There is a phrase that can tell you quite a lot about a workplace.

“That’s not my job.”

Sometimes it is completely appropriate.

Roles exist for a reason. People need to know what they are responsible for, where their authority ends and when something needs to be handed to someone with the right knowledge or skill. Healthy boundaries are not the enemy of teamwork.

But context matters.

Because there is a difference between “this falls outside my responsibility, let me get the right person involved” and “not my problem.”

The words may sound similar. The effect on the workplace can be very different.

I become curious when the phrase starts appearing everywhere.

A problem reaches the edge of one person’s role and stops. Someone notices something is wrong but assumes somebody else will deal with it. A task falls into the little space between two departments and somehow belongs to neither of them.

Nobody has necessarily done anything technically incorrect, and yet the work still has not moved.

That is the interesting part.

Most organisations put considerable effort into defining responsibilities, reporting lines and areas of accountability. They should. Confusion about ownership creates its own problems.

But organisations are also living systems. Work does not always arrive neatly packaged according to the job descriptions we wrote for it.

Things overlap. Circumstances change. An unexpected problem lands somewhere inconvenient.

The question then becomes less about whether somebody should take on work that genuinely is not theirs, and more about what happens when they encounter something that sits outside their boundary.

Do they help it find the right place, or does it simply stop with them?

Over time, those small moments can begin to shape a culture.

People become very good at protecting their piece of the process while losing sight of what happens to the whole. Departments can each meet their individual responsibilities while the organisation still struggles to achieve the outcome everyone is supposed to be working towards.

And once that happens, frustration tends to travel in both directions.

One person feels they are constantly picking up things other people should have handled. Another feels they are being expected to take responsibility for everything that crosses their path.

Both may have a point.

Which is why I don’t think “not my job” is really the important part.

I am more interested in what has made those words necessary.

Perhaps responsibilities genuinely are unclear. Perhaps somebody has spent years quietly carrying work that was never theirs until a boundary became unavoidable. Perhaps people have learned that stepping in once means owning something forever.

Or perhaps the connection between individual responsibility and the shared outcome has simply become a little lost.

That distinction matters.

Because asking people to “just be team players” does not resolve unclear accountability. And another policy defining who does what will not necessarily create cooperation between people who have stopped seeing the outcome as shared.

Somewhere between everybody does everything and I only do what appears in my job description there has to be room for something more useful: not blurred responsibility, but shared awareness — the ability to know what belongs to you while still noticing what is happening around you.

Perhaps that is why I pay attention when “not my job” becomes a recurring workplace phrase.

Not because the person saying it is automatically the problem, but because repeated language often tells us something about the environment in which it has become useful.

And when enough people begin protecting their own small piece of the work, the friction may no longer be sitting with any one person.

It may be living in the spaces between them.

These are the kinds of workplace frictions that interest me most: the familiar responses that make complete sense in isolation, but begin to tell a different story when they become part of the culture.

Related Service

Organisational Friction Diagnostic

Helping organisations look beneath recurring workplace challenges and identify the patterns that may be keeping them in place.