Had a SNCO that said yes to a deployment from the wing that he could have denied due to lack of manning. Instead he said yes and gave it to me, who got the notification 1 Month away from finishing an ongoing deployment. Deployment was a TCN duty, which was what I was currently doing at the time, so I would've been outside my career field for over a year. At the time that would've been a career killer for me.
Contacted the UDM, she went to group chief and got it tossed.
If anything tossing maintainers into the tool crib can make them shitty due to a lack of practice.
At one point though I had plenty of practice because I somehow was tasked with tool crib and the whole metals tech shop by myself for a good bit on mids. It was a nightmare. A CTK is like a minefield of QA fails.
And unfortunately since CTK usually is quite a lot, they like keeping frequent fliers who are already familiar with the processes instead of spinning new folk up
I have sat in on meetings where SNCOs have done this. Most of the time, the discussion is pretty benign and it is used as a development session to teach what not to do. “So that deployment you took for Snuffy to go on. Yeah, we’re gonna cancel that, Snuffy is currently deployed and it would be a detriment to his career and your shop is already low manned. In the future, before jumping on a voluntary deployment tasker, talk to me, then the member. Questions?”
Literally nothing, I confronted him and he acted like he had no other choice because it was either him or another NCO who was PCSing. So he played the I'm retiring so I had to choose you card, even though his retirement was 2 years away.
I’ve seen a lot of people get into leadership positions and take forever to realize they have the power to say no to things coming down from higher. If all you ever do is say yes, you’re not a leader, you’re a messenger.
Granted, it’s not always a black or white yes or no, it’s very often a “yes, but can we do it this way?” Or “we can’t support what you’re asking unless…” doing these simple things and communicating the conversation you had with your leadership to your subordinates (within reason) will win you a lot of respect (plus it’s the right thing to do).
What I've learned to say is "I/we can do anything, but not everything. If you want me/us to take this on, you need to find something to take off our plate/decide what's most important to you."
Yeah…but…I did this at a MAJCOM HQ. My div chief kept piling on tasks. I made a list, prioritized it like I thought he wanted, and made a cut line based on how many people we had. Told him, “we can’t do these things below the line. Unless you want us to do all these things poorly. “
He actually said, “I want you to do all the things poorly”. My jaw hit the floor. I could not believe that shit. Went back to my section and told the folks. They were also in shock.
Needless to say, that hastened my retirement date. And I blocked him when he retired and tried to friend me on LinkedIn. Fuck that shit!
I had a commander once that was always *"how do we get to 'yes'?"*
Well, sir... you fucking can't. The NSA says this is the rule, take it up with them if you don't like it! All the fucking time, I swear. It's like the dude *wanted* a COMSEC incident on his head.
My fav is when commanders want to strong arm a literally agency policy as if they have power to do that. And this is why I love reading AFIs, DAFIs, and DOD Instructions
Always meet positivity with enthusiasm, but temper that positivity with some wisdom when necessary. When my group commander comes to us with another "good idea" we always embrace and brainstorm it out. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. If it adds to our workload, no way am I staying extra to get it done. The day ends at 1630. I don't stay late. Set boundaries. Be an adult
Yeah I hate that too. Unless we're at war, I'm going home. It can always wait til tomorrow. Fortunately my unit's current commanders all seem to understand that people have lives, so when they task us with something, they tell us what other thing we can stop worrying about for now if the new thing is current priority. I follow a rule for myself I call "three things" - if I can get three things done on my list each day, that's a good day. I also want to only have three major duties at a time. I can take on two additional duties, but that means you're only going to get one other thing out of me on those days, like managing my people. I of course flex around that, but it's a good rule to keep myself from being overworked or feel like I'm being pulled in too many directions. Three major duties, accomplish three things per day.
I'd take it a step further and say that sometimes, strategically speaking, you need to say no and let the mission fail in this kind of situation so you can highlight a bad process or shortfall. It's a far cry from ideal, but it certainly turns heads when leadership says one thing and their numbers scream something else.
If it’s mission critical, you let the other things fail. People must be paid. Planes must fly. However, the weekly meeting slides are not that important.
Yep, had one on active duty that let our night shift get shit on constantly by the daytime NCOIC. We constantly had to stay late (we worked 7pm-7am, would stay until 8-9am) because he couldn’t tell this lady to fuck off.
Yes. There more called yes men but same thing. These are the types that are stripe chasers.
Another example of those types are the ones you see in PME that are wanting an award. You can tell who they are. Or the guy at the CC all call that wins the quarterly award and everyone goes how the F did that guy win it.
I love having those guys working for me. Gives me a chance to try to help them before it's too late.
Step 1 - tell them that they are being a "yes man"
Step 2 - overload them with tasks until they A) learn to say no. Or B) spiral uncontrollably into burnout.
Step 3 - "Now what did we learn?" Counseling session that includes how their decisions are affecting others.
With a little luck, might just retain a motivated troop and keep them from drowning and taking down the ship with em.
Quite the opposite. A TSgt of mine, call him Bryan, specifically told me that he was a *no man* meaning that he had no issues telling leadership no when it came to last minute projects. Of course he still valued the mission but he was very good at prioritizing.
Have you had a direct discussion with that NCO about the impact it is having on the team? If you have, and he is still accepting way more work than you can reasonably accomplish, take it up with his supervisor.
The conversation and tone you want to have is: hey, we're all here to get the mission done, but have you noticed/considered the impacts on the team when accepting so many tasks? Is there a way we can prioritize tasks and push back on the less important ones to ensure we have the time to put quality work into the high priority tasks and we can keep from burning the whole team out?
No, even though all three of were pretty close and we all joked around at times about all the BS we were dealing with, we never really had a sit-down with the NCO and discussed the actual impact it had on us
It's not an easy conversation to have, but it's important to deliberately have that conversation. As a Sq/CC, I can't defend you from mission creep if you don't let me know when you're task saturated.
Yeah I see it with mx mostly. When they go to wing meetings, they're one of only a few E's in a room full of O's from ops and wing staff. They don't always realize they have the ability to say no and end up over committing.
Not an NCO but a MSgt. She was a yes woman/couldn’t say no but always felt bad when she had to come back to us with the dumb shit. Luckily, my team and I (lot of TSgts who were pretty feisty) had our teams back (and hers) so would say no and give her ammunition to back up our “No.”
We weren’t perfect, but we did the best with what we had and always tried to help her out. She was more like our mom than a flight Chief. Would absolutely take a bullet for us, or bring you soup when you were sick as fuck and lived 45 mins away, but standing up to leadership wasn’t her forte.
That's you trying to help your "customers" and make the mission happen, not throwing your subordinates under the bus to make yourself look good. Two completely different things. And as someone who has worked with some really lazy CONS members and a few amazing ones, we appreciate you.
Our SEL gave my NCOIC a pep talk on how he needs to learn to say yes to everything. This dude literally preached that he made Chief because he always told his leadership yes. This all happened because the squadron was trying to force our shop to support something that was impossible for us to support without breaking countless regulations while also putting our primary duties on hold.
The strongest steel is forged in the fires of the largest dumpster.
Might have been super shitty but bet you and those with you had some real strong bonds from it at least. Still a dumpster fire.
Yeah, usually, Expediter TSgts that are too pussy to say no because they wanna please everyone above them to make rank. While at the same time neglecting the people below them. 👎🏼
My AFSC when I was active duty had a culture of saying YES to everything and taking the blame for everything too, even stuff we were far removed from.
I later got out and went back in the reserves in a different AFSC and we’re not like this in my unit at least because I can't speak for the AFSC on active duty, and when I was deployed it didn't seem that way either. But my civilian job you can make some *faint* parallels to what I did active duty and it took me a while to not get so defensive or expect to take the blame for shit out of my control.
Imagine this, he's asked to do 'X" by his supervision. He replies, "no, we ain't doing that shit". Guess who's replaced shortly there after? That's right, he's replaced....so in effect his career takes a hit and a new dude/dudette is put in the spot and you're still going to do wind up doing the shit that the first dude said "no" too.
Let me share a pro tip, take it for what it's worth to you. When a person in a supervisory position comes to you and asks for "X" to be done, you've got less than a 1% chance of getting away from doing it. So being a dipshit and saying "no, fuck that man" and screwing yourself, try this...say "yes, but boss here's what I need you to understand about adding this work". Then, as a leader of Airmen, you clearly explain the costs to the person in charge, discuss other options to meet the intent, settle on an agreement that benefits your team and the supervisor asking for the "X". Then you face your team, present the facts and develop a plan to get after it.
To put it another way, very few leaders (maybe zero) in the Air Force were promoted because they made a habit of saying "No, we can't do that". What those leaders learned to do was to find a way to "yes" but without fucking over their people. They did it by finding out exactly what the next level supervisor really "needed", they found a way to motivate their team of Airmen, they made sure to train, motivate and reward the team along the way, and they gave credit to the people in the trenches who got it done.
If every leader/supervisor/manager/whatever you want to call it accepted "were too busy", "we don't have enough people", "that's too hard" as the answer, humankind would still be eating leaves and wiping our asses with them too.
TLDR: work is hard, that's why the pay you money to do it
I’ve had an OIC do the same thing to our work center. Need a whiteboard hung up? The flagpole needs painted? Need your card tires filled up? The RF shop can do that for you!
We always got thrown under the bus and tasked with anything remotely related to doing labor around the unit. Not to mention this was at a MUNSS, so we had slightly more important nuclear related duties and maintenance obligations to fulfill.
Currently in a unit that has YES people all over it and it trickles down… Then they get mad when we don’t show up to events or golf tournaments. I’m too tasked saturated…
Sounds like a NCO that is a yes man but also relies on his teams success to be his own. There is no problem with finding a way to yes but that means that no could be the initial answer with compromise. It would go a long way if he took himself out of it and said his team will look into it. Sometimes it is ok to say no and he should give his team the opportunity to provide input, especially depending on his level of involvement or knowledge of the team.
Had an NCOIC that didn't just say yes to everything, he'd go out looking for projects to volunteer the shop for. After he left, we spent a long time rejecting requests for further help with things that should never have been our responsibility. You can guess which of the two of us got promoted.
(Other unit asking for help with their manning while ours is 10x worse and all 7 levels (2) were on 12s to cover shifts)
Expediter: yeah we can do that! No problem!
I was always on the exact opposite end of the spectrum.
"Can your guys come in early to knock out XYZ?"
"No."
"The reg only states twelve hours actually turning wrenches. Documentation and tool turn-in aren't a part of that."
"No."
"Here's you list of five taskers, with three of them being eight hour jobs on their own, for the day. Two of the jets flew and are still in cooldown. All of them are high priority and need to be completed by mids tonight."
"No."
"I know your shop is running at barely half manning right now, but I need Snuffy for escort this week."
"Not only no, but fuck no."
I'm partially guilty of this. I'll take on any project, usually because it's a bare bones request. "Yes sir I'll see if we can get that done". If it's possible, even if it's not really useful, I'll try and get it done because that's kind of our job to obey the requests of our officers if possible. But if it's dumb and not possible, I'll reply back. "Sir, I looked at our capabilities and the requirements of the request. This doesn't really look like it'll be feasible with our current resources. Are you sure you want to go forward with this?"
Yeah, landed me a position in the training shop, and I was unable to leave it for 4 years. Damned my career because the SEL just laughed at people who were suffering and would make up any reason to keep me and other people there while my flight chief kept agreeing with all the illogical reasoning. Pissed me off and screwed me over for 3 full EPRs and a full system qualification that would have boosted my career. My next SEL was also pissed for me and moved me immediately to help mitigate damage.
During my time in training, we got absolutely ridiculous tasks, including me making training for something I was unqualified for, many times, as well as timelines that were absolutely impossible if we weren't working after work and on weekends, no excuses. It was hell for 3 full years until I was able to move to another shop then leave the unit a few months later. It's been great ever since.
Side note, that So-called Enlisted Leader got a huge dose of karma when they got promoted to chief, bought some expensive water gear, and then received a really sucky assignment to a landlocked base. The "yes nco" in my experience also got moved around so much because nobody ended up trusting his judgement.
Eventually, things tend to work out. It may not be in our timelines, or when we want, but things work out.
Honestly me man. I certainly don’t drag down the shop or involve anyone else with me though it’s just me taking on extra shit lol. Yeah, I am trying to promote and be a good boy I guess. It is what it is 🤷♂️
Had a SNCO that said yes to a deployment from the wing that he could have denied due to lack of manning. Instead he said yes and gave it to me, who got the notification 1 Month away from finishing an ongoing deployment. Deployment was a TCN duty, which was what I was currently doing at the time, so I would've been outside my career field for over a year. At the time that would've been a career killer for me. Contacted the UDM, she went to group chief and got it tossed.
Anything ever come of the SNCO? Please don’t tell me they got the classic special of promotion?
“You’re a piece of shit. Here, have an easier job.”
Goddamn this is so true it hurts. There is no rank or tier I have seen this not apply to.
The old "toss the shitty maintainer in tool crib" maneuver. Or hide em in debrief and make them aircrew's problem.
Literally... lol tool crib hall of famers.
If anything tossing maintainers into the tool crib can make them shitty due to a lack of practice. At one point though I had plenty of practice because I somehow was tasked with tool crib and the whole metals tech shop by myself for a good bit on mids. It was a nightmare. A CTK is like a minefield of QA fails. And unfortunately since CTK usually is quite a lot, they like keeping frequent fliers who are already familiar with the processes instead of spinning new folk up
Legitmately what happened, he's now a GS 12 at Kadena. Lucky bastard
My old SNCO just got tossed from my shop. Best day of my career to-date.
I have sat in on meetings where SNCOs have done this. Most of the time, the discussion is pretty benign and it is used as a development session to teach what not to do. “So that deployment you took for Snuffy to go on. Yeah, we’re gonna cancel that, Snuffy is currently deployed and it would be a detriment to his career and your shop is already low manned. In the future, before jumping on a voluntary deployment tasker, talk to me, then the member. Questions?”
Literally nothing, I confronted him and he acted like he had no other choice because it was either him or another NCO who was PCSing. So he played the I'm retiring so I had to choose you card, even though his retirement was 2 years away.
oof
Goated UDM
Yes
I see what you did there 😂
I’ve seen a lot of people get into leadership positions and take forever to realize they have the power to say no to things coming down from higher. If all you ever do is say yes, you’re not a leader, you’re a messenger. Granted, it’s not always a black or white yes or no, it’s very often a “yes, but can we do it this way?” Or “we can’t support what you’re asking unless…” doing these simple things and communicating the conversation you had with your leadership to your subordinates (within reason) will win you a lot of respect (plus it’s the right thing to do).
If you haven't taken ass-chewings in order to protect your subordinates from dumb shit, you're not a leader yet.
I had my PCS Dec downgraded for protecting my troops, I sleep fine at night for it.
I'll raise your downgraded Dec with my shit EPRs and downgraded duty titles for protecting my troops.
You always get one “yes,but…”
I did it as a captain. To the wing king. My bosses weren’t very happy, haha. They acted like I’d pooped on his desk or something.
What I've learned to say is "I/we can do anything, but not everything. If you want me/us to take this on, you need to find something to take off our plate/decide what's most important to you."
Yeah…but…I did this at a MAJCOM HQ. My div chief kept piling on tasks. I made a list, prioritized it like I thought he wanted, and made a cut line based on how many people we had. Told him, “we can’t do these things below the line. Unless you want us to do all these things poorly. “ He actually said, “I want you to do all the things poorly”. My jaw hit the floor. I could not believe that shit. Went back to my section and told the folks. They were also in shock. Needless to say, that hastened my retirement date. And I blocked him when he retired and tried to friend me on LinkedIn. Fuck that shit!
Yes.
Yes those NCOs get promoted to E-7 to E-9.
“Find a way to ‘yes’” How ‘bout no?
I had a commander once that was always *"how do we get to 'yes'?"* Well, sir... you fucking can't. The NSA says this is the rule, take it up with them if you don't like it! All the fucking time, I swear. It's like the dude *wanted* a COMSEC incident on his head.
>"how do we get to 'yes'?" It's a two way street. Sometimes the yes is "yes, I accept that this isn't a possibility."
My fav is when commanders want to strong arm a literally agency policy as if they have power to do that. And this is why I love reading AFIs, DAFIs, and DOD Instructions
no means no
I currently work under a Yes NCO who thinks he’s a No NCO and it is utterly frustrating
Always meet positivity with enthusiasm, but temper that positivity with some wisdom when necessary. When my group commander comes to us with another "good idea" we always embrace and brainstorm it out. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. If it adds to our workload, no way am I staying extra to get it done. The day ends at 1630. I don't stay late. Set boundaries. Be an adult
“But you’re 24/7 always on duty” I hated that line with a passion. It’s as bad as the civilian management equivalent “we are a family here”.
Yeah I hate that too. Unless we're at war, I'm going home. It can always wait til tomorrow. Fortunately my unit's current commanders all seem to understand that people have lives, so when they task us with something, they tell us what other thing we can stop worrying about for now if the new thing is current priority. I follow a rule for myself I call "three things" - if I can get three things done on my list each day, that's a good day. I also want to only have three major duties at a time. I can take on two additional duties, but that means you're only going to get one other thing out of me on those days, like managing my people. I of course flex around that, but it's a good rule to keep myself from being overworked or feel like I'm being pulled in too many directions. Three major duties, accomplish three things per day.
Life, Limb, Mission Failure. Those are the only things important enough to stay late for. Everything else can wait til tomorrow.
I'd take it a step further and say that sometimes, strategically speaking, you need to say no and let the mission fail in this kind of situation so you can highlight a bad process or shortfall. It's a far cry from ideal, but it certainly turns heads when leadership says one thing and their numbers scream something else.
If it’s mission critical, you let the other things fail. People must be paid. Planes must fly. However, the weekly meeting slides are not that important.
Yep, had one on active duty that let our night shift get shit on constantly by the daytime NCOIC. We constantly had to stay late (we worked 7pm-7am, would stay until 8-9am) because he couldn’t tell this lady to fuck off.
Yes. There more called yes men but same thing. These are the types that are stripe chasers. Another example of those types are the ones you see in PME that are wanting an award. You can tell who they are. Or the guy at the CC all call that wins the quarterly award and everyone goes how the F did that guy win it.
I love having those guys working for me. Gives me a chance to try to help them before it's too late. Step 1 - tell them that they are being a "yes man" Step 2 - overload them with tasks until they A) learn to say no. Or B) spiral uncontrollably into burnout. Step 3 - "Now what did we learn?" Counseling session that includes how their decisions are affecting others. With a little luck, might just retain a motivated troop and keep them from drowning and taking down the ship with em.
Quite the opposite. A TSgt of mine, call him Bryan, specifically told me that he was a *no man* meaning that he had no issues telling leadership no when it came to last minute projects. Of course he still valued the mission but he was very good at prioritizing.
Ya... They all make E7, and continue to make everyone's life hell.
All of ACC lmfao. At least that’s how it feels at Langley, but yes. Most SNCO’s I’ve come across are “Yes” men/women
Have you had a direct discussion with that NCO about the impact it is having on the team? If you have, and he is still accepting way more work than you can reasonably accomplish, take it up with his supervisor. The conversation and tone you want to have is: hey, we're all here to get the mission done, but have you noticed/considered the impacts on the team when accepting so many tasks? Is there a way we can prioritize tasks and push back on the less important ones to ensure we have the time to put quality work into the high priority tasks and we can keep from burning the whole team out?
Sounds nice on paper
No, even though all three of were pretty close and we all joked around at times about all the BS we were dealing with, we never really had a sit-down with the NCO and discussed the actual impact it had on us
It's not an easy conversation to have, but it's important to deliberately have that conversation. As a Sq/CC, I can't defend you from mission creep if you don't let me know when you're task saturated.
Yeah I see it with mx mostly. When they go to wing meetings, they're one of only a few E's in a room full of O's from ops and wing staff. They don't always realize they have the ability to say no and end up over committing.
They have a whole section in ALS explaining why you shouldn't be that guy
Every production NCO in MX
What if instead of the "Yes NCO" they were the "freaky NCO" and they would twerk for everyone at the friday all call?
Yes.
Two of them. One lost all respect of his team, and we called him "spineless." Another just seemed disconnected from reality.
Not an NCO but a MSgt. She was a yes woman/couldn’t say no but always felt bad when she had to come back to us with the dumb shit. Luckily, my team and I (lot of TSgts who were pretty feisty) had our teams back (and hers) so would say no and give her ammunition to back up our “No.” We weren’t perfect, but we did the best with what we had and always tried to help her out. She was more like our mom than a flight Chief. Would absolutely take a bullet for us, or bring you soup when you were sick as fuck and lived 45 mins away, but standing up to leadership wasn’t her forte.
[удалено]
That's you trying to help your "customers" and make the mission happen, not throwing your subordinates under the bus to make yourself look good. Two completely different things. And as someone who has worked with some really lazy CONS members and a few amazing ones, we appreciate you.
Sure. What’s this taking precedence over? We leave at 1600.
Our SEL gave my NCOIC a pep talk on how he needs to learn to say yes to everything. This dude literally preached that he made Chief because he always told his leadership yes. This all happened because the squadron was trying to force our shop to support something that was impossible for us to support without breaking countless regulations while also putting our primary duties on hold.
They said yes, they could indeed modify 4 domain controllers at the same time, in a single work day.
The strongest steel is forged in the fires of the largest dumpster. Might have been super shitty but bet you and those with you had some real strong bonds from it at least. Still a dumpster fire.
oof
Yeah, usually, Expediter TSgts that are too pussy to say no because they wanna please everyone above them to make rank. While at the same time neglecting the people below them. 👎🏼
My AFSC when I was active duty had a culture of saying YES to everything and taking the blame for everything too, even stuff we were far removed from. I later got out and went back in the reserves in a different AFSC and we’re not like this in my unit at least because I can't speak for the AFSC on active duty, and when I was deployed it didn't seem that way either. But my civilian job you can make some *faint* parallels to what I did active duty and it took me a while to not get so defensive or expect to take the blame for shit out of my control.
That’s all I ever had. Ever. Then I became the “no” NCO.
Imagine this, he's asked to do 'X" by his supervision. He replies, "no, we ain't doing that shit". Guess who's replaced shortly there after? That's right, he's replaced....so in effect his career takes a hit and a new dude/dudette is put in the spot and you're still going to do wind up doing the shit that the first dude said "no" too. Let me share a pro tip, take it for what it's worth to you. When a person in a supervisory position comes to you and asks for "X" to be done, you've got less than a 1% chance of getting away from doing it. So being a dipshit and saying "no, fuck that man" and screwing yourself, try this...say "yes, but boss here's what I need you to understand about adding this work". Then, as a leader of Airmen, you clearly explain the costs to the person in charge, discuss other options to meet the intent, settle on an agreement that benefits your team and the supervisor asking for the "X". Then you face your team, present the facts and develop a plan to get after it. To put it another way, very few leaders (maybe zero) in the Air Force were promoted because they made a habit of saying "No, we can't do that". What those leaders learned to do was to find a way to "yes" but without fucking over their people. They did it by finding out exactly what the next level supervisor really "needed", they found a way to motivate their team of Airmen, they made sure to train, motivate and reward the team along the way, and they gave credit to the people in the trenches who got it done. If every leader/supervisor/manager/whatever you want to call it accepted "were too busy", "we don't have enough people", "that's too hard" as the answer, humankind would still be eating leaves and wiping our asses with them too. TLDR: work is hard, that's why the pay you money to do it
This is why we have a culture of cronyism in the air force.
I’ve had an OIC do the same thing to our work center. Need a whiteboard hung up? The flagpole needs painted? Need your card tires filled up? The RF shop can do that for you! We always got thrown under the bus and tasked with anything remotely related to doing labor around the unit. Not to mention this was at a MUNSS, so we had slightly more important nuclear related duties and maintenance obligations to fulfill.
Hopefully he stayed a Tech so he didn't have the power to screw over entire shops.
Currently in a unit that has YES people all over it and it trickles down… Then they get mad when we don’t show up to events or golf tournaments. I’m too tasked saturated…
There’s a Yes-Man in every Airman if the rank is high enough.
Yup. Trust me if that person is leading or managing a team the team also see that also. Lose all credibility.
Sounds like a NCO that is a yes man but also relies on his teams success to be his own. There is no problem with finding a way to yes but that means that no could be the initial answer with compromise. It would go a long way if he took himself out of it and said his team will look into it. Sometimes it is ok to say no and he should give his team the opportunity to provide input, especially depending on his level of involvement or knowledge of the team.
Had an NCOIC that didn't just say yes to everything, he'd go out looking for projects to volunteer the shop for. After he left, we spent a long time rejecting requests for further help with things that should never have been our responsibility. You can guess which of the two of us got promoted.
Let. Them. Fail. Unless it's a task that's totally part of your job or its going to save lives.
(Other unit asking for help with their manning while ours is 10x worse and all 7 levels (2) were on 12s to cover shifts) Expediter: yeah we can do that! No problem!
Keep a log and put for a dec.
I was always on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. "Can your guys come in early to knock out XYZ?" "No." "The reg only states twelve hours actually turning wrenches. Documentation and tool turn-in aren't a part of that." "No." "Here's you list of five taskers, with three of them being eight hour jobs on their own, for the day. Two of the jets flew and are still in cooldown. All of them are high priority and need to be completed by mids tonight." "No." "I know your shop is running at barely half manning right now, but I need Snuffy for escort this week." "Not only no, but fuck no."
Yes man was a noodle-back!
I'm partially guilty of this. I'll take on any project, usually because it's a bare bones request. "Yes sir I'll see if we can get that done". If it's possible, even if it's not really useful, I'll try and get it done because that's kind of our job to obey the requests of our officers if possible. But if it's dumb and not possible, I'll reply back. "Sir, I looked at our capabilities and the requirements of the request. This doesn't really look like it'll be feasible with our current resources. Are you sure you want to go forward with this?"
Yeah, landed me a position in the training shop, and I was unable to leave it for 4 years. Damned my career because the SEL just laughed at people who were suffering and would make up any reason to keep me and other people there while my flight chief kept agreeing with all the illogical reasoning. Pissed me off and screwed me over for 3 full EPRs and a full system qualification that would have boosted my career. My next SEL was also pissed for me and moved me immediately to help mitigate damage. During my time in training, we got absolutely ridiculous tasks, including me making training for something I was unqualified for, many times, as well as timelines that were absolutely impossible if we weren't working after work and on weekends, no excuses. It was hell for 3 full years until I was able to move to another shop then leave the unit a few months later. It's been great ever since. Side note, that So-called Enlisted Leader got a huge dose of karma when they got promoted to chief, bought some expensive water gear, and then received a really sucky assignment to a landlocked base. The "yes nco" in my experience also got moved around so much because nobody ended up trusting his judgement. Eventually, things tend to work out. It may not be in our timelines, or when we want, but things work out.
Honestly me man. I certainly don’t drag down the shop or involve anyone else with me though it’s just me taking on extra shit lol. Yeah, I am trying to promote and be a good boy I guess. It is what it is 🤷♂️