Worst manager stories

[Funiculus]

Posting in AIBU for traffic. Tell me your worst manager stories!

I’ll go first. We had a temp manager join our team. Seemed lovely at first but then really surprised a staff member by asking her one day if she was on drugs because she couldn’t do a “simple task.” We were all a bit 😮 It was like she had a personality transplant overnight. She left shortly after that, never to be seen again.

2nd manager on secondment this time. He was awful at his job. Could clearly talk the talk in interview but when it came down to process - nada. His people skills were similarly dreadful. He had the emotional intelligence of a teaspoon. He had to have his hand held by junior members of staff to complete forms online. He showed up an hour late every day and missed very important meetings with the Area Director.

I remember sitting in one such meeting and the AD looking at his watch half an hour in, and saying “Where is Geoff?” (Not his real name!) God, it was a complete shitshow. He clearly loved himself too and strode around the office like some kind of malignant force to be reckoned with. All he ever did was talk about cutting costs. I don’t think any of us actually saw him to ANY work.

God knows where they dug him up from, he was fucking useless. Anyway, his secondment ended and he returned back to his team - the role then reappeared some months later as a permanent post and he applied but didn’t get it. Lots of people in the office had complained about him whilst he was there and this had obviously trickled back to the AD thankfully. We never saw him again either.

You’ve had a lot of bad luck! Sorry to hear it. Luckily, I’ve always had pretty good managers, so have nothing to contribute. I hope things get better for you soon though.

I would not want to waste any of my time writing about the mean, nasty managers that I have had. I did have one lovely manager though, who was fair, intelligent, a good listener, and lovely to work for. I wish that I had more managers like her.

I had a manager who very much believed in the whole bums in seats thing. ( pre covid) so much so that when the internet stopped working in the office (regularly) we would just sit there not working.

He truly believed we would slack off if we worked from home or in the other office which was nearby. He preferred for us to sit and do nothing.

Though sometimes he would drive us to the other office then pick us up again before home time. Where again we would sit and do nothing.

Funny thing was we were able to work from home. We did it at least weekly as they needed us to cover the emails and calls. He hated that, he wanted us to log what we were doing to 'earn' our overtime.

We worked 9 to 5 in the office and took it in turns to cover the evenings until 2200. We were doing them a favour. I just said i would stop the OT then. As i was only doing it to help out. He had to back down after that cause they could never find anyone to do those hours.

The manager who sacked my friends mum in the pub in front of her friends and family. On a Friday night. She allegedly stole something. A loaf of bread that was going to be thrown away!

She worked in the staff canteen and it was late Friday, there was a spare loaf so she put 50p in the till and took it home as it would have been binned due to the fact a) there was no catering on the weekend and b) it would be out of date.

The manager worked till 8 and came into the pub where he knew she would be with her husband and sacked her!

Have had so many bad managers.
One who was verbally abusive towards me and made a point of telling me about the 'jokes' he and the rest of the staff had about me in the office. It was my first job out of university and while I wouldn't accept this nowadays it has negatively impacted my mental health for many years.

One manager stopped talking to me and would literally walk away from me if I approached her when she found out I had applied for another job. We had had a really good relationship before this. It was very bizarre. On my last day there, she deliberately parked next to me, hit my car with her car door and left without saying another word to me. She also didn't write my reference so a senior manager had to do it 😂

Lastly, my current manager is a nice person but CANNOT manage. I have had multiple issues with a co-worker which manager discusses with me and commiserates but won't do anything about and tells me to 'just ignore it'. I've become completely apathetic in my work and now am struggling to give anything above bare minimum since there's clearly no incentive to care.

Mainly had ok managers both male and female, some were very good at managing staff and workload, others were useless at one or both but were ok as colleagues otherwise.

Best managers were females, worst manager was one male, miserable attitude, horrible personality and no one liked him. Was glad when company was taken over and he and his director moved elsewhere.

I don't like to ever wish ill will on someone but made an exception for him mainly due to the colleagues who were suddenly jettisoned out of their job with a surprise redundancy meeting no one seemed to know about and the shitty way it was done.

The one I've got now. I've never come across anything like it in 35 years in the workplace. And I've had some crap managers. I've had some weird managers. I've also had two or three excellent managers.

Behaviour is SO weird I'm starting to think there must be a medical reason. Untreated. They've managed to lose over half the team since October last year. And still they won't take accountability. Batshit crazy, entitled, spoilt, incompetent, the biggest bully I've encountered in the workplace and for some bizarre reason protected by the management despite repeated behaviours that would have got them sacked or at least redeployed anywhere else I've worked. Even in the NHS.

Not to mention constant AWOL episodes, being more elusive than the Scarlet Pimpernel, micromanaging to a degree I've never come across before, and preferential amounts of leave for not usually very close relatives who are dying at a rate of knots. Curiously many of these relatives live in very lovely parts of the world.

I hate my job and the organisation now and I am counting the days until I can partially retire in two years time.

It is the main reason I am searching for a new job atm.
I'm in a specialist area and she is excellent at that no doubt but everything else goes by the by, training, uniforms, so much disorganisation and late pay to boot!
Luckily it's a good team but there's only so much people can take.

One of my very old managers was a coke head, regularly did coke at work he constantly chased after my friend who worked with me who was 16 and looked far younger than her age .
Few years later he got arrested & sent to prison for having cat A images of children on his PC.
Horrific.

When I first graduated I was put with a guy who hated me to mentor and train me.

The department I was in had been made to take their porn off the walls and they never forgave me or the other women recruited to that department.

I can't even remember the guys name they put me with but I do remember his piggy little eyes. He would regularly tell our director on me because of such misdeameanours as adding up a column of numbers differently to how he would. What a wazzock. As I pointed out at the time, his way couldn't be easily checked to find errors (pre spreadsheet days I didn't even have a laptop!)

Pretty sure he keyed my car.

The final crunch came when I was sat at HQ as he had yet again not bothered to leave me anything I could do or take me with him to site to train on the things I couldn't. He left a message with a colleague that I should complete his monthly accounts and hand them in.

Now this is something you wouldn't entrust to an assistant let alone a graduate of months. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and why would I? These were systems solely used by that company. I'd never even seen them at that point. I certainly didn't have the in depth knowledge of cost and value that was needed. I didn't even have access to where that came from.

Anyway I quit and the boss, instead of looking at why the expensive recruitment process had failed (another female graduate had already gone) he told me i wasn't tough enough for construction. That made me furious. I'd done a sandwich year very very successfully and knew that was horse shit.

Anyway I moved firm and in percentage terms made them a record profit margin on my first job. The firm I had initially worked for, very well known in the area and had been around for years went bust. Pension fund had been raided too apparently. Doesn't surprise me, they were committing fraud on one specific contract. It really had become a shitshow.

So fuck you Paul and your little boys club coterie. You were fucking awful at your job. I don't regret much but I regret not walking out after a fortnight. I might have been young but even i could spot a crap director with zero management skills.

Name changed for this as it is VERY identifying.

My first job was in a Greggs style bakery at 16. My manager would fuck off to the pub for 2+ hour lunch breaks leaving me alone to run the entire place by myself. Being under 18 I wasn't even supposed to touch the ovens or be left alone. I actually did a much better job than her and enjoyed the time she was away. She would come back stinking of booze and wobbling about.

She would undercook the pastries and put them out for sale. One day a woman came in and threw an undercooked pastry at me, I put the pastry in the bin while shit manager spoke to her. The woman demanded the pastry back in order to report us, the manager told me to get it out of the bin and gave me a bollocking in front of the customer who just assaulted me.

More recently I worked for a small business and was the only member of staff who wasn't family. The owner's son was a neo nazi and would place holocaust denial videos in front of me. They asked me to leave after challenging him and trying to speak to them about it. They are a highly respected local family business so I had no chance challenging them. Needless to say I don't automatically support small businesses anymore, I shop at the most convenient place!

My first job was as an apprentice in a government role. The training manager made a beeline for me and it got to the stage where he was comfortable grabbing my side boob, stroking my leg etc. Apparently this man had done this before with other young trainees. So I told the other regional manager but it didn’t make any difference. Sexual harassment was rife in this organisation and supported/tolerated.

Worked for a small business. When I joined the owner told me there wage deductions but I needed to ask another employee what these were which, in hindsight was a big 🚩 Wages often fell short which caused problems. If you turned down unreasonable requests the owners would become unpleasant.

Unfortunately the sexual harassment has been an on/off theme throughout my working life. Being self employed was no protection from some self-entitled men on a power trip.

I was working on the dishwasher at Sainsbury's cafe years ago when this 18 year old girl I worked with barged into the kitchen and proceeded to break down into hysterical tears because some twat manager had asked for a vanilla latte and she had asked how many pumps of vanilla he wanted. He proceeded to give her a huge bollocking in front of customers about how she should know how to make it blah blah blah (I must point out she normally worked on tills and was helping out). He was such a cunt that manager. I think he got in trouble over it though

This is going back to the mid 90s when I worked in retail management. I had a miscarriage and my doctor signed me off work for two weeks, writing ‘gynaecological reasons’ on the document.

My area manager had already taken a dislike to me because I couldn’t go to a manager meeting she’d arranged a month earlier as I had no cover for my store, my assistant manager was away on holiday. I wasn’t the only manager unable to go and the meeting was rearranged for another date but for some reason I was the one who bore the brunt of her annoyance over it.
I had an exemplary work record and had never had a problem with any other area managers I’d worked with. In fact I’d even covered their jobs when they were on holiday themselves.

Anyway, when I returned to work after two weeks I had a phone call from the area manager who told me that taking two weeks off for a heavy period was ridiculous. I broke down and told her that I’d had a miscarriage. She then said that I’d be getting a first and final written warning for lying about my reasons for being off sick and because of that she was also putting a block on the sick pay I’d be entitled to.
I was only in my mid 20s and wasn’t fully aware of what rights I had, if any, but I did put in an official complaint and whether it was a coincidence or not, the area manager left two weeks later.

I was pregnant again very soon afterwards. I decided that I wasn’t going to be returning to work for that company and when my son was born I had a visit at home from one of the directors who was very apologetic about the way I’d been treated. He gave me a letter stating that there would always be a job for me if I ever wanted to return to work for the company again.

Geoff sounds terrible. I’ve had very few good ones.

I’ve had many very controlling bullies for managers who liked to redo all my work and make me feel like I was incompetent. Not exactly what you’re asking but very interesting: So I went on maternity leave and the controlling bully who was managing me couldn’t cope without me - she had to do some of my job and had a breakdown and was off work for months.

I’ve had some terrible managers - the one (SC) who lied, skived and eventually tried to throw me under the bus, she failed because where she had fabricated stuff about me, I had physical evidence to counter every lie. I left that role and got a much better one….the crap manager applied for a role there a few years later, I was able to give a factual and fair account of her behaviour, she didn’t get the job and displayed some red flags in the interview.
I stayed for 20years with this company and had some dreadful managers - mostly males scared of an intelligent, capable female, I also became a manager and towards the end of my tenure there I guess I was a terrible manager, I felt guilty every day.
I was doing three peoples worth of work after yet another round of surprise redundancies and just didn’t have the time to manage effectively or support our offshore staff in getting skilled up.
I left that toxic hell hole and now work in a fab company.

I have a manager who's speaking style isnt speaking-she just shouts

You could be stood a foot away from her and she will scream at you to get your attention

Customers have complained and she still does it

I can hear her when shes in the building and im outside in the car-shes that loud

What makes it worse,she promoted her sister to manager and she's exactly the same

Neither can do their job properly,the other managers often do their work and they take the praise

I've never seen two women panic so much when we have more than 3 customers in and they just get louder and louder

When they have a day off,the peace is lovely and we all speak in normal tones

My current Manager shouted at me at my desk the other day as I asked him a question he didn't know the answer to.

He's also ridiculed me saying "I'm not an English teacher, I can't teach you grammar", turns out I have dyslexia.

Often likes to call e out on "attention to detail" if I make one mistake out of 100.

One of the many things my manager said to me that helped me to decide to retire was “I believe you were a useful employee”. I was a senior academic who had the highest student satisfaction ratings in the department. He refused to let me take on a student support task that literally nobody else was willing to do. When I asked him why he said “X (his sidekick) will tell you why”. Never heard a word of explanation. He also expressed astonishment that I had an exceptionally strong understanding of the rationale behind our curriculum (had he bothered to read any of the documentation he would have realised that I led the previous two curriculum reviews).

I once worked in an office with the Manager and the Admin Worker who was her bestie and sycophant. They quickly decided they didn't like me (I found out later they did the same thing to the previous person in my post). Their behaviour was so childish and unprofessional. I caught them passing notes about me, they constantly rolled their eyes every time I spoke and on the one hand micromanaged everything I did, while also refusing to have meetings with me to properly plan things.

I eventually complained to head office and one of the things I complained about was the lack of induction and handover. I then found that they had fabricated an entire personnel file, with an induction programme and meetings that never happened. It was held in a filing cabinet, which they suddenly started locking, when I had access to it before. One day the admin worker forgot to lock it and was able to copy it and send it on to head office once I left for a much better job.