The essence of these is how you set boundaries for yourself, while a) not threatening the percieved power of the person you are speaking to, and b) expressing n

The essence of these is how you set boundaries for yourself, while a) not threatening the percieved power of the person you are speaking to, and b) expressing needs in terms of appealing to some shared principle of professionalism. The challenge with flat organizations is they reward bullying because they lack recourse to principle and positional authority. This communication style is necessary for navigating them, and it's how most educated people in orgs communicate these days, as they higher you go up the org chart, the higher the percentage of your time is spent essentially just navigating power. While I see people reacting to the passive aggression in these phrases, that's literally how managers communicate. Bureaucracy is passive aggressive warfare and a power struggle where people try to subordinate and make others accountable to them. Sometimes someone is only asking you for something because they want to set you up as a blocker for their project to both get more time and blame it on you, or you are being added to something because the person who failed at it needs to add stakeholders to diffuse accountability for the failure - bureaucracies are systems of alien incentives, and the people in them must often operate according to objectively insane rules. If you want to stop this stuff, learn to lead and make sure your org doesn't default to this, or start your own company, and make a place that doesn't run like this. When I've seen leaders mystified at how their orgs got like this, it was because when they asked everyone to find ways to work together without the toxic culture, they didn't take ownership and set the example, and everyone just interpreted it as, "hide how you are doing this."