Customer: Can you help me with this problem?
Clerk: Not my job.
Manager: Will you help Jane figure this out?
Employee: Not my job.
Test Engineer: Can you help me understand how this works?
Software Engineer: Not my job.
“Not my job” may seem like the opposite, or at least orthogonal to “just doing my job.” But at their core, they’re both about responsibility — specifically, a deflection of responsibility (if even in a faux manner).
Not my job is an attitude.
I’ve banned the phrase “not my job” from my teams. That doesn’t mean that we always take on everything, no matter the request. It just means we don’t have the “not my job” attitude. If the request or task isn’t something we can or should handle, then we set the requestor on the right path as best we can.
We help. We don’t deflect responsibility.
Is it your job?
