“You’re not the boss of me!” Growing up as the oldest of four children, I was frequently reminded of that by my two younger sisters and my brother. If you are the oldest in your family, you can relate to that plight.

I had to change my bossy-big-sister ways and replace “You better” with “I would prefer” and “You never” with “I need you to.”

Similarly, when I became a young supervisor, while still a graduate student working in university administration, I discovered that I frequently needed to gain the cooperation of others, even though I was not their boss.

I needed staff from other departments to participate in my programs and expertise from other teams to help complete projects.

And I sometimes found myself needing to communicate concerns to someone in a senior position and realize—yikes! —this person is the boss of me! Nothing more challenging than needing to give some not-so-nice feedback to someone who supervises us.

As a woman in one of my keynote audiences so perfectly put it: “How do you pull rank when you have no rank to pull?”

I am a fan of phrases and there are a whole lot of them that we can use when we are “pulling rank” or asking for cooperation from our peers, our supervisors and even our family members. Many of these phrases are in the form of input-seeking questions.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Would you be willing to?
• Would it be possible to?
• Would it work for you to…?

I know what you’re thinking: What if they say NO, I would NOT be willing to. It would NOT be possible. This will NOT work for me.

Plan B: Whip out the W.I.I.F.M.—“What’s in it for me?”  As you can imagine, people want to know why it would benefit them to cooperate with you. Examples when seeking cooperation from your supervisor or co-workers might be:

• “I would appreciate the extra time on the project so that I can do a more thorough job.”
• “If you would be willing to, I’d be eternally grateful. And I would owe you one!”
• “If I could get this report to you next week instead of Friday, then I would be able to gather more information for you.”

Another Plan B approach, which is sometimes best as a Plan A, is using open-ended questions such as:

• What are your thoughts about…?
• How would you feel if we…?
• I would love your input on…

  So, you may not be the boss, but you can constructively “pull rank when you have no rank to pull.”  Just say what you mean in a nice way.

[This blog is partially excerpted from Chapter 5: You’re Not the Boss of Me in Sarita’s book Say What You Mean in a Nice Way.]
Please visit Sarita’s YouTube channel for For a 35-Second video of keynote excerpt on this topic.