Introduction

Over the years, there have been many books and articles written on the subject of how to manage a company well. But how often do we examine the mistakes that managers make? What are the failure modes of a manager?

Most workers find good management to be an uncommon phenomenon. Hence the popularity of the comic strip

• Dilbert which finds humor in the many sufferings of the worker at the hands of management.

Workers are more likely to endure over the course of their careers a series of managerial failures caused by indept, self-serving managers whose mistakes are defended by equally inept, scheming peers and superiors.

A List of Management Failure Modes

Idleness, Inaction

• The mismanager is idle and lets himself (and his co-managers) be seen by underlings, conspicuously doing nothing and joking around. This causes outrage among hard-working employees and is demoralizing. Over time it leads to either the exit of hard-working people or they cease to work hard.
  • The mismanager as a consequence may be required to pull out the whip and demand hard work from underlings, which has little effect because he himself doesn't work hard.
• The mismanager knows that some workers are idle but just assumes they can be trusted not to create trouble for other workers, never telling them to keep silent.

Distractions

• The mismanager insists on an open workspace so that he can spy on everyone, even though open workspaces are proven to cause numerous distractions that prevent work from getting done.
  • Why Your Open Office Workspace Doesn't Work by David Burkus (Forbes)
  • The Origin of Cubicles and the Open-Plan Office by George Musser (Scientific American)
• In an open workspace, the mismanager allows idle workers to hang out noisily next to people who are hard at work, inevitably leading to the idle workers creating enormous noise and distraction.
• The mismanager allows and even fosters constant talking at work in the work area, which is distracting even in a cubicle environment, because he misunderstands that while collaboration is positive, it should happen in the lunchroom or hallway or somewhere else where it doesn't block work from happening.
  1. To make things worse he allows loud discussions about
  • divisive topics like politics and
  • frivolous discussions such as about celebrities.
  2. To make things worse he leads the noisy conversations, because
  • he has a big personality i.e. narcissism, or
  • he wants to be friends with underlings.
  3. To make things worse he prevents workers from finding ways to find quieter places
  to do their jobs e.g.
  • he blocks working from home;
  • he blocks working from an unused conference room.

Mistakes

• The mismanager considers every mistake to be a huge deal, utterly unforegivable, no matter how tiny, no matter how imaginary, and his identifying of the mistake is a cathartic experience for him, proof of his bogus superiority and bogus relative competence, and proof of his victim's (often wrongly attributed) inferiority or moral defectiveness (you lied to me) despite the mistake being misconstrued and only one data point.
  • In a sense, the mismanager is just another Karen for whom every innocent action is a major infraction, but unlike a traditional Karen he has actual power over people.
  • The mismanager himself usually makes many mistakes, at work and outside of work, in the present and in the past, and his accusing others of making mistakes is what psychologists call projection i.e. transferring a personal guilt onto another person.
  • Typically the mismanager knows he is incompetent and that he cannot do what the underling workers do.
• The mismanager from day one will be keeping score on every new hire, tallying up their mistakes to justify the day when he pounces on his victim, betraying their trust, declaring them unfit or morally wrong, projecting his incompetence and bad intentions onto them.
• The mismanager may claim that one single mistake proves a trend, indeed that it is a grand dramatic trend of historic proportions, arising from an unredeemable character flaw, when in fact the flaw is within himself.
• The mismanager blames the worker(s) for problems the worker(s) did not cause.
• The mismanager, in order to justify his unjust blaming, sinks to the cowardly practice of smearing:
  1. he spins evidence to claim bad intent
  2. he invents totally bogus evidence
  3. he takes the lies of others at face value.
  4. he refuses to say why he is blaming, to conceal his racism etc.
  5. he engages in favoritism, racism, ageism, sexism to support his accusations.
• If a worker fixes a mistake, even one the worker did not cause because the worker is acting on behalf of the team, the mismanager will not thank him or even acknowledge it.
• If a worker does not fix a mistake, even a falsely attributed or imaginary one, the mismanager mentions it over and over, first face-to-face, then in larger groups hoping to humiliate.
• If the worker makes an attempt at fixing a mistake, the mismanager who is a bully will try to blame his victim for not doing it right.
  • The mismanager's mantra is You're incompetent, not me.
• When the mismanager is a particularly mean bully, he will knowingly falsely blame a worker, because he knows this will make the worker disgruntled and discourage the worker from fixing the problem correctly or at all, and then he can then use the worker's not fixing it to blame him again.
  • If such a worker quits in disgust, such a manager will mention him behind his back, because every bully is a coward: speaking behind the worker's back is a cowardly attack.

Lack of compassion

• The mismanager is insensitive about workers who have a long commute.
• A mismanager might offer working from home as a reward to his approved sycophants.
• The bully mismanager knows that a stressful commute is a sensitive topic and a vulnerability, and will target that weakness by rescinding any work-at-home privilege when he wants to be petty.

Poor communication, miscommunication

• Castigating a worker for not knowing what a different worker did when you were not around to observe it, as if you were responsible for the other person despite not being their manager.
• Talking over you; cutting you off; ignoring what you say; talking at length to prevent you from talking. This simple rudeness may indicate egotism, disrespect, a pecking order or even fear of what you are going to say.
• The mismanager takes hours to respond to important questions that only he can answer, or simply ignores those questions thereby becoming himself an obstacle to work i.e. a blocker or someone who prevents people from doing their job.
  • To make things worse he then blames underlings for interrupting him.
  • To make things worse he blames the workers for not knowing the answers he would give i.e. for not being mind-readers, because if they were any good at their jobs they'd just know.
    • Thus he blames workers for not doing the impossible (mind-reading).
    • Thus he insults workers by claiming this means they are not good at their jobs.
  • He blames underlings for not knowing that they aren't supposed to have high expectations about communication, when really the workers just expect competent and responsible behavior from their manager.
• The mismanager fails to gtive clear instructions and directions about what tasks are important to him and how he wants them done. But he later blames workers for not doing it just the way he wants.
• The mismanager never asks workers for estimates of how long a task will take, but instead demands a death march when the deadline comes to get work done immediately.
• The mismanager doesn't want to admit that he doesn't know what to do, so when he provides vaguely worded task descriptions and never clarifies, he actively avoids and ignoring questions for clarification.
  • To make things worse, he blames workers whom he has blocked for not being self-starters.
• The insecure, inexperienced mismanager tries to keep up an appearance of being an expert, and is therefore bossy about how to do things, even preaching at more experienced employees.

Sycophants i.e. Cronies

• The mismanager allows his sycophants to bully workers and/or outside-help e.g. they might insult the cleaning staff.
• The mismanager allows his sycophants to become obstructions, preventing the work of non-favored employees.
• The mismanager just assumes his cronies are properly onboarding new workers, or workers who are new to a project, but the crony purposely doesn't do that, causing the newcomer being undermined by the crony; to which the mismanager responds by blaming the newcomer, not his sycophant friend. This truly awful mismanager gets pleasure watching his cronies create such drama and destruction.
• The mismanager delegates control to his sycophants to make his life easier or because he doesn' know how to do something.
  • However he never questions their competence or verifies their competence.
  • Power begins to shift to his sycophants until he becomes a willing puppet of them.
  • Management is a power trip for him and he experiences that power trip vicariously through his cronies.
• The manager is himself a sycophant, sucking up to and manipulating gullible upper management who are inclined to give him a pass because he is one of them.

Micromanaging

• The mismanager engages in micromanagement e.g. demanding status reports multiple times per day, for several possible reasons.
  1. He is micromanaging to pressure on underlings to deliver faster.
  1. He incorrectly estimated the date when a deliverable will be delivered,
  and doesn't want to look like a klutz.
  2. He's desperately seeking a bonus e.g. because he recklessly bought something expensive
  like a new sports car, assuming he'd get the bonus.
  3. He's seeking a promotion and is happy to push others down in order
  to rise up himself.
  2. He is micromanaging because he's insecure about his ability to manager
  and whether he will lose control.
  3. He is micromanaging because he's an egotist (e.g. with a PhD) who has condescending
  views about your competence.

Bad organization of work

• The mismanager is switching workers from task to task before any task is complete.
  1. This indicates bad planning, panic and perhaps a worker shortage e.g. as when other workers have quit.
  2. This could indicate an attempt to sabotage underlings whom the mismanager doesn't like.
• The mismanager doesn't know what he wants but wants it now and wants it to be perfect.
  • The work specification changes often.
  • The new work has to be done yesterday.
  • The new work has to be perfect.
  • But the specification is unclear, is vague, is never written down.
  • Due to the managers' indecisiveness, work gets delayed while you wait for clarification, but he blames you for missing a deadline.
  • Due to the managers' indecisiveness, you try to improvise, but when you do so, the mismanager condemns your ideas and thinking.
• The mismanager doesn't ask the workers how long a task will take before making unrealistic promises to bosses.
  • He lies to his bosses about what is possible within some timeframe.
  • He conceals from his underlings the promises he has made.
  • He puts undue pressure on underlings to finish tasks sooner than is possible.
  • He causes workers to burn out by working them long hours and constantly badgering them, but never apologizes and never accepts responsibility for his behavior.
  • He keeps team members in the dark about the reasons for his rushing them.
  • Perhaps he expects a big bonus for working people like slaves and has stupidly already spent the money.

Tools

• The mismanager insists on using the wrong tool regardless of:
  1. whether the tool is even needed at all,
  2. whether it's the appropriate tool for our usage,
  3. whether it's even fit for purpose,
  4. whether it's the best one available,
  5. whether it's unusually difficult to use or learn,
  6. whether he is willing to provide training to learn it (he isn't),
  7. everyone knows he is friends with the idiots who own the company that sells it,
• Multiple similar tools are used across project treams because the mismanager is not knowledgeable or brave enough to tell project managers that they can and must standardize; instead he treats them like princes/princesses who can have whatever they want, no matter the costs or downsides.
• The mismanager decides to outsource numerous functions to other companies, for instance every tool is web-based or app-based and is provided by other companies.
  • If anything goes wrong (service interruptions, software bugs), workers' time is wasted dealing with some other company.
  • Fees always add up fast.
  • Company secrets and workers' personal info risk being stolen when they are spread across numerous other companies' servers.
  • Workers are presented with an array of tools that they can optionally use for something or other, but they never use 90% of them.

Blaming

• The mismanager blames workers for factors completely outside their control, like traffic, airport delays, weather problems, etc.
• The mismanager blames workers for mistakes made by himself e.g. when he doesn't tell workers what they need to know to do their jobs, or misleads those workers with bad information.
• The mismanager blames workers for mistakes made by other workers or other teams e.g. some software was misconfigured.
• The mismanager blames workers who point out problems that are impeding their work, rather than praise them for being proactive. This is because the problems make the mismanager look bad and/or may lead to an investigation.
• The mismanager who speaks terrible English blames workers for their not understanding him, even though he uses wrong words for concepts, leaves out words, uses wrong word order, and uses idiomatic expressions unknown in English, etc. Even though only 50% of what he said is intelligible, he insists he speaks English and saying otherwise is offensive.

Outsourcing

• The mismanager takes a harsh and self-serving view of local workers as always insufferable and incompetent, no matter how polite and effective they are, but meanwhile the mismanager praises an offshore team to the sky, even though his own poor management skills or difficult personality exasperate tensions with local workers (perhaps on purpose).
  • It may be that he is accepting bribes from the offshore team's management.
  • It may be that his managers are promising him bonuses for offshoring work.
• The mismanager embraces outsourcing as a panacea, much as how an alcoholic embraces booze.
  • He starts out by accepting only low-cost, high-quality geniuses, which overseas companies only offer temporarily to get the business, but the offshore team gradually provides worse and less-experienced workers until they are the majority. Thus the offshore company forces the mismanager to lower his standards until any novice or hobbyist will do.
  • To the mismanager, the more offshore workers that are employed, the better, because like an alcoholic seeking more and more booze, always more of it to solve his problems.
• The mismanager takes bribes from outsourcing companies to send work overseas, because he thinks he will never get caught and he deserves a new:
  1. house
  2. car
  3. foreign wife
  4. bogus feeling of winning to address a midlife crisis.
• The mismanager is himself a foreigner who looks down on locals and he is racist, religiously bigoted, etc., so he is eager to avoid hiring local workers and seeks to bring in his fellow countrymen from abroad or hire local fellow immigrants.
• The mismanager treats offshore staff like golden boys even though they do shoddy work. To him they can do no wrong, but local experts keep telling him their work is shitty.
• The mismanager is eager to quickly to forgive any and all mistakes by the offshore workers, but for a local worker, the mismanager considers even the most trivial mistake that doesn't have any impact whatsoever to be a major and grave catastrophe, requiring the mismanager to call out the local person and shame them.
• The mismanager becomes the offshore team's hatchet man.
  1. On their behalf, he maligns local staff every chance he gets e.g.
  1. Misinterpreting their progress reports to claim a project somehow failed or is late.
  2. Putting them in a position to fail e.g. not telling them what they need to know.
  3. Inventing requirements that were never communicated to claim the local worker is doing things wrong.
  4. Firing local workers the moment foreign workers can be brought in.
  2. He blindly believes every invented complaint from the offshore staff about local staff, because the offshore team and the mismanager together always seek to have local staff discredited, disbelieved, disgraced, fired, replaced.

And so on

I'm currently editing this part!

• Bad managers are hire two-faced backstabbers who routinely betray them. And those bad managers subsequently refuse to believe they have been betrayed. And those bad managers strike out at the messenger(s) who told them the true facts.
• Management by amnesia: All debates won with great effort, all points made and agreed upon, and all concessions achieved are forgotten and the manager pretends they never occurred.
• All feedback is expressed in the form of blaming
  • Blowing up tiny problems pretending they are large problems to justify blaming.
  • Blaming the over-worked person for not doing some trivial thing or not forseeing some minor problem.
  • Feedback is always from a deranged and/or harsh viewpoint in which partial evidence or no evidence at all is the basis for jumping to wild conclusions about willingness to be a team-player, overall competence, willingness to work, etc.
  • Blaming for not complying with an arbitrary demand to use various shitty software or hardware.
• The manager(s) tell you that you signed off on some work task when you did not.
• You signed off some early work task however the task then changed and now management insists your previous approval covers the new work when it does not.
• Multiple managers give you multiple directions, and these conflict.
  • This may indicate pettiness between managers.
  • This may indicate their disrespect for underlings.
• The mismanager has an attitude that meetings are meant to be won and that the other side must just accept whatever he says, because he is the manager and they are the underling. Therefore the underling has nothing of value to contribute to the conversation.
• The mismanager insists that underlings have to listen to feedback, which it turns out is just his slanted opinions that are based on invalid evidence. He thinks feedback is sacrosanct (it isn't) and can't be debated (it can).
• Trying to shame a person in front of other workers about made-up problems in order to make them quit.
• Adding insult to injury: Blaming you for not following orders when multiple managers are giving you differing orders.
• Blaming the victim: Berating you for not complaining enough about having multiple managers!
• Hovering over you; watching your every move; demanding that you do or type whatever they say. This is micromanagement; it may indicate egotism, emotional immaturity and disrespect.
• Dismissing your ideas. This is anti-team behavior; it may indicate a big ego, a pecking order or personal disrespect.
• Not sharing crucial information like who is the designated team lead,
• Blaming making a complaint to a worker not/ based on facts but on wrong assumptions. Not bothering to check facts before jumping to a conclusion.
• Walking up to a worker at an inopportune time e.g. early morning and demanding to know on the spot what he did the previous day, which has been forgotten.
• Blaming a person wrongly and later claiming it was just asking not blaming.
• Refusing to be corrected about wrong facts.
• Refusing to have bad behavior discussed or even pointed out.

Basic business processes

• Not taking responsiblity for new workers' needs such as:
  1. Getting set up with a laptop.
  2. Getting set up with necessary accounts.
  3. Instructing the new employee on everything he needs to know to do the job.
• Failing to get a new worker their badge and forgetting to follow up and make sure it happens.

Meetings

• Using multiple scheduling systems and blaming people who don't receive meeting invites.
• Failing to send out complete meeting invitations e.g. missing room information, missing videoconference link, wrong time.
• Scheduling a meeting for only an hour in the future and then acting surprised when people hear about the meeting and don't attend.

Tools

• Requiring that workers install an application that requires a license and then not providing that license.
• Requiring that workers use an application that is ineffective, tedious, time-consuming which forces workers to refuse using it; subsequently seeking revenge against workers who rejected the bad software.