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Dumb Management Mistakes
By peace | December 11, 2006
Men Working By Retro
Stupid management mistakes never cease to amaze me.
Every day I hear stories from people that leave me wondering why smart managers can be so dumb. And it just keeps happening.
Got a problem? Set up a committee?
Want someone to do something? Throw them in to the deep end with little training, then come down hard on them when they stuff up.
Ask your workforce for feedback, then ignore everything that’s been suggested.
Want to treat your staff like demented idiots who can’t think for themselves? Just micro-manage everything and talk down to them when they come up with ideas.
Susan Heathfield at About.com has come up with her own list of Twenty Dumb Things Organisations Do To Mess Up
Their Relationship With People.
Two Men Working on Car By Nelson Figueredo
Twenty Dumb Mistakes
Here are the twenty dumb mistakes organizations make to mess up their relationships with the people they employ:
1) Add another level of hierarchy because people aren’t doing what you want them to do. (More watchers get results!)
2) Appraise and bonus the performance of individuals and complain that you cannot get your staff working as a team.
3) Add inspectors and multiple audits because you don’t trust people’s work to meet standards.
4) Fail to create standards and give people clear expectations so they know what they are supposed to do, and wonder why they fail.
5) Create hierarchical, permission steps and other roadblocks that teach people quickly their ideas are subject to veto and wonder why no one has any suggestions for improvement. (Make people beg for money!)
6) Ask people for their opinions, ideas, and continuous improvement suggestions, and fail to implement their suggestions or empower them to do so. Better? Don’t even provide feedback about whether the idea was considered.
7) Make a decision and then ask people for their input as if their feedback mattered.
Find a few people breaking rules and company policies and chide everybody at company meetings rather than dealing directly with the rule breakers. Better? Make everyone wonder “who” the bad guy is.
9) Make up new rules for everyone to follow as a means to address the failings of a few.
10) Provide recognition in expected patterns so that what started as a great idea quickly becomes entitlement.
11) Treat people as if they are untrustworthy - watch them, track them, admonish them for every slight failing - because a few people are untrustworthy.
12) Fail to address behavior and actions of people that are inconsistent with stated and published organizational expectations and policies. (Better yet, let non-conformance go on until you are out of patience; then ambush the next offender with a disciplinary action!)
13) When managers complain they cannot get to all of their reviews because they have too many directly reporting staff members, hire more supervisors to do reviews. (Fail to recognize that an hour per quarter per person invested in development is the manager’s most important job.)
14) Create policies for every contingency, thus allowing very little management latitude in addressing individual employee needs.
15) Conversely, have so few policies, that employees feel as if they reside in a free-for-all environment of favoritism and unfair treatment.
16) Make every task a priority. People will soon believe there are no priorities. More importantly, they will never feel as if they have accomplished a complete task or goal.
17) Schedule daily emergencies that prove to be false. This will ensure employees don’t know what to do, or are, minimally, jaded about responding when you have a true customer emergency.
18) Ask employees to change the way they are doing something without providing a picture of what you are attempting to accomplish with the change. Label them “resisters” and send them to change management training when they don’t immediately hop on the train.
19) Expect that people learn by doing everything perfectly the first time rather than recognizing that learning occurs most frequently in failure.
20) Letting a person fail when you had information, that he did not, which he might have used to make a different decision.
These various ingredients add up to a recipe for disaster if you want to be the employer of choice in the next decade.
Dumb things include failing to tell people what they’re supposed to do and then wondering why they fail, adding layers of paperwork and bureaucracy to stop things getting done and treating people as if they are untrustworthy.
Another one is telling employees to change the way they are doing things without providing a good explanation why, and then sending them off to change management training, or Siberia, when they resist.
Does any of this sound familiar? Any to add?
