, advised organizations, and recently released a book called, “The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead End Work.”

They conclude that this isn’t a problem that women can fix on their own. “It is an organizational problem. And it is in the interest of organizations to address it.”

See, if you hire someone for her specialized skills, then saddle her with unrelated work, it not only hurts her career; it hurts your company.

I devoured their book — my favorite line is, “A ton of feathers still weighs a ton.” While I highly recommend you read the whole thing, here are a few takeaways.

Don’t Accept Work that Doesn’t Promote You

The women write about non-promotable tasks (NPTs), work that is important to the organization but doesn’t advance your career — like being on a committee to select a new vendor, or taking notes in a meeting, or covering for someone who’s out. Their research showed that women are asked far more often than men to take on “these crappy tasks.”

But to avoid saying yes to a non-promotable task, you first need to know what a promotable task is. Figure out what your company values, especially in performance reviews. In the case of a lawyer, billable hours are what’s important, not heading up the recruiting committee. If you’re in retail, upselling is more important than going over inventory.

Also, promotable tasks are visible to others. If your bosses don’t notice your work, point it out. I’ve written before about the need for women to toot their own horns. Nobody’s going to notice how hard you work, because everybody is busy.

200 Hours a Year on NPTs??!

The authors found in their research that women spend about 200 hours more per year on NPTs than men do. That’s five whole weeks of full-time work, and the situation is worse for women of color. “It is a global problem,” says Laurie.

So next time you’re asked to do a task outside your job description, consider whether it will help you get a raise or a promotion, or at least get you noticed. Even if the task is important to the organization, and someone has to do it, that someone doesn’t have to be you. What’s more, if you do a great job on an NPT, you’re going to be asked to do it again! Suddenly, it’s part of your job.

The Volunteer Experiment

As part of their research, the authors brought together undergrads at the University of Pittsburgh and placed them in co-ed groups of three. Each group was told they had two minutes for one of their party to volunteer to do an undesirable task. If no one volunteered, each member would receive $1. If someone volunteered, the volunteer would earn $1.25, but the other two people who sat on their hands would receive $2 each!

Well, as the clock ticked down, guess what happened? You know what happened. Most of the time a woman finally volunteered. Sure, she’d only receive $1.25, but that was better than only getting a buck if no one volunteered.

“Women volunteered on average 3.4 times, while men volunteered only 2.3 times,” the authors report. As they repeated the experiment 10 times, a third of the women volunteered at least half the time, versus 11% of the men. And these were young adults who hadn’t even started their careers yet!

And then (inhaling, trying to hold down my blood pressure)… when the groups were rearranged to be all one gender — either three men or three women — more men volunteered! They’d rather receive $1.25 than $1! “They just don’t want to [volunteer] when women are around,” the authors concluded.

We have to stop this. “If we don’t step in now,” warns Lise, “this next generation of women is going to be exactly where we were.”

Saying “No”

The women in The No Club developed strategies for declining requests for NPTs, even writing scripts on what to say. They developed their “No muscles.” Here are a few tricks they used.

Lise visualized the reaction of her family to news that she’d taken on another task. “Suddenly it was no longer a trade off between me and the requester,” she tells me, “but it became between my family and the person who wanted something from me... I could no longer justify saying yes.” Saying “no” got a lot easier.

Another idea: When you’re asked to do a task with a deadline months down the road, imagine the deadline is tomorrow instead. If you don’t want to do it by tomorrow, you won’t want to do it months from now. Say no.

Even if you do say yes, you can set boundaries, like a time limit. Linda never says yes without thinking it over for 24 hours. And if it’s not important to your job, why knock yourself out? The authors suggest you “do a B+ rather than an A+ job” on an NPT (if you do a mediocre job, maybe you won’t get asked again! #winning).

Don’t Join a Board or Committee (At Least Not Long-Term)

Joining a board or a committee can be indirectly promotable — at least in the short term — if it brings you into contact with important people at your company. But after a while, there’s no value added. They know who you are now, but you’re still stuck on a committee that’s taking you away from tasks that lead to higher pay and/or promotion.

For example, the authors say that 80% of the senior faculty at Carnegie Mellon is male, yet when Laurie joined “an important committee,” pretty much everyone in the room was female. “Many of our male colleagues seemed to avoid a lot of the dead-end work.” Duh!

The authors also mention a large research university in California that boasted women comprised half of all committee members but only 25% of the faculty. Doing the math, that means “each of the women would serve on two committees, while each of the men only would serve on two-thirds of a committee, on average.”

How to Say No (and Don’t You Dare Solve the Problem by Recommending Another Woman for the Job)

When you say “no,” you need to make sure the message is clear. The authors quote producer Shonda Rhimes, who declines requests by saying things like, “I am going to be unable to do that,” or, “That is not going to work for me.” Don’t set a trap for yourself by saying, “I’d love to, but I’m not available that week.” You might end up hearing, “No problem, we can reschedule for when you’re available.”

Laurie’s go-to “no” response is to point out all the work she has on her plate, including other NPTs her boss may not know she’s already doing. “I wish I could help you out with this,” she’ll say, “but I’m already doing X, Y, and Z with these other committees.”

She also tries to recommend a replacement, but she doesn’t suggest another woman who’s probably also overloaded with NPTs. She’ll recommend a man who isn’t. “Maybe you could ask John.”

Other Tips For Saying No

— If your manager needs an answer now, buy time. Say that the task sounds interesting but you’d like to know more about it, and you need some time to consider the impact it will have on the revenue-enhancing work you do for the company. “Covering for Debbie could be interesting, but I need to know how much that will take me away from clients. Can you tell me more? Why me?”

— If you’re at a meeting and managers are asking for volunteers, mimic the behavior of male colleagues who have no plan to raise their hands by shuffling papers, getting up to leave, refusing to make eye contact. This will signal your disinterest.

— If a request for an NPT comes through a group email… IGNORE IT. “Our research found that women were 60% more likely than men to write back to the requester and say they can’t do it, rather than just ignoring the email.”

Once you start saying no, it gets easier.

“I used to say yes to everything, but I think I have become better at understanding what’s right for me,” says Brenda, the former associate dean. The club helped her finally confront a male colleague who was supposed to share scheduling and other administrative work with her, but who never did any of that.

“I finally went to him and said, ‘Look, this job is both of our responsibility, this one task, and it’s huge, and it takes weeks to get it done, and you never do it.” She told him she went ahead and split the work in half. “Pick the half you want.” His response? “Okay, I’ll do the first half.”

And that was that. No drama, no pushback. After that first experience, it became much more natural for her to say “no” to future NPTs.

MANAGERS: Stop Asking Women to Plan Parties

Why do bosses ask women to do NPTs? Because they know women will say yes.

In the experiment that featured groups of three college students, the researchers eventually added another layer. They brought in another student who was designated as a “manager.” This person’s job was to ask one of the three to be a volunteer. In groups where there were two men and one woman, the woman was asked 40% of the time, instead of an equitable 33%.

In groups where there were two women and one man, each woman was asked 40% of the time, meaning the man was only asked 20% of the time. Women “managers” were as guilty as men of tasking other women with the NPT.

We have to recognize our bias both as individuals and organizations.

Linda has started working with companies that want to promote women but keep coming up short. “They’re kind of flummoxed by the fact that they’ve been working on it for 20 years, and they don’t seem to be making much progress.” One company actually had different work labeled “pink tasks” and “blue tasks.” The blue tasks involved promotable activities; the pink tasks did not. When Linda points out that this kind of thing holds women back and makes them resentful, “It’s like a lightbulb going off.”

Laurie put the club’s research into practice when she found herself in a leadership position at the business school. She looked at how committee assignments were delegated. Sure enough, they mostly went to women. “As a leader, I was able to shift things around,” she says, by redistributing commitments more evenly between men and women. I asked her if there was any pushback from men. “No,” she tells me, “because I was in a position of authority, right? This was their job to serve on these committees.”

MANAGERS: Stop Asking for Volunteers

There’s no question that every organization has tasks that have to be done but aren’t valued or promotable. Often managers will ask for volunteers. And often, the same women raise their hands to pitch in.

So, instead of asking for volunteers, draw names out of a hat, or create a rotation system. For example, ”Sue will take notes for this meeting, but Dan will do it next time.” Who can argue with that?

MANAGERS: Acknowledge and Reward NPTs

The authors point to a report last year from McKinsey & Company, along with Lean In. Nearly 90% of the organizations surveyed said that tasks done to support “co-workers’ well-being” were critical to an organization’s success, “yet only 25% of companies reported that such work was formally recognized in performance evaluations.”

And while 70% of companies reported that they believe work which promotes diversity, equity and inclusion is important, only a quarter recognized it in employee reviews.

Hmmmmm…

Maybe it’s time to practice what we preach. Linda has consulted with organizations to change the inputs to performance evaluations to include tasks that serve the organization but may be outside an individual’s job description.

The authors also suggest it’s time to incentivize NPTs, such as rewarding the person who organizes the company retreat with two days off.

EVERYONE: Stop Judging Women Who Say No

“We have been taught and internalized the mandate that women take one for the team,” the authors write. Women who don’t go along can suffer retaliation. They’re not team players. They’re difficult. Divas.

One research report showed that women weren't rewarded for helping out, but when they said no, they were penalized. “The pattern was different for men.” In other words, men get a pass.

We need to reprogram ourselves and our expectations. Flip the script. Women need to stop feeling guilty for saying no, and all of us need to examine how we’d react if a man did the same (assuming he was asked).

Start Your Own No Club

Linda, who called that first meeting of what became The No Club, says the other members provided her with important moral support as she learned to start turning down requests. “I felt like I really owed every person my time,” she says. Having a posse helped change her mindset.

So the authors suggest you start your own No Club and surround yourself with others who can give you a reality check. This means being honest, something the women in the original club found challenging. “Divulging that you made the same mistake four times in a row was difficult,” they wrote about their first few meetings. “Worse was when everyone else at the table, except for you, saw what you had done.”

That said, once in a while you may have to say yes to an NPT, because that’s only fair. But consider saying yes to one that appeals to you. Do you enjoy being a mentor? Then be a mentor. It might even provide you with a nice mental break.

And don’t beat yourself up. “To be completely truthful,” the women write, “we sometimes still say yes when we want to say no.”

I hear ya.

💰💰💰💰💰

Does this story speak to you? If you’re a manager, do you find yourself asking women to do NPTs and expecting them to say yes? Are you shocked when they say no? Join the discussion below or 📧 jane@janewells.com.

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Cover image by Westend61/Getty Images