This post was part of a series of old blogs i have created in the past. i moved them here (as well as tidying up some details) in order to preserve all of my writings in one place for easy reference. Hope you find this one a good read. Enjoy!
In the last post we talked about the good things that can happen when management does its job well. In this post we will take a turn to the dark side and see what it is like when we flip the scenario. What impact does a bad manager have on a business?
The internet is full to the brim with horror stories of how corrupt management practices led giant businesses like Enron and Lehman Brothers to collapse in a spectacular fashion, or how a poor decision made in a strategic level caused businesses that was once leaders in their industry to miss out on a market trend, like Nokia, Blackberry and Kodak. Those were all perfect examples of management done wrong, sure. But the truth is, bad management is even more pervasive than that. And the bad news is, most of them don’t even show up in the news.
If you have worked for at least 2 or 3 companies, chances are you have experienced what bad management looks like. And chances are, it’s not as horrifying or breaking-news worthy like the examples above. No, it’s far more mundane than that. Most likely the kind of bad management we all used to deal with revolves around day-to-day issues like how the company deals with attendance, our interaction with our direct reports, how compensation is calculated and dispensed, or other administrative things. You, know, routine stuff. Hardly news-worthy material. Most of bad management don’t have catastrophic impact on the lives of the employees. They’re only annoying at best and oppressive at worst.
Still don’t know what i’m talking about? Well, take a look at these examples and see if you’re familiar with one or more:
- Bad recruitment practices : Most companies put up silly requirement barriers (like age, and *gasp degree) or sometimes outright unrealistic requirements in hopes that it will help them filter the best match for their positions when in reality, 73% of people surveyed by an online job seeking platform reports feeling dissatisfied with their work. Turns out, as long as the company ‘feels’ they got the right person for the job, it doesn’t really matter what the employee has to say about the matter: The recruitment model must work!
- Bad work-life balance policy : Working overtime is normal and even sought after by people if compensated fairly. But are there companies out there who see their employees as nothing more than cattle to be worked to death and to be squeezed for utility until the very last drop? You can bet your pension plan there are!
- Nonsensical rules and policy : Does this scenario sounds familiar? Back in the good ole days, this company was so much fun to work in. Everybody was friendly to each other, and you know what’s the icing on the cake? We can come in to the office whenever we like! But one day, someone decided to be a jerk and came late to an important, company-wide, all-hands-on-deck meeting. His excuse? He had some laundry to do or something like that. And the boss wasn’t too happy about that. Soon, the management announced that all employees have to check in every 9 o’clock at the office. They installed a new attendance machine at the lobby. And if you had to go somewhere office related at 9? well the management thought about that too, and they mandated all employees to install a special app so they can check in digitally just in case. If you have something personal you need to do, you’d have to fill-in a special form to ask for permission the day before. Now it doesn’t feel the same anymore working here. Just because one guy messed up, all of us had to carry the consequences. So much for “management knows best”.
So yeah… routine stuff.
And just to drive the point home, these things are common. So common in fact that it becomes ingrained in our work culture. We tend to see them as normal facts of work. One might even say that those problems are so subtle it doesn’t warrant any attention at all.
But therein lies the problem, because the problem is subtle, it gets ignored. Even in the instances where those practices hurt people in one way or another, they don’t speak up for a variety of reasons. They might not want to stick their heads out too much. Or they might rationalise and say, “hey, it’s not that bad. It’s just how things done around here”.
I’ve got 2 answers for that.
- No matter how subtle a problem is, it is still a problem. And the thing with problems or issues is they grow. Unless you deal with them or negotiate a consensus around it, it will keep getting bigger albeit very slowly until one day, it gets big enough that enough people start to notice. That’s also usually the day when it becomes news-worthy material.
- In my opinion, speaking up in the hopes of improving the practices of the management is not only the good thing to do. It’s actually the moral thing to do. Because if you haven’t noticed by now, no matter the scale, what management does in a business have a direct impact towards people’s life. If you can do something to improve the management quality and in turn, the well-being of somebody’s life or help them avoid further damages, isn’t that a moral thing to do as a fellow human being?
So let’s talk about it, shall we?
One logical way to address the issue is to find out the reason for these issues. What is it that caused bad management? Well, it could be anything, to be perfectly honest with you.
It could be that the managers are lacking in concrete management skills such as communication, organisation or other technical skills. It could be something that lurks deep within the psychology makeup of the managers. Maybe the managers have a deep issue of trusting other people, maybe the manager have a paralysing insecurity, maybe the manager have an ego so big that he needs his own elevator just to go up to his desk. Or it could simply be character / moral issues in some extreme cases where managers would blatantly lie, cheat, manipulate or do criminal things just to get their way.
I could go on, but i believe you get the point by now.
Trying to solve bad management by identifying the chaff from the wheat is a futile effort, because for every 1 right way to do something, there’s probably a thousand other ways that don’t work (remember the famous saying by Edison regarding his experiment failures?). It’s more logical (as well as far more efficient) to focus on the things that work rather than on the things that don’t. That’s why people in banks are trained to identify fake bank notes by focusing on the traits and characteristics of genuine bank notes only.
There are a limited set of best practices and mindset that management can adopt to improve their quality, and i would love to share that with you some other time. But now we must close, because i’m afraid this post is getting too long already.
In the end, just like there are (some) good managers, there are also (more than some) bad managers out there. The good news is that despite the prevalency of bad management, overall we still have a relatively stable economy and work culture, meaning that any extent of the damage done is still contained. The bad news is, if left unchecked, this could lead into worse situations in the future. But let’s not focus on the negative, look at how much potential there is for improvements there. Think of what we could achieve if our businesses adopt better mindsets and practices in their day to day activities. That’s something to look forward to and worth fighting for.