Bad Management: The Root of so Many Problems

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The vast majority of people out there, including a lot of you who are about to dive into this article, have faced bad management at least once in their lives. What is a Manager, though and what is he supposed to be doing?

So basically and in a few words, a manager's role is to plan, organize, lead, and control the work of a team or department to achieve organizational goals. In other words, he is responsible for the strategy, the procedures that everyone will follow, he provides the correct direction that everyone must follow and guide them accordingly.

He also has to support the teams he is managing, track the performance of his team members, listen to them, help them grow, take the difficult decisions, solve any issues that might come and basically be the liaison between the team members and the higher Management.

What's really happening, though, in most cases?

Long story short a Manager must be able to "manage" people and in a good way. We rarely see that happen and for many reasons. We will analyse some of them but ofc there might be a lot more that i might miss, so please feel free to add them in the comments.

Lack of Knowledge

The vast majority of Managers receive no training or don't want to receive any kind of training. They have no idea how to manage their people, even though some of them might be good at their jobs in terms of hard skills. Also, a lot of the training that i have seen in terms of how to manage people is like they deem employees like children.

There is also the possibility of some Managers not having the hard skills and knowledge in terms of work. That in combination with some of the things below like immaturity that leads to arrogance, make everything extremely difficult.

Lack of Communication Skills

A lot of Managers and i have faced this quite some time, lack the communication skills. In my mind if you got no communication skills, then plain and simple you can't be a Manager, no matter how good you are in your job. Except the fact that it's quite difficult to explain things to your employees and understand you a lot of Managers have an attitude, are rude and make their employees feel bad and afraid of even asking a question.

Micromanagement

A lot of Managers feel the need to micromanage. Micromanagement, plain and simple, is when you have your Manager over your head for everything. Even for the simplest task, for an email, you need to get approval from him or to look it over.

Usually, they will also try to correct you even if everything is correct. For example, they will try to rephrase something or add a "." or a ";" or "," just because. The reason they do it is to feel important, that they have value and oversight in everything, while in reality, this leads to chaos as the employees are getting tired of it and resign.

Favoritism

Some Managers, for some reason, can't separate work and life. Due to that some people who would be ideal friends for them or are already friends will get better treatment than the rest. Also and this is happening a lot and this is something both sides are taking advantage of, which is that there is sexual tension in the air. You know what i am saying i am sure of it. Finally, some Managers show favoritism to people who can easily take advantage of and manipulate.

Immaturity

A whole lot of Managers and, in general, the vast majority out there are immature. When someone is immature, they won't act rationally or with a bit of emotion. They will simply do whatever comes to their head, from being rude and obnoxious, to following the favoritism logic, to taking decisions that will affect their employees badly and in general not help them grow. Generally speaking lack of immaturity pretty much leads to all the above and many more and i don't think it will ever stop.

What Should Be Done

Even though this is a hard question to answer, honestly speaking, all the employees who have a Bad Manager should talk with HR first. Before you start talking about HR, you need to first know and understand how the company that you are part of works.

A role HR needs and must have is the internal "policeman". If for example someone says about a bad behavior of a Manager or a co-worker, HR needs to do a proper investigation and solve this issue. not hide it and not blame the employee instead.

In order to do that though, and this is quite important, HR NEEDS THE AUTHORITY APPROVED BY THE CEO OR BOARD OF DIRECTORS. If that's not the case then absolutely nothing will happen but if this is the case, which is rare, the company will sort out all these issues and honestly would be one of the best workplaces out there.

The reason that this doesn't happen most of the times is mostly the same reasons that i talked about earlier but this time instead of the Manager we are talking about the CEO. Also a lot of CEOs have this thinking:

If employee A & B say that Manager X is Rude and in general an asshole to work with, we can either do nothing or talk with the Manager. If we can do nothing, most likely at a certain point we may lose 2-3-5 employees but they are replaceable. If we do say something to the Manager and he won't listen, he may leave, so we may lose an experienced person which may lead to losing more money due to his absence.

Even though this is a logic way to think it over, the truth is that by letting go of a Bad Manager, the company will see more growth, the employees with step up and feel appreciated, while constantly losing employees one after the other, you end up losing money and decrease productivity as less people will do more work in a stressful environment and extra cost for the new recruitment process.

So in case the HR doesn't have any authority you can either leave the company if you can afford it, or all the members leave at the same time (which is difficult) and letting all together know why, or simply start writing everywhere anonymly negative reviews about the company and the management which may result in less clients and new employees.

I would like to hear if you have any experience with bad Managers, please share your stories!