I once worked at a very large multinational which had some of the worst management I have ever seen. It was so bad I took a course in management just to discover how wrong they were doing things. Calling this workplace dysfunctional would be an insult to dysfunction.
One of the managers, a Sales Director newly graduated from Stanford MBA program (and definitely the worst manager I have ever had), would say things directly from the MBA program "we want to have transparency" interjected with strange customer service comments like, "publicly positive privately negative" during our sales team meetings.
Then we learned what was happening under his management: hiring & promoting incompetents, taking people's sales commissions and repackaging them as bonuses for senior managers (ie himself), and firing people who disagreed with his view. While he was fired after 2 years of his destruction had battered our team, the horrible decisions he made stayed for many years after.
These bad decisions are too many to list, but I can summarize a few:
- Firing the best sales person.
- Coming up with arbitrary work (presentations, reports) for people to get evaluated by him.
- Learning other people's jobs & then telling them what they would now be changing -- without considering their feedback.
Then there was the sales guy who wws a total moron, but the corp couldnt fire him because they didnt have cause. So they promoted him to our Sales Director (which he remained for 1 year) before firing him for poor sales performance. He was going through a divorce, and he had a guest speaker for our sales team meeting -- his psychotherapist who talked about Buddhism and acceptance! That same sales meeting started with a disgruntled salesman projecting "Office Space" in the room before the start of the meeting. This was the closest to a real-life Dilbert experience I have ever had.
While it was a horrible experience, they did pay very well. It was a great education for me -- that management doesn't mean improvement or efficiency.
I have had excellent managers, for contrast. They were notable for a few strengths:
- Advocated for employees to their supervisors (ie protect their reports).
- Help remove obstacles from employees' path to success.
- Help develop employees.
- Listen to their employees and try to understand from their perspective.
- Not be domineering or waste their "authority influence" unless absolutely necessary.
- Have mastery level experience which others can use as a resource.
Now, onto my latest rant, which vaguely has to do with management:
Why are the ATS (Application Tracking Systems) used by big companies (Taleo, brassring, etc) so awful / horrible / badly made? Its astounding how bad these massive bloatware apps are, plus generally users have to retype & resubmit their data for each job!!
Every time I use a badly designed ATS system, it makes me question the quality of the place I'm applying at -- if they pay millions to have this obstacle between themselves and quality talent, blocking people out unthinkingly, maybe their management sucks too? Or worse, maybe when you get the job you have to waste hours of every day maneuvering horribly designed software (call it obstacleware or bloatware, but this is too soft IMO) foSidenote -- Why are the ATS (Application Tracking Systems) used by big companies (Taleo, brassring, etc) so awful horrible badly made?
Its astounding how bad these massive bloatware apps are, plus generally users have to retype & resubmit their data for each job!!
Every time I use a badly designed ATS system, it makes me question the quality of the place I'm applying at -- if they pay millions to have this obstacle between themselves and quality talent, blocking people out unthinkingly, maybe their management sucks too? Or worse, maybe when you get the job you have to waste hours of every day maneuvering horribly designed software (call it obstacleware or bloatware, but this is too soft IMO) for unnecessary reports or forms.
I worked in a company where they paid millions for an order entry system to replace our email orders. What resulted was a bloated piece of garbage where inputting a sale took hours (used to be minutes with an email) and throttled the effectiveness of a great salesforce.
Ultimately, management decided to manage the bottleneck by hiring 2-3 people per location with the responsibility of inputting sales orders!!! (And that "Sales Data Clerk" job was a horrible nonsensical job!)
I intimately quit my job because I was required to generate activity reports. At first, it was a monthly activity report highlighting what I had done. This seemed reasonable enough. Then it became weekly, which didn't make any sense, but when it became daily and I was supposed to spend the last hour of every day updating this report, I started feeling the side effects of horrible management: unnecessary stress, anger, pressure to document everything I was doing (which was unnecessary), and resentment. The final straw was when a friend who worked in the HQ compiled these reports into a master report for the Senior Director sent me a copy of the final report -- and discovered nothing I'd been reporting ever made it into the big report!! That caused me to have a physical aversion to writing the reports, which I could now clearly see were busywork, and ultimately helped me make the decision to leave my overpayed corporate tech support job.
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