Dealing with Bad Managers

Bad managers obviously affect corporate culture in a negative way, but they also contribute negatively in other ways.  They increase the costs of turn over while affecting the corporate reputation of a company. There is also the out of pocket expense of recruiting, and the costs of training people to replace the outgoing employees.  So in summary, that bad manager who you think is the rain maker for the company or the jerk who your biggest customer seems to like? well, maybe you need to break down the costs of keeping him.

What to do when one has a bad manager?

It is often said that someone with a bad manager should go to human resources to report and solve this type of problem. Unfortunately, a poor manager or a bully manager will not usually take well to third party confrontation, and will usually seek revenge on the employee who goes directly to H.R.

The best solution is often to approach the manager in a non-confrontational way. When addressing them, it is important to always focus on appearing that you want them to look good in their jobs. The following is the type of script that should be considered. "Look, I feel that I am not  satisfying your requirements and I want to make sure that we are both able to achieve our goals and ensure that you are leading a high performing team. I sense frustration in how things are going and I would like to address these frustrations now to ensure that we can continue moving ion the right direction."

Aggressive managers or bully managers usually have high egos, and by stroking those egos and showing that you are not threatening their stature in any way, they will often cause a poor manager to correct their course.

In most situations that I have come across with candidates, the going directly to HR approach usually delays the inevitable, where the employee eventually moves on to somewhere else. The manager often doesn't appreciate having a new file created for them in the human resource department and in most cases the employee leaves the company in one way or another.

It is not always easy for some types of personalities to directly address a manager in this fashion, but it is certainly the most effective way to resolve the situation and should be explored.

It used to be that organizations were much larger, and if there were certain issues that employees had, human resource departments could sometimes help transfer people to different areas that were more insulated from problematic relationships.  As organizations have become smaller and more flat, it is now much less common and less possible for employees to be moved to other areas so again this approach is not as viable.

Farewell,

Mike