7 Acts of Poor Managers Who Gift Cancer To Their People, Their Clients and Their Businesses

In my decade long course of learning, unlearning and relearning  business and its management, I’ve observed different kind of managers.

Good and bad;  effective and ineffective; powerful and poor. Different.

Photo Credit: runran's Flickr photostream

Today I’m going to expel about some of the common acts; one or more usually found in the managers who can be classified as ‘poor’ and who unknowingly gift cancer to their team members, their clients and their business.

Here are those seven acts:

1. Take everyone and everything for granted: Nothing matters. Their own life, their family, their friends, their workplace, their team members, their customers… everyone and everything.  They don’t keep promises and usually take more things on their platter than they can eat and digest. They don’t know that management starts with ‘Managing Thyself’ and don’t know what they don’t know.
2. Cannot manage the face of change­: It is said that ‘Change’ is the only constant in the business. Things change. Situations change. People change. People also – Not very often but change. Everything changes. Being able to manage the self, the team, the operations and the projects on the face of change is the most important skill that is expected from a manager but they can hardly make it.
3. Change team members fast: Whenever their expectations are not met, they find out an excuse that the cause of the failure is their team member’s non-performance. So, they start losing trust in the team members and start to look for replacement.
4. Set lousy goals: They don’t really understand what’s setting SMART goals. They don’t keep it written and their personal and professional goals are overlapped. Pity is that, they are not much worried about it.
5. Focus on experience and titles rather than abilities and talents: They believe that more the experience, better the results. A good manager should always focus on making the best use of available pool of talent…that’s what distinguishes them from the poor ones. But they just miss to notice that.
6. Steal the credit: Whenever they get a chance, they love to grab it. “I did it” and “If I was not there, this task could never have been completed, you know!” are the favorite sentences in their vocabulary.  Such behaviors result in general dissatisfaction in the team and the team members also – may be indirectly – encourage the poor manager to become poorer.
7. Delegate what they should not: They focus on getting rid of their responsibilities and call it ‘delegation’. While in essence, delegation means, “To give somebody else the power to act, make decisions or allocate resources on your behalf.”  But they use delegation as an escape tool rather than an important weapon in getting things done.

Not being a manager is a better choice than being a poor manager. It’s a blessing, in fact… for the people, for the clients and for the businesses. Think and take corrective actions about it if you find any of the acts in your management repertoire.

3 Critical Questions For The Managers:

1. Do you perform – knowing or unknowingly – any of the acts mentioned above?
2. Even to a minor degree?
3. Do you think you need to change it in order to be an effective manager?

See Also:

1. Twelve Traits of Dependable Project Managers
2. My Happy Clients 12
3. Four Causes Of Poor Performance (And What You Can Do About Some Of Those)
4. 10 Peaks For Creating Performance Focused Teams
5. The Guaranteed Way To Best Manage A Project
6. A Path-Goal Based Approach That May Take Your Project Leadership Repertoire To The Next Level
7. Dependable Project Manager 9

Tagged as: Project Management, team management