My Employee Is Too Accommodating

Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues—everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

A reader asks:

I am having a very backwards problem with one of my employees, Jill, being too accommodating and self-sacrificing.

We have regular hours that we work, but it’s not uncommon for hours to need to change when something comes up. Everyone is aware of this when they come on board, and we do our best to rotate who has to stay late. Everyone seems pretty content with how things work as long as there is equal division of overtime. Jill, however, will often volunteer to work the longest hours to take the most unenjoyable part of the work every single time. A lot of my conversations with the team will go something like this:

Me: We have a large new project that’s just been brought to us and the client has put in a rush order, so we’re really going to need to push over the next few days.

Jill: I’ll do it!

Me: That’s OK, you did it last time, plus you’re going to be on vacation the next couple of days. We’ll see if we can get someone else to handle it before we come to that.

Jill: No need, I’ll do it. I’ll cancel my vacation immediately!

And the next thing I know, Jill has put in a request to cancel her time off and has already told the others they can go on home and she’ll stay late. She does this even if I tell her to wait! In any given month, there are at least a few times where Jill volunteers to stay late, work through lunch, cancel scheduled time off, or even do someone else’s work for them so they can leave early. Jill doesn’t seem upset about all the extra work or canceling time off, and her work is always well thought-out and excellent.

But I do not know how to tell her to please back off and let us distribute the extra responsibilities a bit more! Asking her to cancel a vacation would be an absolute last resort for me, not a first or even second choice.

I have had one talk with Jill where I explained it’s OK for her to allow others to do the extra work. Throughout our conversation, she kept insisting to me that she didn’t mind and that she was happy to help in any way needed. Our talk ended up not being much more than my saying “You don’t have to do it every time” and her saying “I don’t mind!” After that, her behavior did not really change.

I’d like to address this again because it simply isn’t fair to Jill, but I’m struggling to come up with a better way to phrase it. I suppose I could pull rank and ban her from working on certain things, but that seems too harsh for this situation. Any ideas on how to better handle this?

Green responds:

It sounds like when you spoke to Jill about this last time, you framed it as “it’s OK to let others do some of the work.” It sounds optional and leaves the door open for her to say, “oh, but I don’t mind!”

Instead of framing it as “it’s OK to do X,” you’ve got to frame it as “I need you to stop doing Y.”

Sit down with her again and this time say something like this: “I apologize for not being clear enough about this the last time we talked. It’s important to me that our work is distributed evenly among everyone. I know that you’re willing to pitch in and do more than your share, but I actually need other people to take an equal share. When you rush to pitch in so others don’t have to, you are interfering with my ability to manage the team fairly and equitably. So when I decline your offer to help with something or tell you that I will find someone else to do a project, I need you to respect that. It’s OK to offer, but when I say no, you need to leave it there and not tell others they don’t need to pitch in.”

You could also say, “Going forward, I don’t want to see you canceling scheduled time off because you think you need to be here. I realize you may not mind doing that, but I don’t want the rest of the team thinking there’s an expectation on them that they’ll do the same — and right now you’re creating that pressure. That’s a real concern for me about the health of our team, so I cannot let you continue to do it.”

In a different context, I might tell you not to interfere with her decisions to stay late, work through lunch, or help someone else with their work so they can leave early, especially if that’s only happening occasionally. However, in this case it seems like part of a larger problem and so it might be worth also saying, “I know you like being helpful to co-workers and will sometimes do their work for them so they can leave early. I can’t let you keep doing that. I assign work to specific people for a reason, and I need those assignments to stay where I placed them.”

All of this is about reframing it for her from what she’s willing to do, to what you need her to do differently.

Also, because Jill sounds like someone who derives a lot of her self-worth (or her sense of how others value her) from being helpful, make a conscious effort to give her positive feedback on the things you value more about her work. Make sure she gets recognition for what she does well, some of it public. It might be that over time emphasizing her value in other areas will ease some of whatever internal pressure is behind this.

Want to submit a question of your own? Send it to alison@askamanager.org.