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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Maybe. Our previous manager (who she worked under) didn't do this though. She actually worked really hard.

I've seen it.

I work in education. I'm not a a teacher I have a specialist support role within schools.

So many leaders go on middle management courses and learn things like target setting etc.
They apply all this in schools.

But anecdotally in the past 5 years I've noticed most of those leaders are actually really poor teachers when placed in a classroom despite obviously being teachers themselves.

It's like they forget the realism of the job and forget what teachers on the ground have to do and cannot work out why they lose staff at a rate of knots!

I think they don't know how to support the teachers because they themselves really weren't food at the job and so that's why they became management.

google the Peter Principal. Also lateral arabesque.

I do have some management skills, from management roles I held before retraining as a teacher. I even received actual training. I'm in a lovely job currently with competent management who let me do my own thing. I interviewed a year or two back at a bigger school where I would have been head of a department of 4 or 5 people. They did not let me meet the people I would have been managing. They did not ask me one single question about managing people at interview. It's like that aspect of the job was considered completely irrelevant (I didn't get it but frankly by then I was worried there was stuff they weren't telling me!)

In the main my managers have always given me the scope to do my job and the back-up and support if it goes wrong. They have acknowledged my efforts and achievements and I feel appreciated within my role.

I try to manage in the same way, I push the staff who work for me to achieve their best, support their training and assist with their work where needed. If things go pear-shaped I will sort it out.
I have trainees working for me, so depending on where they are in their training they need a lot of input.
Year on year I am praised by my trainees in their appraisals (fed back to me by my manager) for the above.
I've just been reviewing some jobs which were done really well, and have fed back back to the trainee and thanked them for their efforts, as well as feeding that information upwards.

I get fed up, and complain within the managment group, where there is a lack of effort, or consistent ignoring of my training input, or laziness etc, but I try to feed back positively to the trainee to get an improvement.

I am personally disheartened when trainees don't make the grade, even when this is something beyond my control.

Lawyers have to be good at attention to detail. As a manager your can’t micromanage your team but you still need understand the law in your area at a extremely high standard to be valuable to your team. It’s a really hard balance to achieve successfully. So many managers either micromanage and don’t seem to trust their team members. Or they do manage more light touch approach but lose the oversight they need of the law. I have had good lawyer managers but many miss the sweet spot!

@Chasingsquirrels that is so lovely to hear. I've had proper rabbit in headlight looks from managers in training and coaching sessions before when I've asked about how they give positive feedback (loooooong monologues on how careful they are to tell their staff everything they do wrong though ).

Gliblet, it so annoys me when staff aren't given positive feedback when they are doing a good job. I appreciate the work I do being acknowledged, why wouldn't I do the same for others.

Having said that I ticked the "below expectations" box on one of the feedback forms I did today by mistake. It was clearly wrong from the written comments I'd also made and my email sending it back. The staff member came back to me asking if the grade was due to some very specific things? Umm no, its due to me being a numpty, sorry!