It’s Optional, Except It’s Not: You’ve Been Voluntold
If you’ve ever had your hand raised for you, we can help
3 min
Come to my meeting. Plan my bachelorette party. Help with this project that’s totally not in your job description.
Please?
We’ve all been there, trying to persuade people to do things they don’t have to do, and probably don’t want to either. Or, we’re staring down a painful request ourselves.
“Inside, you’re questioning, like, how did I get here?” says Matt Brattin, a software company executive based in Fresno, Calif.
Over the years, he has been talked into everything from taking notes at meetings that had nothing to do with his job to donning a giant gnome costume at an employee event in the Texas summer heat. (He was working for Travelocity—whose mascot was a gnome—at the time.)
“Is this a thing I even have an option to say no to?” he wondered.
Definitely. It’s time to learn the delicate art of ‘voluntelling’: persuading people to help, or, if you’re the one always being voluntold, getting out of it.
The power of silence
Scoring the answer you want starts with asking the right questions, says Jonah Berger, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
You want to pose queries that guide the person down a path that inevitably ends at the destination of your choosing. Aren’t you excited about so-and-so’s new baby? (Yes!) Shouldn’t we have a shower for her? (Of course!) Can you help me plan it?
Make sure to pause frequently as you encourage the person toward your conclusion, says Prof. Berger, the author of a book about the magic words we can use to persuade others. A moment of silence is a cue for the other person to shake their head yes or mutter “uh huh.”
“They are implicitly starting to agree with what you’re saying,” he says. “You’ve given them that space.”
Best to also give the person choices. Would he rather be in charge of finding a venue, or coordinating the food? We all want to feel like we have autonomy, Prof. Berger says. Confronted with specific options, we’re more likely to focus on the possibilities we’ve been given, not declining altogether.
Skip the apologies
Don’t be tentative or apologetic with your request, says Bob Bordone, who coaches executives on negotiation. Saying sorry gives the person an easy window to say no.
“I’d be super grateful if you could help us out with this,” Mr. Bordone recommends saying.
Tap in to the other person’s perspective to make the offer one that they want to say yes to. What’s important to them? What do they care about?
When Wassia Kamon, a finance professional in the Atlanta area, noticed the supply-chain team at a former job was putting wrong data into her accounting system, she knew confronting the team’s leader with accusations and demands wouldn’t get her anywhere. The group didn’t report to her, and the executive had years more experience than she did.
Instead, she explained she wanted the departments to work better together, and help the company run more smoothly. After the pair held a group meeting with both departments, the supply-chain workers stopped making mistakes, and Ms. Kamon’s relationship with the executive got more cordial, not less.
“How can we form little alliances?” she asks herself.
Add some peer pressure
You can build additional momentum by winning support from people who are close to the person you’re ultimately trying to convince, says Allison Shapira, the chief executive of Global Public Speaking, a firm that trains managers to communicate persuasively. Think about who the person you need the yes from trusts. Get them on board first.
“Now all she’s doing is joining her colleagues in this, as opposed to standing out,” Ms. Shapira says.
Giving a specific deadline can also help, making the request feel less nebulous and open-ended.
If you suspect the person is going to be resistant, you can briefly acknowledge the road blocks or pressures she’s facing. You know she has another project on her plate, or that staffing is tight. Then quickly pivot back to potential solutions. Ms. Shapira recommends asking questions like, “What would make it easier for your team to attend this meeting?”
Say no with conviction
Sometimes, we’re on the other side, our hand raised for us.
Even when we feel we’ve already been roped into something, we still have the power to decline, says Vanessa Patrick, a marketing professor at University of Houston and author of a coming book about the science of saying no.
Avoid making excuses, she advises. At some point in the future, the excuse won’t be applicable. Instead, tie your no to your identity, using the word “don’t.” I don’t lend money to family members. I don’t volunteer in my kid’s classroom during the workday.
Research from Prof. Patrick and a colleague finds that using “don’t” instead of “can’t” increases the chances the person will respect your no, and adds to your resolve.
Worried about sounding harsh? Buffer the direct language with nonverbal cues, such as smiling, leaning forward, using your body language to communicate warmth, she says.
If you’re still tempted to go along with the demand, buy yourself some time by saying it’s your policy to take 24 hours to consider requests. Remind yourself of the opportunity cost. What will you miss out on if you begrudgingly agree to do this?
After all, convincing others to say yes is a valuable skill. But so is saying no when the moment calls for it.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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