To think hierarchy doesn't work at work?

[Scarlettjune]

I have a boss that is currently making my life a misery. She is very hierarchal and she wants me to see her as above me in status. She micro manages constantly. I have had a couple of bosses like her before and it always made the workplace extremely miserable. Hierarchy leaves workplaces open to abuse of power

The best bosses I ever had were the ones that saw themselves as being on the same level as the rest of us. I remember one great boss who said "I'm th same as the rest of you guys I just have different work responsbilities". We all worked really well with hk,

Funny. You are the only person to write that on here. I can guess that you are a manager!

Yes but your definition of ‘just doing my job’ might be different to theirs. It’s very difficult to give an answer to your question.

once I inherited a team full of dead wood. The previous manager had basucally done their work for them. As you can imagine, within weeks of my arrival I was an ‘evil micromanaging witch’. They all ended up leaving and now I have a team who have been with me for years.

Wow. You talk about a colleague as if they were a petulant child. And yet she is the one who has the problem?

How can you call a whole team of people "dead wood". That's awful!

OP your line manager does sound bonkers but you sound almost equally stuck in your line of thinking.
A healthy mindset would be "my manager has issues, I need yo either raise it with HR or change jobs", not "hierarchy is bad and I'm worth as much as all my managers and demand respect and only flat structures work".
Ultimately if you haven't embraced management as a career yourself you need to accept a level of oversight.

One of the woman that works there told me that she was thinking of bringing my boss to an employment tribunal for bullying her, so it is definitely not me, it is my manager.

Apparently my boss managed to talk her out of bringing her to a tribunal

We don't have a HR department. I've written it many times! There's only one woman over my manager and she is nearly as bad. Complaining to her goes nowhere. Other people have tried.

Alright Jack Nicholson! 🤣🤣🤣

I learnt a lot from my first boss who introduced herself to others as my colleague. That and many other things she did made her a great boss.

That really only works if you hold the same level of responsibility and pay.

Of course I can. If somebody doesnt doesn’t do their job properly and has zero interest in improving, that’s exactly what they are: they expect to be carried by the flow.

sounds to me perhaps you’ve been pulled up on a few things, or perhaps your boss is trying to do something differently and you’re pushing back. Your reaction to people not agreeing with you wholeheartedly is very telling.

as I said earlier, it’s impossible to answer your question. It really depends on the work ethic of the team. A flat strategy in a team with little work ethic woukd be a disaster. A flat strategy in a team with strong work ethic could work. You’d still need a manager somewhere.

Why did you leave your job where there was no hierarchy?

It isn’t. Have you ever actually been a manager? Occasionally you do get entire teams like this, usually all influenced by one supremely negative character. I’ve cleared out a couple in my 30+ year career.

How much of her own work is she doing if she is spending her life reading your emails and watching you on CCTV? Have the people above her not noticed?

The pilot and the surgeon might be in charge but they shouldn’t also be operating the kind of system like the OP’s boss where people become scared to speak up. There was a spate of air crashes years ago in Korean airlines. It turned out that the first officer had noticed problems but didn’t feel confident in raising them which led to the crashes. Similarly my surgeon had got the wrong side to operate on. She was collaborative so it was easy to tell her.

An extremely rigid hierarchy like the OP’s boss wants is invariably because the bosses are insecure and don’t really want anyone noticing that they don’t in fact add any value, so they micromanage everything.

My boss criticises everyone on my team and never gives any praise. We all had a team meeting with her a while ago and said that we would like some positive feedback. She couldn't think of one thing that any of us were doing well. We then showed her reviews from our clients thanking us for doing an excellent job.

She is a very negative person and likes to dominate

You've just got a useless boss. It's nothing to do with hierarchy.

Every boss you have is above you and usually paid more than you. All organisations have a hierarchy otherwise they don't function.

You boss is a rubbish manager.

It’s not hierarchy that’s the problem here, it’s micromanagement.

My line manager is definitely my “boss” but very rarely ever gets involved in or checks on my work, she trusts that I’m in control of what I need to do and that I’ll get it done on time and to a high standard.

I was absolutely dreading going into work today. I've actually started having panic attacks before going into 1-1 meetings with her. I need to get out of there.

No but bad management doesn’t work. They are not above you as people obviously, but they do have more authority . It’s how they use that authority to motivate and help get the work done that makes them good or poor managers, not the structure.

I agree with others, the hierarchy isn’t the problem. The buck has to stop with someone and hierarchy defines who that is.

Given you didn’t have this issue with other managers in the same hierarchy, the problem is the person. Some people can turn a tea kitty into a power trip given half a chance, that’s their nature - removing the hierarchy wouldn’t change or stop them.

Humans respond better to respect, than they do to being dominated and treated like crap

Of course. But having a hierarchy doesn't automatically require that people be "dominated and treated like crap". A hierarchy simply means a chain of command with the most powerful/responsible at the top and the least powerful/responsible at the bottom.

In a well run hierarchical system people understand their role in the organization and it shouldn't be necessary for people to bully and micromanage. Bullying, control and micromanagement aren't intrinsic to a hierarchy, they are a sign that the hierarchy isn't working.

This. It’s the people, not the structure.

In that case the problem is the person, not the hierarchy. Hierarchy done well can work very well.

The chain of command works both ways , you can off load things on people who are paid more

i pass on safeguarding issues daily then its off my plate immediately , the consequences for those i pass ip to are life altering

what you have an issue with with is mot hierarchy but shit management on power trips

Who interviewed you then? Seems strange, especially as there’s no HR department.