Anyone else tired of poor ‘managers’ and ‘directors’ ?

[Confusedemployee]

A good decent manager, director or leader are so hard to come by. Why?

I’ve worked in countless offices, corporate, non profit etc and surprised by the number of entitled, arrogant and incompetent people in management positions. I’m based in London if that makes any difference.

Why are such poor managers tolerated and not given enough training in the workplace? It makes sense for an organisation least of all for staff well-being, retention and productivity.

Examples of bad management I’ve seen is zero direction or support for employees. Where you’re basically expected to figure out the job yourself, or given no support or resource on a project for example. When your manager is completely absent and go weeks without a proper catch up.

I’ve seen people being bullied, belittled not being developed, etc

I’ve personally had a manager deliberately hold me back in my career - when she went on maternity leave, senior management were so impressed with my work, I got a promotion without her being around.

There’s often no way of feeding back during appraisal time and no meaningful way of escalating concerns. But usually it’s obvious to most people when there’s a bad manager around.

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Completely agree. This has been my experience to my detriment. I despair of every finding a decent manager but I have friends who've had then so they must exist! It is rubbish these underserving idiots are getting rewarded with senior positions.

I am in London too. Which sector are you in, if you don't mind saying?

I have had a few jobs in my time and my managers have on the whole been ok. Not actively incompetent or bullying or holding me back - I would try to resign in those situations. There could be a clash of personality or styles but that is just normal human interaction (with me as the junior sucking it up). I can take my manager giving no direction, because I would figure it out myself and prefer a hands off boss to a micromanager.

The only time I came across what may have been a useless person in a very senior managerial position was in the IT department.

Yes! My current manager, completely useless, provides no support and if it weren't for senior management would completely be holding me back.
The problem is people get promoted as they're good at their jobs but it doesn't mean they're actually good at managing people. They manage to stick it out in the ways described eg bullying, keeping people back or just having decent staff they can ride on.
Not sure how it can be fixed

Not sure if this applies to your workplace but at my employer staff turnover is low, a lot of the managers have been in place for 15 plus years and were originally recruited within an environment that was very masculine so they all have similar personalities.
The company seems to reward length of service over actual competence. One of the other defining things about a lot of our managers is that despite being generally lazy and careless, they have massive amounts of confidence in themselves, which may account for how they first obtained the role?

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Current manager does no managing, well more of a mix of micro-managing random things and having no input or contact for the vast majority of the week. Left to your own devices then criticised for what you’ve had to come up with 🙄

Team meetings are brilliant. We’ve been back since Sept and have just started having a weekly call, minimal communication the rest of the time. Points that are raised as issues aren’t actioned so very one says “this is a problem”. Everyone agrees but no one is actually assigned to come up with and implement a solution. Or they tell us to start doing something but have no idea what the task involves or how it will impact our workload or if it’s feasible. Or take a 1 person simple task, break it down into 3 or 4 needless stages that involve telling everyone else when you’ve done 1 bit so the next person can take over before handing it back. They don’t rate Excel and don’t use it but we’re all meant to be working from a central spreadsheet people don’t use properly and any time someone has a problem the manager says “we really need a spreadsheet” 😤😡

I’m a bit ranty today 😜

I took a grievance out against mine and thankfully was moved to another manager.

I love it when people tell me how shit they are at doing x, y or z. It is EXTREMELY gratifying

Look up the Peter Principle - it is a management theory that competent people will keep getting promotions until they reach their level of incompetence and stay there. I guess they would then become your managers.

I've had a lot of poor managers and a few good ones over 35 years of working. My last one I only stayed in the job six months because of her bullying and humiliating me. My mental health was wrecked.
My current manager is half my age and has never worked anywhere else since graduating. He is lovely in that he would never really tell me off for anything unless it was really serious and is approachable and flexible but also just doesn't deal with lazy colleagues who are totally incompetent at their jobs and this infuriates me because in my line of work , vulnerable people suffer. Whenever I try to address concerns with him he sweeps things under the carpet and nothing changes.

I've had numerous managers in offices and schools who have ranged from not very good to incompetent. I am pleased to say, however, that my current HT is excellent in all respects - effective, supportive, kind, enthusiastic and motivating.

My line manager left without notice on Tuesday. She was new to the business but not the industry or the workload and after 4 months she just emailed in saying she wasn't coming back. Part way through induction of 10 new members of staff that she's recruited and I've got no idea where anyone is in the process she had supposedly developed but not shared with anyone. Its not been a fun week at all.

In my almost 20 year career working in Finance in London, I've only ever had one really bad manager. She was awful, micro-managing, incompetent, and bullying, she even sent my assistant to fetch me from the loos once, literally 5 seconds after I'd sat down (TMI, sorry). She also told me I wasn't allowed to take personal calls during the day, despite spending most of her days on calls to her daughter! Turnover in her team was horrific, nobody stayed for more than a year. I left that employment after just over a year, which was the worst year of my life professionally.

I think they didn't get rid of her because nobody else knew what she was talking about majority of the time. I think she just used to make up the numbers, which was another reason I left; I knew she'd shaft me if anyone came asking questions. She's still there now 6 years after I exited the place

Good managers are hard to come by - ice worked for my current manager in three different companies over 12 years. He's amazing. He hires me wherever he goes as we make an excellent team. It does beg the question of whether I could ever work for anyone else.

*I've worked...

Well first off theres the pareto distribution whereby a small number of individuals in any task are highly productive, while the majority are mediocre, applies to all sorts.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

Cant remember the source, but as organisations get bugger incompetence within the organisation expands exponentially, it's why scaling up small businesses is so difficult as it requires delegation and thereby effective distribution of labour. I'm an economics student, I'm not mad

Bigger*

I was so tired of them at my last full-time job I grabbed hold of the voluntary redundancy package and ran out the door. I've been in the workforce a long time, and in my experience those at the top get worse every year.

I worked in several FE colleges..rife with useless managers who stayed for years until they messed up so badly they would get a huge pay off and excellent references and just move to another college...and repeat until retirement !!.. several women were just also just evil bitches and bullies plus incompetent of course !!.. I remember one man who operated the photocopier suddenly promoted to a director !!...just bizarre !

I work in a big global law firm. Partners are chosen for their legal skills and/or client contacts and never for management skills. This means they are almost all absolutely terrible managers. It's a real issue that is raised on a daily basis and absolutely nothing ever happens to fix it.

Because all the people who know better like yourself don't go into management?

@plebsticle

I work in a big global law firm. Partners are chosen for their legal skills and/or client contacts and never for management skills. This means they are almost all absolutely terrible managers. It's a real issue that is raised on a daily basis and absolutely nothing ever happens to fix it.

Weird, I'd have thought in a Lawfirm partners would have hired a sort of business manager to act as the go between them and the company for management.

I'm some ways, those who seek out management positions probably have larger than average egos and lower than average self awareness.

You only have to see the preening on some threads over how they oversee 'my team' to realise that.

@KathleenTurnerOverdrive You hit the nail on the head there, over confidence gets them into management positions, but they sometimes lack intelligence and common sense.

I was lucky in my last job, where my line manager was a decent bloke who trusted me to just get on with the work, and we got on well. That didn't stop me being made redundant though... not his fault, but even so he could have handled it better.

Years back I worked at a place where the manager made a move on me. He was married and twice my age - I just thought he was pathetic really, so rejected his advances, then he never had a good word to say about me after that. He was good at buttering up clients and sucking up to directors, but didn't belong in a management position as he was too busy with extra marital affairs to concentrate on the job. He often went for long lunches which involved shagging his mistress in the back of his company car, and he used to return looking all pink faced and sweaty, wearing a silly grin and looking very pleased with himself. Nobody had any respect for him.

I've worked for some great managers and some truly terrible ones. The terrible ones were the micromanagers. I had one boss who insisted on standing next to my desk and listening to my phonecalls, to check I was doing them to her satisfaction. Then she would take me into her office, and pick the phone up herself and make me listen to her ring all the same people. It was hours and hours wasted every day. I don't even understand why I was employed if she had time to do that, why did she not cut me out and do it herself in the first place? In the same organisation I had another manager who refused to speak to me. On her second day in the job, she took the whole team for a meeting to get to know what everyone did, but I wasn't allowed to come. Then she ignored every email from me and refused to speak to me. Wouldn't answer when I asked for annual leave etc. No one could understand it. Then she called me into her office one day and complained that since she couldn't hear my voice I obviously wasn't doing my work (I needed to make a lot of calls). Then called me in the next day and told me the exact opposite, that she could hear my voice too much so I obviously wasn't doing my work. It was insane.