Beating Bad Bosses Blog – Our Top 7 Tips on How to Deal With Poor Management

by | Mar 11, 2010 | Blog, Management

  • Amy Letke

    Amy Newbanks Letke, SPHR, GPHR, is the Founder of Integrity HR, Inc. Amy provides workplace solutions to improve performance, reduce liability and increase profits. She is passionate about helping other entrepreneurs and business owners achieve success. Contact us for more insights - 502-753-0970 or info@integrityhr.com

The Start of a New Series

Today marks the start of another IntegrityHR blog series.  This will be an ongoing four part blog series coming to you over the next two weeks that gets down into the details of how to deal with poor management.  Don’t miss this one.  It might save your job, or even your company!

There’s a saying in corporate America that people don’t leave jobs, they leave their managers.  Promotions and pay increases notwithstanding, this is the case more often than not.  The people you work with every day can make or break your experience on a job, and it’s the manager of an organization that sets the tone and culture.  A great boss can make you want to stay a job that may not pay as much as another down the street, while a bad boss makes the 20% raise you took seem like the devil’s ransom.

What makes a manager a “bad boss”?  There are any number of things that contribute to poor management, but we’ve dug down to the deepest depths of your daily dose of doom in this beating bad bosses blog (ok, we’ll stop with the redundant letters) and have isolated the top seven categories of and how to deal with poor management

1) The Know It All Manager:

The Know It All Managers got where they are by knowing their jobs and doing them well.  They climbed the ladder quickly and resolutely and never looked back.  They are the experts in their fields.  And they know it.  And they will be absolutely certain that you know it.  The problem is that new talent can’t emerge under a “my way or the highway” mentality.

While these managers have a wealth of knowledge to share, they often fail to recognize the importance of new ideas. When they feel threatened by the new ideas, they turn to micro-managing, refusing to delegate, and demanding that their stamp of approval be placed on everything – leading to the development of an entirely unapproachable manager and a company that won’t develop.

2) The Know Nothing Manager:

The Know Nothing Managers, on the other hand, don’t want to leave their stamp, or their fingerprints, on anything.  They may claim that they are working on the “big picture”, but the real problem is that they don’t know the jobs they oversee well enough to dive in and do them themselves. The problem here is that they can’t engage their employees, their talent, their projects, or their tools if they don’t understand them.

Next thing you know, everyone is scrambling last minute to complete projects and meet deadlines due to their poor preparation and planning.  Because they don’t understand the jobs in their departments, they can’t build upon the skills within them, and therefore can’t build up their employees or develop them.  These managers recognize that their staff have skills that surpass their own and feel threatened by them, creating animosity and distance, and alienating the team that they are supposed to be leading.

This leads to disgruntled employees because its easy for them to see that their manager (who makes a lot more money than they do and does much less) doesn’t know the jobs that they get paid way less to do on a daily basis – needless to say a motivational killer.

Next Time:
In the next installment we will reveal the next two bad bosses, along with how they can lead to turmoil in your organization.  Keep reading folks.  This series may save your company. Click here to read the next blog in this series!

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