Struggling to get leave signed off

[fluffles]

ok, so i know legally our employers dont' have to agree to any of the leave days we ask for and only has to give us the legal minimum, when they choose.

BUT.. my place of work has a generous allowance after you've been there five years. And generally people choose when to go with the proviso it doesn't clash with deadlines/colleagues.

Now this year my boss is off with stress and my senior manager is just refusing to discuss signing anything off... the admin person has been asking about a long weekend for so long the flights have gone up and she now can't afford it . my colleague wants a long weekend for his own 40th and can't get an answer either way and i want to ask for my DHs 40th off and also a few days for a long weekend to go to a wedding in the US.... senior boss just says 'we'll see' and 'we have to check the programme' even though she has it in front of her.

How can we get her to just say either yes or no (and if no to the dates we want, then when we CAN go)???

Work is really really stressful right now and I NEED to know i have a holiday SOMETIME for my own sanity and relationship and family life.

1. this is unacceptable
2. tell her your holiday dates.. don't ask and summarise in e-mail. This will actually make it easier for her - (if you are asking for a decision on when is best, with millions of variables it is a massive impossible simultaneous equation. - Say 'I'll be taking xth, xth, and xth as well as all days in between yst and xth of Oct.'
3. Put the onus on her to say no and thebn pressure for reason if she does and express surprise and bafflement in response... eg 'Oh but isn't this three weeks before we have our financial reporting? is that sensible??

Whenever you say 'I'm off (then list of dates) its difficult for someone who hasn't planned to have good reasons to block you. Even with difficultly indecisive people, the worst I have got back is no response which becomes a whinge when I sent the 'just to remind you I'm off next thurs' e-mail . chances are you'll get a short mail saying 'fine' or nothing - if you get nothing, send reminder as above and if she gets shrity say 'its all booked and we did agree - hope that's ok!..'

1. If you submit plans and no reasonable response - incompetent.

1. If you submit plans and its 'no' and 'we will decide' (by e-mail we hope!) then she is 'incompetent mega' and this is unfair. You need to put pressure on to make her pop -eg 'thanks, but I really can't see any other suitable time - hope this is OK.'

1. the onus should be placed on her to refuse and explain - pressure her to make her case - (just keep 'assumptive closing' i.e say 'thanks' and 'glad this is OK' a lot) - you are aiming a) to get an e-mail that is open in this way that is not responded to that you can point to later and say 'oh but you didn't contradict this plan' or b) a crap explanation that she knows is stupid and will look stupid to others.

1. You DO need a holiday and planning it early is a sensible part of mitigating stress, and giving information early is helpful to planning in the department.

If nothing from this - grievance - say 'I have submitted several holiday plans all have which have been refused - mention stress leave of boss and importance of planning hols to mitigate stress. HR should s**t themselves over stress leave and then no holidays as this is a breach of health and Safety legislation and cand actually (though employers often don't believe it) can lead to the shutdown of the department of company - members of staff taking time off for stress is a big red flag - having 'practices that predictably increase the likelihood of stress-related illness and absence' is also a breach - and poor management of holiday allocation fits right into that!

This is shocking! Part of my job is to OK leave from work. I know it is stressful to wait for an answer, so I treat all leave requests as a priority and generally give an answer within 10 minutes of the request and always by the end of the day. Some managers see this as an 'interruption' to the work they are doing but in my book happy staff = good workers! Agree with Heroine's advice put the ball back in 'senior manager's' court and let her deal with the fall out! Good luck with it!

thanks, will try your techniques heroine, that's very useful.

we also plan to raise 'managing annual leave' at the next team meeting in the context of - can we put everybody's leave up on the wall in the office so we know who is out when?

that way she'll either have to admit she's planning to say no to us all or else allow us to all know in enough time and plan round it.

See now, if it were me I would go to manager, say "I know it is a real pain trying to sort out holidays when you have so much else on your plate with the manager being off ill, so how about I take the planning off your hands, draw up a spreasheet of important dates when we need people to be around and see if I can organise all the requests that you have on the go and come up with some recommendations that you can then sign off?"

Re stillsquiffy - are you a manager perhaps?? I have worked for managers that think the most productive things their staff can do is to do their job as well so they just get paid for poking around! there is a danger that by taking on problems instead of putting pressure on the people who should do them, to do them, you end up with overloaded underpaid juniors with a lot of stress, but no authority, and overpaid ineffectual managers who get promoted inappropriately (cf HE, Local Councils, Civil service, education (I spoke to a school teacher whose role consisted of 10% of one job, 5% of another 25% outreach 25% head of drama, 50% teaching and 30% timetabling because of exactly this 'I'll take that on' attitude !!) Role expansion is very damaging! Especially when all the really big headaches move downwards

Absolute rubbish.

The jobs market is shrinking. If you want to keep your job you make yourself invaluable. And the best way to be invaluable is indeed to solve your managers' problems for them. Because when there are promotions, you go for the people that solve problems as opposed to the people that create problems. There is no room for jobsworth people any more (even in public sector).

And in answer to your question, No I'm not a Manager, I'm a Managing Director in a large organisation, and I have successfully been pulling staff upwards for more than 20 years and setting them on paths into 6 figure salary careers. I am also doing a PhD in Organisational Behaviour and Design. And you?

Ah.. not entirely true I'm afraid - solving manager's problems is one thing, taking all their work and creating doughnut managment is another.

Your job title doesn't surprise me - neither does your point-scoring. The number of people capable of doing a PhD is much greater than those who do one, and those who do PhDs aren't necessarily even capable so throwing quals at me won't help.

If you had a senior manager who was ducking and diving and avoiding responsibility and couldn't make simple decisions, would you really be happy to hear that she had been overloading junior staff, meaning that they had to do their main job less well because they were also doing components of your senior manager's too?

For the record in my last three roles I improved departmental or company income by between 300 and 500% (though the 500% is also a bit of reflection of poor previous performance). In my last fulltime role (currently working freelance) I was dealing with a manager operating exactly as the OPs poster's manager was (and still is). He couldn't delegate, got junior people doing 1.5 to 3x roles, and there were several work-arounds to cover up his imcompetance, including for example an duplicate recording system for annual leave (based on electronic calendars and automatically filed copies of e-mails). As MD you might think 'great, reducing costs' as a cost benefit person/organisational behaviourist you would think 'output down' (not in my area - I was very 'jobsworth' as you put it, 'clear about my responsibilities and aims' as I put it and that is partially why I was able to keep performing as the market dropped for other comparable providers).

I am not on a six figure salary, but don't think I'm not able - or correct here!

thanks for the discussion argument as it's actually helpful to evesdrop on.

with my current workload there's NO WAY i can 'sort out' people's leave. But we are going to suggest a wall chart each person marks it up on ourselves and that if anybody coincides with anybody else or with an agreed deadline then we ask 'special permission' (btw. we already know that this wont happen as we're all pretty conscientious about what we're asking for anyway).

ace! I'm pleased.. a nice solution!

Re PhDs the limiting factor is not ability or will, its money so its no surprise a) that people on higher salaries are more likely to have PhDs and other postgraduate quals or b) that most people with PhDs come from families where their parents too were highly paid. The fact that some senior people seek higher quals is normally about creating an artificial hurdle that substitutes for class race or sex when discrimination on these factors is impractical. I scored very highly on the GMAT test, without the preparation courses that wealthy students offer pay for without thinking - yet didn't get into a MBA course, because my current role wasn't 'senior enough' despite my achieving better results than the last person (graded two grades above mine) in my role did. The reason? not ability, not will, not likelihood of good result, not even (at that time) ability to pay, but because senior people have higher salaries on completion (because they already have higher salaries on entry) and that is much better for the stats on the course - what MBAA course can sell a £40K risk on an average finishing salary of £30K?

ie. its another hurdle against getting best quality, and for getting the usual members of the club in. This is how discriminaton works and its sad that here we have someone trying to intimidate and negate arguments by waiving the PhD around like a big stick.

"its sad that here we have someone trying to intimidate and negate arguments by waiving the PhD around like a big stick."

If you check, I think you will find I was responding to you lecturing me on being overpaid and ineffective manager and not knowing what I was doing.

But whatever. The discussion has helped the OP (which, incidentally, was what I was trying to do in the first place). Do feel free to go on flaming and hyperventilating as you wish. It obviously helps for you to get all your angst off your chest, and I assure you that I can take it.

Oh no, that was your interpretation entirely!

Its cute that you are trying to pain me as the hyperventilating blusterer, do you always use words like 'lecturing' and 'angst' 'I can take it' and go on about I'm doing a really big impressive qual... you?' when you aren't threatened??

Whatever makes you feel better, sweetie.

Heroine, you are barking, you really are .

Barking maybe, but I can spot that anyone who advocates that 'the only way to get promoted, chum, is to do the work the manager is paid to do on top of your job so their incompetance is hidden but all the stuff still gets done' Unfortunately too often incompetence promotes incompetence in precisely this way. I'm grateful that 'squiffy' has helped illustrate this by being the foil.

sorry in the edit above 'is a manager..( or perhaps in this case someone who has progressed above manager by getting others to cover their work)' is missing, sorry (damn edit button)!

I've never seen management 'pull people upwards' because they are good at their jobs, quite the opposite in fact.

As someone with a high IQ and a raft of postgrad quals (I'd love to do the 3 more years of my clinical masters and then a Clinical Doctorate but I don't have the £30k it would cost me) I always end up doing a lot of hard work, bottom of the heap jobs plus a lot of jobs that should be manager's jobs as well.

I am always amazed that bad managers get promoted but have learned that they often get promoted to keep them away from the real work because when they do the real work they make a mess of it.

God, I'd love to work in a company where people said, you know, you are really good - let's promote you In fact, I dream of it! What companies are these please?

PS I used to invigilate and teach MBA students, they were dreadful!!!!!!!

Blimey Tigerseye, you must work in the public sector too.

I have yet to see a good person not get pulled up. Not because management are altruistic, but because we like to work our pound of flesh and if we're going to be paying mgmt salaries then we want those people who are goind to work their socks off in order to justify their rations. But then again it is easier for us in private sector because bad managers just get sacked, so we dont have them cluttering up the structure. Saying that you do of course see the Peter Principle operating here and there in any organisation.

Totally agree on the MBA front, by the way: I tutored someone through their MBA and thought it was the biggest pile of I had ever seen (mind you, I wouldn't say no to an MBA place at Kellogg or Wharton if I got the chance)

Interesting to see this discussion, tbh. Personally I agree with Squiffy in that I've seen good employees repeatedly pulled up through the ranks throughout my employment history.

But the idea of "good" differs from person to person. In my last job, the head of the dept was someone that Heroine has probably met, hell he might be the OP's boss for all I know. He shirked decisions, pressured junior employees, made it difficult to pin down exact requirements, contradicted himself when issuing instructions. But senior management promoted him becuase he lived for the job, he genuinely didn't mind being there at 10pm and Saturdays too (in a 9-5pm office environment), actively pushed to get onto projects which had a big impact on our bottom line - basically, from a senior management's view, he was great. From working along side him, I was extremely glad to be rid of him when I handed in my notice.

A good employee depends entirely upon where the assessor is in that organisation. Ask your office temp what he or she thinks of their direct line manager and it'll be different to the head of the department in a significant number of cases.

I do, hence my other thread on here

I should maybe move to private sector. I used to work as a temp in lots of companies and I was amazed at how little work some people did compared to public sector, where we work our arses off, so really I don't know why I don't jump ship.

But my experience of private healthcare was not that great either...

Every time we watch The Apprentice my OH says 'You should do that, you'd be good' and maybe I should...

Sorry, this is way off topic sorry OP