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.

🤷‍♀️

Simply not enough focus from the business as management as a skill, plus limited (often discouraged) opportunities for proper feedback from reports to their managers. Or incentives for managers to listen and use that feedback to improve.

Plus, the roles (can) attract empire building type poeple who just like power and control because it makes them feel better about themselves. Instead, more priority should be placed on people attracted to those roles because they love helping, supporting and inspiring people.

Finally, almost every business I've been in (including the good ones) is looking for the next Messiah. Someone comes along who sounds confident that they have the answers and everyone around is too keen to believe them and promote them. As an old (and good) boss of mine used to say: He's NOT the Messiah; and I should know, I've followed a few.

It's important to distinguish management as a skill from management as a qualification -save me from the MBAs. As someone says upthread, university businessb and management schools tend to be very badly run.

I've been lucky for the last few years and have had good (mostly female) managers, but recently got a new one who is irritating me quite a lot. He's personable enough, but he doesn't listen, ignores the bulk of what I do and is micromanaging one area in a really frustrating way, because he can't distinguish between low-level routine stuff which is ticking along fine and the more high-risk scenarios where he has been asked to identify improvements. We've been stuck on the low level stuff for months, and he's blaming me for the lack of progress.

This reminds me of an Alexei Sayle sketch where he said "think about your boss for a moment" - "arent they a complete knob?"

lol

@honeylulu

I'm a partner in a City law firm. A salaried partner so just an employee. The equity partners who effectively own the business are obviously very results driven but as the expense of all else. This filters down to the salaried partners who are haragued by th EPs to get their teams to do more hours, send more bills.

The complete gulf is that they largely ignore whether staff are actually happy and supported. So people keep leaving, usually the best ones they saw as the future of the firm . The EPs are baffled, indignant and annoyed about this especially as it costs a lot to recruit and replace decent lawyers. There are also lots of incidences of people kicking off because they've been overlooked for promotions/bonuses because their expectations haven't been managed or poor decisions have been made (it's sadly common to see EPs deciding to save money give x a smaller bonus because "she won't be any trouble" then astonished at dealing with the fall out when x minds very much! Yes I have been x!). There are also sadly high incidences of people going off sick with stress and anxiety, often after telling their managers over and over that they can't cope with the workloads and expectations.

Perhaps most irritatingly of all they will criticise and harangue staff for no doing enough but there is no praise or acknowledgement for staff doing well. It's as if they think people will get "too big for their boots ". When I was made a partner and got access to the department stats I was astounded to find that I was the highest biller in the department most years. No one had ever told me. I had always been given the impression that i wasn't doing enough. There's an attitude of "you're lucky to have a job here".

I manage a team and I'm not the best manager (a massive introvert) but I think I'm doing a better job than most. I actually care about my team and making sure they are supported technically, developmentally and pastorally. They feel listened to and cared about. Their legal skills have developed because I spend time with them mentoring them. I encourage and support applications for promotion where appropriate. The retention rates on my team are very good and no one has stormed off on my watch. The EPs in my department are starting to listen to me a bit more ... I think it will take a lit to town the culture around though. Sigh.

I think Part of the problem is the ‚up or out‘ mentality.

I used to work in a city law firm. To be clear, I was a shit hot 3-4 PQE lawyer. I knew what I was doing and I got it done! I got paid enough for me and I really enjoyed being a cog in the machine that kept the show (Multi million pound investigations) on the road.

But each year I would jump a pay band automatically and be told to take on more and More management . I didn’t want to rise upwards. I wanted to do my existing job and support those who did want to rise. But there is no scope for that. So at 6 PQE I had been promoted to somewhere I was not at all comfortable.

Reader, I left.

All I wanted was to move at my own pace, developing as I went, until perhaps the day would come where I felt able and sufficiently knowledgeable about both law and management skills to be a manager. I’m now 10PQE and finally feel I’d be capable of managing others the way they wanted.

In the industry I work in, management are generally from technical backgrounds so wouldn't necessarily have the skillset (or desire) to manage teams, personal development etc. It often just seems a next step up. Or; someone who is pretty dire at the technical side of things but is power hungry and wants to manage people and work their way up. They are good at networking and getting in with the right people but are even worse managers than the former.

Completely agree! I think many senior people are there simply because they're ambitious and full of self-belief and they can bullshit at interviews. They stay at senior level because it's too difficult for organisations to tackle it. Then really good people look at what's going on and think sod that! So they don't apply for promotion and it's a vicious circle. And also, crap managers are threatened by good people below them.

Yes agree, most firms are crap at getting rid of problem managers as well. I often think they are well aware of high turnover in some teams being a ‘manager problem’ but have no appetite to deal with it and that’s when the cultural rot sets in. Basically you can be terrible at managing and an arsehole and stay in a senior position. The firms that tackle this, hire the right people for manager roles, focus on skills and leadership over experience and just being a loud voice. Unfortunately firms that do this are few and far between.
I also agree about people that seek to control or have power over others will be attracted to manager roles, especially those that enjoy being right, or having the final say or being able to belittle other people. No wonder so many firms are just so poorly managed.

I've had a right mix. I am in a technical role but I don't have STEM background and omg the people who become managers are people who are very good at the technical bit. Can tell you amazing things about chemicals, gears and cogs and all that stuff. Ask them about their opinion on your development and what training should you consider. Crickets.

Luckily my manager now is great. My previous one was a lovely person but was never available. I was a trainee and I would go months with no direction or management. I was handed a physics book and told to read that. It was awful.

My friend had an absolutely dreadful manager, so bad that she and others ended up leaving the very small company for him. Everyone despised him because he was useless at managing, and his attempts at micro-managing caused work problems. He was also prone to having crazy, time wasting ideas and trying them out. They never worked and were always quietly dropped.

No one knew why he got the job as he was an external appointment who lacked technical skills so had gone into management instead. All his previous other recent jobs had lasted only a year - 18 months before he was made redundant. His CV was available on linked in, and it was quite mediocre compared to the people he had to manage.

Then after a year in the job, he went on long term sick leave for a very minor leg injury. It was baffling why he wasn't sacked. Before that, he used to do things like not go in when the weather was a little bit bad, and phone his team to tell them not to come in either, who would ignore him and just go into work as there was no reason not to.

After 9 months of sick leave, he went straight onto furlough. 3 skilled employees left because of him in the 2 1/2 years he was there. My friend has found out he has been sacked, sorry made redundant, at last.

The reason I know so much about him is my friend began to wonder if he had some hold over the company bosses due to some scandal and asked me if I could find out anything about him. I couldnt: all I found out is that he was deeply involved with the scouts in his spare time.

I'm convinced though that a lot of it comes down to management not being treated as a skill/competency. Having shit-hot technical skills in a role doesn't necessarily teach you anything about engaging or motivating staff, managing performance, delegating effectively, helping your team through change, building their resilience, helping your staff learn about the wider business context and understand where their role fits, and it teaches you bugger all about the employee lifecycle and what should be the absolute basics - make sure your team know what their jobs are, make sure they know how to do them, and make sure they are paid in full and on time.

This is one of the finest paragraphs I have ever read on MN, from someone who really gets it. Gliblet I wish there were many more of you.

It would take me forever to reel off the list of piss-poor management I've come across in my life (most of it in the NHS and much of it, I'm sorry to say, from women). As PPs have said, it is often because people with shit-hot technical skills get promoted, but in the NHS it is also because people with terrible technical skills get promoted out of the front line to minimise the damage they can do without having to actually address poor practice.

I think there are myriad problems causing this epidemic of poor management, and most of these have been outlined above. The universal one for me, besides the distinction between management and leadership, is the suspicion many people have of "management" as a business function itself, distinct from technical and traditional functional roles. The rather dismissive "spare me the MBAs" comment above is fairly symptomatic of this.

Many self-help books are quite poor too, especially the leadership ones which are often based on one individual's experience of limited sets of circumstances. It is telling that some of the peer-reviewed academic evidence on leadership, especially the work by Goleman and Collins on emotional intelligence and humility respectively shows that the character traits associated with the most effective leadership is almost the exact opposite of what most people think good leadership is.

Ultimately, management is the only specialist job we ever give people with no prior experience, and we often wait years before then giving them any specialist training either (MBAs etc). Hardly surprising it's so poor.

There are no doubt done crap managers just as they are staff who expect too much from manager.

One of old colleagues used to complain all the time about our boss not giving us enough time, direction, support etc...however, we were in roles that conjured some level of autonomy and responsibities.

She however expected to be treated like a lower level staff just being told what to do but with her salary.

I had no issue with our boss.

Agree wholehesrtedly. Also London based.

@littertraywarrior

Agree, I have one.

I also have a team, I purposefully break my back not to be like him.

He's so self absorbed that when we do catch up, he's always late and just talks about himself.

Throughout this entire wfh period he's never once asked me how I'm coping.

He never responds to emails.

At year end I do get the opportunity to feedback on him, however his appraiser is his long-standing friend, and the feedback isn't anonymous. Which makes it impossible to feedback honestly as you risk repercussions.

Sadly there's a lot of it about.

We had an employee opinion survey each year on our company. It was anonymous and done by an outside company. Part of which we got to give feedback on our bosses. The parent company put great store on this and one year a certain boss did get a move which we believe was because of this.

Wherever I've worked, people have been promoted to managerial positions based on their technical expertise. They might be great, say, engineers, but suddenly they have four people to manage and no idea how.

The same thing happened to me last year and I've put a lot of effort into learning how to be a good manager. But really, everybody should be given training before they're put in charge of people. It isn't easy.

My desk was near that of a really toxic department head, known as “wonderknickers” and all her staff bar left (they tried to transfer departments but she blocked the transfers). It really demoralised me having to listen to the way she treated people, and publicised their work as her own. She became the deputy of a learned institution, even though she didn’t have even the right qualifications and experience to be a member herself, just because her “mentor” (this is where the knickers come into it) was the head of that institution. He put her on the committee of an award, she saw the reports being submitted, and announced she could do better, submitted a report (using data/analysis copied from someone else!) and won. She announced to her staff that she bought two bottles of “naice” champagne out of some of the prize money but decided not to share it with them as it was too nice!

Out of curiosity, I once did some internet searches on 2 of my previous useless managers...The nasty bully who was so useless is now a vice principal of a college, when she left, we found mountains of papers stuffed behind a filing cabinet that she had failed to deal with....

The other nasty vicious and useless bully, who we learned had false qualifications and a dodgy immigration status [ she told everyone she was french and had some fancy name but was from another country ]..she is now the head of an overseas company involved in education etc....when she took classes, it was awful...he knowledge of the subjects were so poor that students asked not to be taught by her..!!

staff who complained about her were silenced and moved out of the department by the people who had ultimately interviewed and appointed her in the role and post...thankfully these 2 nasties left after only a short spell but caused so much damage and good staff left because of them....

Wherever I've worked, people have been promoted to managerial positions based on their technical expertise. They might be great, say, engineers, but suddenly they have four people to manage and no idea how.

This. It happens everywhere, but I think it's particularly rife in industries where strong technical skills are needed, such as IT. (I work in IT and have spent much of my career as the only woman in the room, so I may be a tad biased...) My current employer has a technical stream as well as a management stream, and at some point, you have to make a decision about which way to go, but it does mean you can continue as technical, rather than management being the only next step. Although that's all academic, as hardly anyone ever gets promoted anyway. I have asked what I need to do to get promoted, and the helpful answer was, "walk on water," yet I don't see the men who have been promoted having to do that.

I remember a quote from someone whose name I have forgotten:" We will know we have attained equality when we see incompetent women promoted at the same rate as incompetent men." Of course, we don't want incompetent women or men being promoted, but that isn't the point.

I read Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic - Why do so many incompetent men become leaders? which argues that the skills we mostly look for in managers are not usually the skills we actually need managers to have. Of course, the fact I read it prominently at lunch breaks and left it in full view on my desk the rest of the time is probably partly why I have never been promoted, but I figure I have nothing to lose these days.

@Otherpeoplesteens ah, another NHS survivor

I'm honestly not sure if people are getting better at spotting crap management but I hope that the more information is out there, the more training is available (not necessarily in management but in giving honest and assertive feedback), the more crap managers will be left with fewer places to hide. I'm certainly seeing more things like competency frameworks, behavioural charters and reporting mechanisms like Glassdoor.

EBearhug that is brilliant - off to order a copy of the book 😁

Its because people tend to move up the ladder to management positions when they have a lot of experience/time in a role and are good at their job. But being a good manager is about dealing with people, not being good at your job. It's a different skill set, one which many don't have. Just cos you have 5 years of experience organising admin or doing logistics doesn't mean you know how to handle and motivate a team of people.

My manager is a massive procrastinator and just basically very lazy. When we were in the office she would spend all day reading news websites while telling everyone how busy she was. Weird, as we could see her computer screen and she made no effort to hide it.

Now we're wfh she still delegates all of the work because she is "too busy" and it is so frustrating because I am working my arse off and homeschooling my DC while she gets paid double what I do to basically surf the internet all day. There is no way to give feedback or do anything about it. When I have raised issues in the past she either ignores my email or says that she doesn't "recognise" the problem.

Her procrastinating causes massive stress in the team as she is a bottleneck and we can't do some things without her say so. I just feel utterly helpless about it but don't want to leave my job as I actually really love the work.

For me, the most difficult thing is coping with the injustice of the pay and recognition she gets when its the rest of us doing the work and covering up her mistakes. I don't really know how I can get over the daily anger and frustration I feel. I don't want to leave my job.

I do wonder what she thinks of herself deep down. Surely she must at some level realise she is lazy and being really unfair on the rest of us? I suppose she just doesn't care.

I’m a manager (and probably not a great one)!

I’ve been promoted into it - love the technical skills involved in my field but having been promoted into a management position never get to do any of it. I’m not a natural people manager (my technical area attracts introverts who are happy spending the day behind a spreadsheet, and to be honest that’s what I would rather be doing) and find it wearing.

I spend most of my days dealing with constant grief from all sides Our department is pretty dysfunctional which annoys all my staff who are constantly griping at me - because I’m the manager they can just vent and moan at me with zero regard for how I feel and I have to shoulder the burden of all their woes.

I do my best to influence our senior management and resolve the problems my team face but it’s banging my head against a brick wall. Trying to constantly be positive and constructive and pep up the team is exhausting. No one appreciates anything I do. So much time is spent trying to resolve disputes between staff which really any reasonable grown adult should be able to sort out by themselves.

I often wish I could just work on my own.

Its because people tend to move up the ladder to management positions when they have a lot of experience/time in a role and are good at their job.

Or as I suspect in a couple of cases I've worked for, promoted out of the way. Packed off with glowing references to be someone else's problem.

@Charley50

I do wonder what she thinks of herself deep down. Surely she must at some level realise she is lazy and being really unfair on the rest of us? I suppose she just doesn't care.

Maybe she thinks managers just delegate the work, take credit for the results and go to lots of meetings?