It feels good to be the person who can sort things out.
Especially when you’re young. Somebody hands you a problem, you figure it out, and people start trusting you with more. That can be how you build a career. It can also be how you end up being the mule. Another word for mule is Donkey.
I once put forty thousand dollars of my own money into a company to make payroll after my “partner” emptied the account so he could go have a ‘big weekend’. He paid me back. A few months later, he asked me to do it again.
I had treated the first time as an emergency. By the second time, he seemed to regard me as the arrangement. Also known as the sucker.
That’s the part I’d pay attention to. When you get everyone through a crisis, it can look as though the problem has been solved. Payroll goes out. The angry phone call ends. Everybody gets back to work. But what changed that would keep it from happening again?
If the answer is nothing, your ability to cope may be the only thing holding the arrangement together. Ask yourself: Are you solving problems or are you setting precedents you might regret down the road?
And you can be proud of solving problems. I understand. I thought being able to handle things meant I was getting good at the job. Sometimes I was. Other times, I was getting good at making somebody else’s failure less inconvenient for them.
You don’t have to decide the person is a villain before you notice that.
The music manager who left me alone in a different crisis was somebody I respected, and still do. I felt very differently about the “partner” who kept taking the money. But in both cases, I needed help that I wasn’t getting. Their other qualities didn’t change that.
Ask what happens after the emergency
There’s a difference between learning to handle a hard situation and being left alone with one. Somebody can give you responsibility and still stay available. They can let you make the call, help you prepare, and step in when it goes beyond what you can decide. That’s how I’d want a junior person to learn.
When you’re the junior person, though, it can be hard to tell which situation you’re in. You’re busy trying to prove you can do it. You may not want to ask whether you should be doing all of it.
That’s one reason your boss shouldn’t be your only source of advice. They have a stake in keeping the work moving. A good mentor has room to ask what this arrangement is doing to you.
Find somebody experienced who isn’t depending on you to make the problem disappear. Tell them what happened, what you were asked to do, and what you were actually able to decide. Ask, “Does this sound like a reasonable thing to keep expecting of me?”
Then get specific about the next time. Who will be available? Who can make the decision? What help can you offer, and where does that help stop?
Saying no can have a cost. My partner found the money when I refused the second time, but our relationship declined from there. I’m not going to pretend a boundary makes everybody happy. It did mean that particular solution no longer came out of my bank account.
Before you volunteer to fix the next crisis, ask yourself one question.
Am I helping with an exception, or agreeing to become ‘Plan A’?
Have you ever been so good at helping that people stopped asking whether it was your responsibility?