How Not To Manage

I’m not a manager. I’m doing just fine working in the trenches (although I work way too many weird hours) and don’t have any desire to work the political world of management. I have no doubt that I could do it and successful, but I don’t want to don the required “suit” mentality Therefore this post comes by way of a “those who don’t know, teach” angle as I really don’t have the experience. Some may say that I shouldn’t judge what I don’t know, but I believe there’s a certain amount of common sense involved in managing others and there are some situations that beg to be excoriated. By way of a “for example”: recently, the Senior Vice President of my organization within the company for which I work invited my team to lunch. This lunch turned out to be, from the email sent to us by his assistant, pizza and salad served in a conference room. The lunch, in fact, turned out to be pizza only, the salad either forgotten or diverted by hungry vegetarians. Further, no input was requested from our team regarding what kind of pizza we would enjoy eating, which seems like a reasonable thing to ask given that we were giving up our lunch hour for this pow-wow with senior management. Finally, no information was given to us regarding what this meeting was for, what the agenda might be or what we might do to prepare. We went in blind to a lunch bereft of salad and featuring 2 out of 3 pizzas that no one wanted to eat.

I knew the meeting was going to be bad when, after 10 minutes of small talk (and I was not eating anything partly in protest of the fact that we weren’t asked what we’d like to eat and partly because I didn’t want the pizza they’d ordered), the SVP said matter-of-factly, “This is your meeting, tell me what you want.” Our meeting? We didn’t even know what we were meeting for, let alone have anything prepared that we could discuss. This was all from his end of the world, and now he was dumping the onus of moving forward on us?

Well, not to worry. This guy is the type of executive who is quite happy to hear himself talk, regardless of the relevance to the ongoing discussion. Based on this meeting, let me offer this advice to the managers/executives of the world (again, all of these points are a direct result of my actual meeting with our Senior Vice President):

1. If you call a meeting for a small team within your organization, lay out the details and agenda so they’re prepared and not left guessing as to the reason behind the meeting request (we weren’t sure if we were being fired, promoted or if this was just a get to know you session)
2. Do your workers the small courtesy of asking them what they’d like for lunch. You don’t have to go overboard; you can simply say it’s going to be sandwiches or pizza or whatever, but at least ask them what kind of sandwich or pizza they’d like. Not doing so demonstrates a disregard for your employees (it’s the little things that count, you know).
3. Do a little bit of homework on who you’re meeting with. We don’t expect you to know the name of our pets, but we do expect you to know our job responsibilities. It’s irritating that you don’t know the history of our group, since we’re less than a year old. This is especially true when you tell us we should get to know the work of other teams, yet our group was formed during a reorganization and group members were pulled from those same other teams you want us to “get to know”. In other words: we already know what they do, because we did it. Our group is made up of the best of those other teams.
4. When you ask for questions and a one is asked, make sure you understand the question before attempting to answer. When asked about whether you feel the reorganization has succeeded (the same reorg that saw the foundation of our group and split the entirety of Operations into insular little groups), you should at least know that there was a reorganization. Babbling for 10 minutes about a topic that has nothing to do with the question does not equal answering said question and only further exposes your lack of understanding about the organization that you supposedly run.
5. Don’t bring up controversial topics without someone raising them first. You stating that we’re worried about outsourcing (when we aren’t) does nothing but start us worrying about outsourcing.
6. To expand upon the point above, NEVER bring attention to the fact that you consider us slave labor. Don’t tell us (and I can’t make this shit up) that you wouldn’t consider outsourcing because most of those places have contracts or unions that demand specific pay for specific hours, whereas you can always get more than 40 hours of work out of your salaried employees for no more money. Don’t give us exact percentages of how much more work you can get out of us for no more pay, and why you never need to hire more staff because of that extra work. Don’t make us feel like assholes for not unionizing (when we probably ought to, considering you utter disregard for us).
7. Most importantly, never call a meeting where your lack of organization, planning and your complete failure to understand the function of the teams that you oversee becomes nothing but painfully evident.

Hopefully future VPs and SVPs will read this a learn a little something. You all better start praying that I don’t get the urge to manage, because I will bring ruin and efficiency to the bloated organizations that you call home (which is why I never need worry about becoming a manager…note: none of this vitriol is directed at my current manager, as he is quite good at what he does, but rather at the monkeys who hang out in the branches above us and fling lots of shit).

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 12:44am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.