It’s important for your boss to frame that differently if it’s truly optional.

They can’t leave it at “do you want to do this project?” They need to follow up with, “It really is optional, I won’t be hurt if you say no.”

They also can’t do it with a big decision first. They have to frame small decisions that way sometimes, to build trust that when they say you have the ability to decline, they mean it. Then, they can ask that way on big decisions.

If a decision isn’t optional, they should phrase it a different way. I use something like - “I need you to do this project - how does that make you feel?” I want them to tell me if it’s a hardship, but I don’t want to imply that I’m leaving the door open to a different outcome necessarily.

Establishing a culture where that assumption is not the case and engineers can say “no I’m not very interested in that”. Also a boss that can actually read people (correctly).

After the roadmap is finalized, as the manager I ask every one on my team to stack rank at least N preferred projects from the roadmap. I map preferences to projects with some optimizations (e.g. career progression, avoiding knowledge silos), review it with everyone, and then commit for the roadmap.

If there's grunt work that no one wants to do, I distribute it fairly among the team. Fairly can be splitting it up evenly among the team (everyone refactors _n_ files) and sometimes it means we round-robin the responsibility (e.g. quarterly compliance reviews with auditors). Obviously this depends on the team size and role in the company, but I think it's only come up a few times over ~4 years.

I mean, there is many ways to do that, but one way is to instead of asking a single person you let people apply. For projects that are not as attractive you up the compensation/bonuses till someone is interested.

Then they made the choice themselves and even if the project sucks in the same way, they made the choice themselves.

An important rule of low/no budget film-making is: no mattee who is in your crew/cast, know why they agreed. For an established actor that might be trying out a new or different acting style, a different role, whatever. For the sound guy it might be learning the tools, or going to a certain landscape or some compensation. Know what motivates your people besides the salary and treat that motivation like the most valuable secret intel tou could have ever aquired.