So my peer acts like he is my boss, asking me repeatedly about timelines and giving me tasks, what’s the most professional way to tell him to shove it?

I've told the colleague I have a lot to work on right now, but would be happy to help him figure out *how* to do the task

You should preemptively ask them for the status update on their work and start telling them what to do.

"is this something (manager/lead) asked for?"

Perhaps the next time he asks for a timeline respond with a “why” question, such as “why do you want to know?”

“Ok, can you send me the schedule and project plan? I’d like to review it and then I can make sure we’re working on our respective pieces with no overlap so management can be confident we’re doing our part efficiently to make this a success”

I told my colleague who is younger than me and a year below me in rank that he was stepping out of line and that I do not report to him. He got the hint.

Good responses from people here. Have had similar overeager peers that think they can boss people around to a promotion.

I would just ignore it tbh. If they reach out over IM or email, just ignore the message and say you’ve been busy. They have no position to tell you to stop your work and do their work. If they do, you can always inform a manager.

Following. If the ask is minimal, I may end up helping. If it’s anything beyond minimal, I will just say I can’t do it because I have other responsibilities.

Ugh I have this same colleague. She is maddening. I just ignore her and go about my business. When we are on calls with the PM I get the PM to concur on a specific list of tasks for me, and say I’m working towards those. It justifies my only doing those things.

Is the PPMD/SM slotting them into the role above by any chance? Only reason I ask is during my last promo year, I was slotted into the MGR role as a SC, and led a team of 2 other SC’s and an Associate. In effect, I was leading my peers for a few months. This was pretty clear from the outset and def wasn’t a surprise to the team. Perhaps this is the case and it just wasn’t clearly outlined/defined? If not, then yeah it’s pretty BS and a lot of the responses above would work well!!

Thank you all, this was incredibly helpful

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