These are some recs to tackle the failure modes that @say-duhnelle brought up here.
The Person Who Doesn't Do Their Job (because they don't care to)
The Person Who Doesn't Do Their Job (because they are incompetent)
New Challenger! The Person Who Doesn't Do Their Job (because they want to suck Sam Altman's dick so bad it makes them look stupid)
So the first thing you need to do, across ALL your work interactions, is to not assign intent. When you assign intent (they don't care to do their job! they're stupid! they're AI pilled!) you're adding an unnecessary layer of emotional complexity to an already tense situation (these are FAILURE modes, after all, the intended workflow is failing as is). You also can't know the actual intent, unless the person actively tells you to (and that's a separate failure mode I'll address in a minute). By assuming the other person is failing to complete your request because they're out to get you, you've immediately set both of you into an adversarial relationship. You're going to be annoyed whenever you interact with them (UGH, THEY DON'T CARE!!! AND THEY'RE MAKING MY LIFE HARD!) and that adds a fog of hostility to the interactions that might end up catching YOU in trouble, without even knowing.
Ineptitude is also a blurry thing. Did they install a faulty cable because they're stupid? Or did they install it because they were not allowed to buy a new one and told to recycle and they're now letting the failure happen so they can document and improve their process? Failure is not a bad thing in the Corporate environment. Failure is how you make things better. And if you accept that, then you have to accept that sometimes you will be in the receiving end of Failure, and rather than have a meltdown and make it a THING, you need to document it and let people snowball that failure into a solution.
Similarly with AI... is your coworker AI pilled? Or have they been given a quota of AI usage they MUST fill up, regardless of their personal feelings on the matter, because the company made an investment in AI technology and are pushing for adoption? Are they adding AI components to your workspace or relying on AI to resolve things because they want to, or because their job description has been changed to literally make it their job to do it? I know social media is particularly averse to nuance when it comes to AI but you have to extend grace to the suckers forced to use it, without a choice in the matter. I'm sorry, you don't get to demand people put their job at risk to maintain AI purity, unless you're actively offering to PAY them for the financial hit they will take for doing so. That's part of striking and organizing. Putting together funds to support the people who are refusing to do work in order to force employers to change their decisions. I see a lot of people be very angry about AI usage in the corporate world: I do not see very many people willing to put together funds to support those people being laid off for not meeting AI usage metrics. Food for thought on that one.
In general, again, don't assume intent. Intent doesn't matter anyway. You're in a bureaucracy. Everyone has their own little roles and responsibilities. Don't give someone access to your emotional well-being (being able to affect your emotions, by getting you angry/annoyed/frustrated). That's never theirs to have. This is a job. You don't owe it emotional investment.
Let's focus instead on the actual failure.
@frogeyedape commented here that the solution to most failure modes is ESCALATE until you hit someone who gets things done. This is not an incorrect assessment, but I want to go a bit more in depth about how to navigate it.
First and foremost, please stop thinking of "escalation" as the Corporate version of tattling on someone's bad behavior to their mom/teacher. This is not a disciplinary thing and the sooner you figure that out, the easier of a time you're going to have in Corporate world. An escalation is merely the act of taking a problem that has been proven to be out of scope for a person, and taking it to someone with a potentially wider scope.
This isn't a schoolyard. You're not crying to teacher. You're not getting anyone in trouble. Similarly to how we talked about how you need to let things fail in order for them to be documented and properly fixed, sometimes you have to escalate things to get them sorted out.
So when you raise a problem with the person you were told is supposed to fix it, and they don't... my rule of thumb is the two follow ups and then escalation. Two polite - POLITE, CORDIAL, NICELY WORDED - follow ups - "hey, I'm sorry if you saw already, but I submitted this thing to you, and I was wondering if you had an update", "hey, following up on this, any news? Is there anything you need on my end to get it done?" - before you escalate. You want your follow ups to be in writing - DOCUMENT EVERYTHING, remember? - and you want them to be concise and to the point. Give it a reasonable amount of time to be looked at - maybe a day or two, in between follow ups. Don't expect immediate responses and give people grace, giving them reasonable amount of time to do the work (2 BUSINESS days is a good standard to have). And THEN escalate.
Escalate to your boss first. Forward a private email to your own leader and go "hey, I submitted this request, and I haven't heard back. Can you help me escalate?" This is important because it covers YOUR ass. If your boss is waiting on you to fix something and you're dependent on a third party that's failing to do their part, MAKE SURE THEY KNOW. Make sure they know IN WRITING. This way, you have a response if they try to make it your fault. Cover your ass, always. You also want to try to have your boss be the one to escalate to the-person-that-is-failing-you's boss. A lot of times, in corporate environment, leadership has a network. They know each other. They socialize. A soft escalation where they poke each other through instant messaging app and give a nudge on work, is less friction than an email escalation. It might fix the problem! If the problem isn't fixed, ask for an email escalation from your boss.
See, a lot of the time there's the idea you have to climb up until you find someone who actually cares. And that's true to a point. But realistically, you want to escalate and cover your ass that you're following process and doing YOUR part correctly. That you're not the point of failure. You don't have to make it a crusade. You don't have to marry this issue and see it through til the end. Remember. You're a cog. You're spinning in place in a fixed space. Make sure the places where you touch the issue are done correctly and let it go.
Your boss might also tell you to do the escalation yourself. Either because they want you to expand your network (remember, networking is just putting a Name and a Face/Contact to a Role, so reaching out to request support is definitely a way to meet new people at work and slowly build that network), or because they're a bad boss and they're making you do their job. Either way, make sure you capture in writing that you raised the issue with your boss and that your boss gave you the green light to raise the issue with the-person-you're-having-trouble-with's hierarchy.
Then write a very polite email outlining the fault - the work is not being done - while carefully avoiding putting blame on people. A good boss will respond coldly to you blaming their team. A bad boss will use your words to harass or abuse their team. So let's not risk it either way. Keep it neutral, keep it cordial. "I need this done because X, Y, Z. Here's the steps I've taken. Here's how long it's been. Can you help me get it prioritized?"
Depending on the severity of the issue - and whether you're being pushed to get it done or not - you might need to escalate again.
Do the exact same thing. Escalate to your hierarchy first, only escalate to the recipient hierarchy once you get the okay from your boss.
But what if nothing gets done, Rie? Then nothing gets done. Sometimes failure needs to happen. But you have documented extensively that you are NOT the point of failure and you're not stepping out of your role. Even in very toxic places, a papertrail often makes bad managers think twice about trying shit. And again, if someone is stepping out of line with you - retaliation, harassment, hostile work environment - take your stack of documentation and sit down with HR to talk about it. Document THAT.
You can't detoxify a toxic work environment on your own, but you will be shocked the amount of protection well-documented papertrails provide. As always, if at all possible, consider jumping ship when shit gets toxic, but while you're stuck in toxic land, DOCUMENT EVERYTHING.
The Somebody Else's Problem Loop
This is a lot more common than people think. It's the natural result of people closing ranks around their specific roles and responsibilities. And therefore, paradoxically: this is a good thing. This is a failure mode that betrays a gap in the hierarchy of your bureaucracy. The system has a design flaw. Here's a set of responsibilities without a role. This will never be solved by passing it around in circles among the same level of the hierarchy. Unless someone commits the sin of accepting work outside their scope and fucks up the system, of course. But we all know better now!
This needs to be escalated to what's called a Decision Maker. Upper management. Someone who has executive view of the hierarchy and has decision power to make changes to the hierarchy. In healthy structures, there's probably a process for this, because healthy structures understand they're human constructs and not always prepared for everything. Because it's impossible to prepare for everything.
But we're talking toxic or dysfunctional structures. So the solution is, again, to escalate. Again, escalate to your boss first and point out this is probably a decision their boss or maybe their boss' boss might have to opine in. Get it in writing. Point people to the escalation pipeline when they come to you.
Make sure you're covered, make sure everything is documented, and of course: DO NOT FUCKING TAKE ON WORK YOU DON'T OWN.
The Absent Management/HR
Theoretically those things above should be building a File on those guys that gets them on a PIP or, in the long term, if you as the person who has to deal with them gets EXTREMELY lucky, let go. But instead they've been at the company for ten years and because they play politics better than you they're actually about to fail upward, maybe even into a job you're much more qualified for. Especially if they're male or white and you're female or not white. Another way this one manifests is, you escalate that SEP loop to the boss that needs the conference room, and they don't bother to pass that information on to the people who could figure out whose problem it actually is and compel them to do their damn job.
I'm actually copy-pasting this whole section because I think this entire bit is based on a basic misunderstanding of Corporate and more broadly Bureaucracy.
The goal is never to get people fired.
Say it with me again, the goal is never to get people fired.
The goal is to get your work done or to cover your ass with plenty of documentation, as to why you're not the failure point and you can't get your work done.
I think this is really really important to understand because your job or your bureaucracy of choice (activism group, local government, mutual aid cooperative, etc) is not your friend group. The goal is not that you're friends with all your coworkers. You don't even have to get along with them. You don't have to personally endorse or agree with any of their opinions or out of work activities. You're there for a reason. You're in a job to collect a paycheck. You're in an activist group to change the law. You're in government to influence decisions for your local community for the better. You're in mutual aid cooperatives to target your pet evil in the world. None of those are replacement for a social circle of your own.
If you find yourself replacing your social circle with a job or any of those other bureaucracy models? You need to step back immediately. You need to join a book club. Go out on walks. Start bar crawling again. Make friends on tumblr. Hang out on niche discord servers for your favorite videogame.
The goal should never be to get people fired. If your goal is to get people fired, you've lost the plot and you're supplementing some of your social needs with your work circle and that's bad. That's boundary breaking. That's going to burn you out. And it's also going to wreck your mental health if and when you ever leave your job for any reason.
You took a job to get a paycheck. You're trying to get your work done - the work they're paying you for, nothing more. Please don't let yourself get so enmeshed into a job that it's cannibalizing your other social groups.
Don't lose sight of the goal here. The goal is to get your work done. If you cannot do your work, your job is to document it and escalate it accordingly. Engage with the existing process. If the process breaks, document and escalate. It's that simple.
Toxic managers and toxic work environments will try to get you to feel personally responsible for your job. They'll make you feel like not being able to do your job for any reason is a class 1 catastrophe and you must be constantly freaking out and worrying about it. This isn't true. It doesn't matter what your job is. It doesn't matter how much you believe your job is important and actively benefiting humanity.
It's just a job.
It's okay to step back and not care about it. It's deeply encouraged, actually, that you disconnect from work when you're done with it. Stop talking about work. Focus on books you've read. Movies you've watched. Games you've played. Please do not let any bureaucracy, but specially work, consume your sense of self to the point you're actively fantasizing on getting people fired to make your life easier.
Look, I get it, there's people I work with that I also would internally cheer if they no longer worked with me. Sometimes people are toxic or harmful or just plain bigoted. But it is never your job to get someone fired. I'm specifically targeting that mindset, because that mindset will fuck you up. One, because you're hyper focused on someone else, but also because it's exhausting and demotivating. It's not your job, so there's no real structure to it. No feedback that you're getting close to your goal. It can get obsessive and all consuming.
The way it gets you fired is that you're too busy setting up Mastermind Plans to get someone else fired to do your own job. Don't let the obsession stick its claws into you.
It's totally fine to want people to face consequences for their actions, and it's totally okay to leave a job if you feel those consequences are not equal across the board. But the answer is never a personal crusade. In this economy? Who has the energy, man.
The Management That Shoots The Messenger
Again, documenting and having it in writing is all good. But this one is extra tricky to navigate without being worn down by an insecure/immature leader that lashes out at all perceived attacks. This is what happens when you work for someone who doesn't actually understand how bureaucracy works and who sees failure as a thing to be punished for. Documentation will only carry you so far and honestly, who wants to work with someone that's this deranged?
So the key thing here is how you frame things. This is where appealing to authority is your best bet. Your manager will feel comfortable shooting you, if you're the messenger... so don't be. Sidestep those conversations. I know I've emphasized the idea of going to your manager first when you escalate but if your manager is a direct pain, the alternative is to have someone else escalate to them for you. It will be rare that you'll have blockers where it's a single person problem. It usually impacts multiple people. Because that's how bureaucracy works. Multiple people doing small things. If your boss is not reliable to escalate, try building a relationship with their boss, or another boss on their same hierarchy. Someone they would consider either a peer or a superior, and have THEM escalate for you.
Sure, they might still have a bad reaction to it, and they might bitch and moan about it, but they can't shoot people they don't see beneath you. And that's kind of the underlying problem with this kind of management. They see the people reporting to them as LESSER. Abusable.
So yeah, maybe start looking for a way out of there. Long term, this kind of boss is not the kind you can patch your relationship into full respect without a lot of work and... frankly? It's not worth it. Circumvent until you can go. Deflect escalations to people who don't have toxic shitheads for a boss and let THEM carry it.
At the end of the day, remember.
It's just a job. You're just supposed to do your work, and if you can't do your work, have a solid documented trail of why you're not the failure point.
That's all.
You're Evil For Submitting Work Orders
So this is a trap, and it's a trap a lot of people fall into because being part of A Large Group, people want to Have A Good Time. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. You're not a bad person for not wanting to have a bad time at work.
But crucially: you're not responsible for anyone else's emotional regulation, or lack thereof.
In the accompanying blurb, it's mentioned that people will try to guilt trip you for opening tickets or requesting them to do their job. And that's true. That absolutely happens.
What I'm telling you, up front, to your face, as a grown ass adult: you have no obligation to pick up what they're putting down.
You're responsible for your emotional regulation - this is why you don't assume intent into your interactions with others and maintain neutral-calm as you go about your day, because ultimately, you're all here to just do your job and get a paycheck, it's not personal - but you're not responsible for others'.
So yeah, you document. Aggressively. And you document in neutral/bewildered tone. Document their comments, every single time they make them. Escalate them to your boss, their boss and HR, if the tone of it crosses the line in any way.
Bottom line, do not accept responsibility for someone else's mishandling of their work, their time or their emotions. You're not paid enough for that. Ever.
What Money? (There's no money to fix the root cause issue.)
This is also not your problem, either. Again. Cog in a machine, you have limited reach and are fixed in space. But this is a red flag to be mindful of, because a mismanaged company that doesn't have the budget to fix its crucial issues without dogpiling employees and overworking them, is not a company you want to work with long term.
This, much like "boss won't put your roles and responsibilities in writing, nor give you actual metrics to work towards" is one of those ABANDON SHIP IMMEDIATELY red flags.
Shift to containment mode: dodge as many bullets as you can and begin job hunt in earnest. This place is going to blow and you definitely do not want to risk being the sucker holding the granade when it does.
Really?
It doesn't matter very much how competent this person is or isn't at their job. You are always going to be miserable as long as they work here because they keep stealing your lunch out of the fridge. (The security camera is broken, so it's repeatedly blown off because there is no evidence. But if you dead dove them you can bet it's you that's getting fired; they'll conveniently manage to find some evidence for that).
This one I'm also copying the blurb because what I think it's meant to be is you're just incompatible with a coworker/manager/etc.
And I'm here to tell you that's okay. You're not paid to like everyone you work with. You should remain cordial. You should remain neutral and professional. You don't have to like anyone, but you are obligated to keep your dislike to yourself. That's not to say your dislike isn't valid or rooted in something real.
But this isn't kindergarden. No one is going to sing to make you get along.
You're both here to get a paycheck and the one who blinks first loses. The one who makes a snide remark and gets reported to HR loses. The one who makes an untoward comment. Who gossips to other coworkers.
If they're being unprofessional and violating policy (YOU DID READ THE FUCKING POLICY, RIGHT? YOU KNOW THE RULES OF THE HOUSE, RIGHT? RIGHT?!) you go and report them to HR. Document the issue and let them know and take it off your hands and move on.
Don't give them an excuse to get you in trouble, and don't give them the satisfaction to know you hate them. Do your thing, and move on.
Move on!!! Let go. It's a job, not your calling. It's a paycheck, not your entire reason for being.
Ultimately a lot of these failure modes require you to attain a level of detachment from the job so you can build healthy boundaries. You should in fact encourage that detachment in yourself. If you're salaried, I sincerely recommend you to spend a week tracking how many hours you're actively working, and then how many hours you spend thinking about work. And if it's any more than the hours you're contracted for: work on fixing it. Actively and enthusiastically remind yourself that unless you're paid to do it, you shouldn't think about work. ANY work
A lot of the comments talk about education, academia and healthcare, and how those are the ones that most systematically try to exploit people. There are rewards build in to get you to burn out and then they throw you out without a life-vest and you're on your own. Don't let them. Document everything, get clarity about what you're being paid for and what your metrics are.
Get comfortable being mediocre, in the sense that being mediocre at work means you do what you're paid for and then you go home and get to have a life of your own.
This Reddit story is one of my favorites because it highlights the point of how actually sitting in your lane is best for you. Sometimes a "promotion" is not actually worth it. Sometimes being paid a tiny bit extra for the sake of taking on a lot more responsibility isn't the best for you. More money is only worth it when it makes up for the stress and extra work you're taking on. Don't let yourself be deceived by a small increase in salary to justify a massive increase in work for you.
It's just a paycheck.
You're just a cog in the big machine.
Get your personal satisfaction elsewhere. You will never be as important to a job as that job is to you, so don't set yourself up to fail.
@hearteyesmcgarrett added these tags, which I think it's a very good question and important to address:
So what happens when you ARE the resources people are being routed to, and you're stuck in an exploited labor Gordian knot. You want to help people but you physically can't because you have so much backlog. Because you're stuck. Because you can't.
You give people the information they need to make an informed decision about their situation.
You respect their autonomy.
You say "I can help you but it's going to take me hours/days/months/YEARS" and let them decide if they stay and wait or if they go on looking for other options.
You tell them who to complain to. Who to make noise with. To maybe help you get prioritized so you get more resources.
But ultimately, you do not lie to them.
Look, when I worked as an EMT, we would radio emergency rooms to identify which one was the closest and able to intake patients. it's the same here. You might be the closest option, but if you don't have beds/hands/resources available to answer the emergency, bringing the emergency to you is only going to make it worse.
If people have come to you on referral and they need the resources you currently can't give them? Let them know. Let them triage their own situation and decide if they can wait around or not.
For high risk/high impact cases, networking is also a way to alleviate the stress point. Are there other parallel resources you can route people to? Do so! And then document how many people you had to pass on because of a Gordian knot in resources. You still need to document. You still need to double down and make sure there's a record of the failure. That's the only way to get any kind of prioritization going.
Resources as whole are limited, no matter what field you work in. Don't let yourself be paralyzed by the scope of the problem. You're not responsible for fixing the entire thing. You're responsible for your bit, and you should try your best to do your bit, but don't let them guilt you into taking on more responsibility than you should.
Be honest with people. Setting the correct expectations will save you many headaches in the future.
Lastly, I've really appreciated hearing your kind words in the notes, and I'm very glad you've found this useful. Please take care of yourselves! It's okay if it's just a job. It's okay to not care about it, outside your job time. It's okay.
You've got this.