my coworker is making me do all her work

A reader writes:

I have a coworker who is making me do her work, I asked my boss for help but I feel like he’s being really laissez faire about the whole thing. What should I do? How should I set boundaries with her, healthily?

I work for a small research lab, and I’m rather new (hired four months ago). I have a coworker, Amanda, who doesn’t do her job. Examples include: missing a meeting because she was napping, coming into work only to use the printer/computer to plan a surprise party for her husband, spending “all day” replying to two emails, and most egregiously having her friend take a data analysis assessment for her when she was hired. She apparently has a history of not pulling her weight and was almost fired the same month that I was hired.

About a month ago, Amanda requested my assistance for a presentation because she said she had too much on her plate to do the data analysis. I love data analysis so I agreed and helped her out. She asked me some questions about how I did the analysis and how I created the tables and charts, and I was happy to show her!

This one request turned into me doing all of the data pulls, cleaning, analysis, and creating slides and speaker notes for each of her eight next presentations (taking two to four hours per presentation).

Each time, I showed her how I did everything and explained the data to her so she could present it. However, she kept saying she doesn’t know how, and that she’s “heavily relying” on me to help her out.

Our boss, Charles, noticed that I was doing the bulk of Amanda’s work and told her to give me credit. She did for one presentation, but did not for the rest. Charles wanted me to figure out how to share the workload with her because she had more presentations coming up and he didn’t want me to be doing everything for her.

Since she said Amanda didn’t know how, I wrote out instructions for her. I wrote out each step of the analysis — from data export to execution of the slides and sent it in a group chat with her and Charles. She still refused to do the work, and I ended up doing it for the rest of the presentations.

Each of those presentations led into one “big” project that she is going to be presenting at the end of this week. She was supposed to just take the data from the other smaller presentations and summarize it into one big presentation. She complained, saying that since I had done the original analyses she couldn’t do it. (Side note: she compared it to when her husband picks out a recipe and buys the ingredients and asks if she can make it. She said that she’s unable to do that because she wasn’t the one that planned it. The metaphor doesn’t make sense to me; it just sounds like weaponized incompetence.)

But I ended up doing all of the work again, creating a deck of 45 slides in total.

Doing Amanda’s work has eaten into the time I should be spending on my own projects, so I finally reached out to our boss for help. He asked me what has been happening and how much work I have actually been doing for her. (Apparently she told him that she couldn’t do her other work because she was spending “all her time” on the big presentation that I made. But she told me that she couldn’t help me with the presentation because she was spending her time on the other things. Basically: she was doing nothing.)

I told Charles all I want is clarity of my role in helping Amanda — since at first it was just supposed to be running the analyses, but it really turned into doing everything. He said it might be simpler to just tell her that I won’t do anything else for her — but I don’t want to come across as not a “team player.”

I feel like I’m perceived as the problem because I’m the new person. But it’s taking my all not to blow up on her.

To be honest, I feel resentful for having to do her work and not receiving credit. I also feel resentful because she is being paid significantly more than me, but I feel like I am doing everything for her (save for the presentation itself).

How do I go about confronting her? I can’t exactly avoid her (my desk is right next to hers), and we will have to collaborate on projects in the future because our team is so small. Is there a way to set boundaries with her healthily?

Wait, what?

Your boss gave you the solution that will fix this: tell Amanda you won’t do anything else for her and then stop.

You said you don’t want to do that because as don’t want to be perceived as “not a team player” — but if anything, you’re not being a team player right now because you’re directly ignoring what your boss told you to do, undermining his ability to effectively assess Amanda’s work (inadvertently, yes, but that’s the outcome), and eating into the time you’re supposed to be spending on your own projects.

I am very curious why your boss telling you that it’s okay to stop helping Amanda hasn’t convinced you that it really is! Did you have a previous job where you were unfairly penalized for not helping coworkers or that instilled weird ideas about teamwork in you? Do you have a broader pattern of being nervous about asserting boundaries with people and not caving to unreasonable requests? I don’t know what’s behind it, but I want to flag that something in your thinking about this is disordered and worth exploring more.

I would be really frustrated if I were your boss and I asked you to stop doing someone else’s job, I thought we’d agreed, and then you continued doing it anyway. At that point, you’d be a problem too! Definitely not as big of a problem as Amanda but … a problem. Because I’d have to worry that I couldn’t trust you to carry out reasonable plans we’d agreed to, even on something that had bothered you enough to bring it to me in the first place, and I’d worry you might have people-pleasing tendencies that would get in the way of your job’s priorities. You’d also be preventing me from seeing what was actually going on with Amanda.

So the next move here is to listen to your boss and tell Amanda that you can’t help her anymore. All you need to say is, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you any further — I have my hands full with my own projects.” Or if you’re more comfortable citing Charles: “Charles told me that I can’t keep helping you and need to focus on my own work.” If she complains that she doesn’t know how to do her work herself, you can say, “You should talk to Charles about what to do, because he told me that I can’t keep helping.”

You might need to keep repeating that, but she can’t make you do her work, and your boss sounds like he has your back. So as much as necessary: “Sorry, I can’t help” and “You should talk to Charles.” That’s it.

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