7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Managers
October 10, 2007 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under management hack, satire
While most of the time here at Slacker Manager we write about how to be a better manager, today I’d like to share some of the habits of the worst managers I’ve had, and how you too can be a highly ineffective manager.
MONEY BACK GUARANTEE: If you do all of these 7 habits, I can almost guarantee you’ll have nobody on your team left after only 18 short months, or your money back!
Responsibility without Authority
Assign people a responsibility, tell them that they are responsible for the outcome, and then don’t give them anywhere even close to sufficient authority to make it happen. Perfect for those budding superstars who are threatening to take your job.
Set it and forget it!
I like to call this “Ron Popeil on management.” Delegation is for sissies, just throw out the task and let them guess on how you want it done. Especially effective if you never check in on their progress, and then demand it be “done right the first time.”
Performance Reviews = Surprise!
Never have weekly meetings with your direct reports. Wait until mid-year, say everything is going “just fine.” At the end of the year, make sure to mark associates down for every little thing that anyone ever told you about what they did. Give them a chance to refute any claims, but don’t mark anything but the bad stuff in their year end review. They’ll never get that job in the department of their dreams this way, so you’ll never have to replace them!
Great Expectations? How about NO Expectations?!?
Setting expectations is for sissies! Don’t tell your team what you expect of them, and then hold each of them to an imaginary, and completely random, standard, marking their review full of red ink. After all, if they don’t know what you want them to do, they can’t possibly do it!
Fight Fires, Don’t set priorities!
Give someone on your team a project. Don’t tell them how important it is. Keep throwing more little balls at them until they drop the big one. Complain about how they have no idea what’s really important to you. Continue until they cry or quit, whichever comes first.
Do the same thing with projects you get. Focus on the urgent, forget the important, and keep fighting those fires!
Focus on weaknesses, not on strengths
It’s your team, so your direct reports should be just like you…great at everything! When they’re not, lay the hammer down and focus on all the things that went wrong!
Especially outstanding: focus on that which they don’t enjoy, is outside of their strength zone, and that they have much room to improve in. Be like the parent that complained about the 1 C on the all A report card! You loved it, why wouldn’t your team?
Training is for losers
Stephen Covey encouraged us to “sharpen our saw” by training and reinvesting in our source. Training, schmaining! You know they’re going to leave you once they know what they’re doing, so why train anyone on anything? Just let them fumble around in their own mediocrity, never mastering their job, so you don’t ever have to worry about promoting anyone. This is guaranteed to save your company money for at least the training budget, not to mention nobody ever wastes a day off to get training.
Sadly, I’ve had 1 or more managers who’ve displayed 1 or more of these qualities to me, and it’s why I don’t work for many of the people I once did.
Question for you: What are some of your other best tips on how to be an ineffective manager?
[Phil Gerbyshak is a vice president of information technology who doesn't take his own advice about being an ineffective manager, and is actually rather effective at what he does. He encourages you to discount all of the advice given in this post, except to use as humor, unless you want to be a highly ineffective, UNEMPLOYED manager.]
I don’t think it would take 18 months to lose your team if you follow these habits
Great post…the sad part is that I know a lot of managers who follow a few of these…and they aren’t that great at what they do.
One of the best ways to be an ineffective manager? Follow this piece of advice:
Fire…Ready…Aim.
In other words, don’t plan…just do it. Then worry about whether you are ready to do it and/or whether “it” was the right “it” to be doing.
Phil,
Another fine post…so much for any slack at Slacker Manager.
I think a great way to be a manager is to go around the office saying, “this would be a great job if it wasn’t for all of you!”
Another key is to not look at people but keep your eyes glued to your blackberry or computer screen while you bark out commands.
David
It’s eerie how familiar these are.
Here are my tips:
Being Direct Takes the Fun out of Discussions
Any idiot can run through a list of tasks with their team, but it takes skill to bury that same task list within a long winded diatribe. The joy your team will experience by treating your lectures as information scavenger hunts will surely increase employee satisfaction and workplace morale.
Re-thinking the Work Day
Stop thinking that the work day is the time you get to spend time with your team members; it really represents the small window in the day that you are unable to call them at home. The true work / life balance comes from incorporating the job into all hours of the day. The key is frequency and timing, paying particular attention to calling during meal times and late in the evening.
Phil,
Your post is a good one. I believe that one way to improve is to learn from those who are both successful and unsuccessful at what they do. There is a book titled Web Pages that Suck. The tag line is, “Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design”.
Every Friday on our MBA program Blog I write about business lessons that can be learned from NBC’s ‘The Office’. By watching this show you see poor leadership in action. In fact, most of your 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Managers are demonstrated on that show!
All the best!
Ron
The UB/Towson MBA
My boss at a job I left a couple of years ago actually did all seven of those; I stuck around for almost a year before the very thought of going to work in the morning made me physically ill. The odd thing was that two of the three people I worked closely with had been there for nearly 15 years and all three still work there.
Eric - Great advice! Planning sucks
David - No eye contact. That’s wonderful!
Edward - Sorry about that. I guess I lived your life a bit.
Bryan - 2 more great ones. I work halfdays now. 7 AM - 7 PM. Thanks for validating that for me.
Ron - I’ll definitely be checking you out. Thanks for the link. And thanks for reminding us that we learn from the best, and the worst. You’re right, The Office is a GREAT reminder of the worst we can learn from.
Noah - Good for you for escaping. Sounds toxic. Sucks for those folks you used to work with though. Why didn’t they escape?
Ineffective manager tip: Do everything to keep the insubordinate, slacker employee while ignoring the other employees who are working hard to keep the “team” together. Everything including bending personnel policy rules to support the slacker, but demanding the other employees to follow the policies.
Even if you have no idea how to do your subordinate’s job, pretend that you do, and that you can do it better than they can. Be sure to condescend to them and belittle their skills as much as possible. After all, employees won’t respect you if they think they know more than you about something. Don’t worry that they’ll see through the ruse — you’re the boss, after all.
Of course there is one was to mask incompetence with efficiency by being efficient but not efffective. Do the unimportant really well and ignore what is most important. Become a memo master rather than a management master.
Emily - That could be a very effective way of being ineffective. Time with insubordinates is a direct relation to the amount of love the rest of your team feels. Attention = intention, and the more attention, it’s obvious the intention is to keep the slacker. Unfortunate but true.
Jen - Great suggestion! Fake it until they QUIT, because after all, you’re the boss, right?
David - Ah, the memo master, my favorite co-worker. Write well but don’t do the right things well. The pen is mightier than the sword, at least when it comes to being purely ineffective.
How about -
Assigning tasks (aka “opportunities”) while withholding critical information to which is only given at the very last possible moment. There is nothing like setting your employees up to fail! Then wonder why they mistrust you and cringe when they hear the word “opportunity” slipping through your lips.
Very good post! I am amazed at the lack of leadership in most organizations. It would be great to think that these examples of poor leadership/management are limited to entry level or mid-level management, the fact is this skill set can be found all the way up to the highest level of any organization in America. But I’m getting on my soapbox.
More examples of ineffective managers: To wield your power by reminding them that you are the “new sherriff in town and it’s my way or the highway. Or you could whip them into submission by berating their performance and tell them how great you are as the boss - NOT! Another is to “delegate” your responsibility to a subordinate, give them bad news to communicate to your team, and be no where in the hemisphere to deal with the negative fallout. Just let the team know through an email that these are the new rules of engagement. Live with it or leave.
And I could go on…
Ineffective Manager Tip: Utilize the skills and talents of your team to complete a project and then, when kudos come your way, bask in the glory and take all the credit.
Excellent tips for all budding managers! Publish the manual, shoot the video and start training folks on WNTD (What not to do!!), which is a slightly shorter acronym than HTABACMM (How to avoid becoming a completely moronic manager). Shhhweet!