The Work Thread 2 - Get back to work!

[Qikz]

I support over 100 smaller businesses and I can tell you first hand that middle management in all of those companies is pointless. Maybe it serves its purpose in big organisations but I'm yet to see it ever make a positive impact on smaller businesses.

The CEO or MD of a company can't make decisions on every single thing that comes along. So they create rules and guidelines and then delegate certain amounts of decision making to a rung of management below them. The larger the company the more rungs there are.

If anything I would say middle management is more effective in a smaller company because there are less points of dilution.

The structure is pretty sound. The problem is normally the types of people that are put in middle management positions.

My company is a company of 15ish people. They took 2 engineers away from doing engineer work to be middle managers and they actually make things worse. They have no decision making power at all and all they do all day is micromanage people and complain if someones call stats are lower or if their ticket stats are lower.

If they were engineers, the work load for everyone would be in a better position and we'd waste less time doing admin work just so the middle managers had something to criticise.

[Sandy]

My company is a company of 15ish people. They took 2 engineers away from doing engineer work to be middle managers and they actually make things worse. They have no decision making power at all and all they do all day is micromanage people and complain if someones call stats are lower or if their ticket stats are lower.

If they were engineers, the work load for everyone would be in a better position and we'd waste less time doing admin work just so the middle managers had something to criticise.

That's not following the model then. It's just a stupid decision by the person in charge.

If you're not going empower the management to create effective change and you're going to get two people to do it by taking from other roles then you've just added 2 pointless roles to your structure and reduced your workforce.

[Victor Mildew]

Sounds like someone needs a pizza party!

[Moggy]

Staydead is correct. Middle management is infested with bellends.

[Oblomov Boblomov]

If every middle manager you've met is a bellend, it might be worth asking, 'am I the problem?'

This thread would be about ten pages long if we followed that rule in here. Stop spoiling our fun!

[<]:^D]

spot the defensive bellen- i mean middle-managers

[Rocsteady]

To be fair, middle managers can be bloody awful. Mine sort of presented my 'promotion' today on our team call. I got promoted months ago and it was nothing more than an email signature change. Just sat stone faced through the whole thing, what the actual strawberry float. Americans man, think she expected me to be grateful.

[Red]

I've never been a middle manager but I've had gooseberry fool and decent ones. Usually the problem I find is they're following a different agenda to people on my (minion) level (budget, efficiency, blah blah) so we come to blows. But it would have been chaos in other ways if they hadn't.

[Qikz]

The way I view middle management roles is they're for people who they don't want to leave the company, but have hit the peak of what a role would be in an actual working role. People want promotions or they'll leave, so they give them a title and a job that doesn't really amount to anything just to keep them in the company.

[Trelliz]

The way I view middle management roles is they're for people who they don't want to leave the company, but have hit the peak of what a role would be in an actual working role. People want promotions or they'll leave, so they give them a title and a job that doesn't really amount to anything just to keep them in the company.

[Oblomov Boblomov]

So what we've learnt is that some people are dickheads and some systems are set up really badly?

Archive request for future generations.

To be fair StayDead I had no idea your company was so small. So have you got like 2-3 execs, 2 middle managers and then only 10-11 engineers? That is obviously a ridiculous balance, especially as the middle managers have no actual decision-making authority. Sounds like a situation where the execs have decided they don't want to do much work at all, just retain control of decisions.

[Qikz]

So what we've learnt is that some people are dickheads and some systems are set up really badly?

Archive request for future generations.

To be fair StayDead I had no idea your company was so small. So have you got like 2-3 execs, 2 middle managers and then only 10-11 engineers? That is obviously a ridiculous balance, especially as the middle managers have no actual decision-making authority. Sounds like a situation where the execs have decided they don't want to do much work at all, just retain control of decisions.

Yeah that's the balance we have. We're getting an extra engineer on Monday which should be nice though. Your explanation is spot on as well.

[Jenuall]

I've worked directly under about 10 or so middle managers in my career and have had plenty of interactions and awareness of many others beyond that and can only think of one that was genuinely bad or not doing something that was valuable.

The bad one was ex military and was a combination of insane and utterly dependent on the highly structured and "chain of command" nature of the military world that just did not translate into the commercial space he now found himself in. He spoke almost entirely in a combination of the worst of management speak and military terminology - "We've got something coming up on our radar", "I'm going to hand the conn over to you and let you land the plane on this one" etc. He had no idea about managing projects or people which led to huge numbers of problems with scheduling, client relationships and staff morale and he effectively lost us a piece of work that should have kept us going for a good 5 years within the first few months of being involved. He also had serious anger management issues and would fly off the handle at the best of times, the worst of which was when he stormed out of our office and smashed a door off its hinges, and he resulted in at least one member of staff going off work for stress.

So yeah mostly I've found middle managers to be decent enough, but the one who wasn't really strawberry floating wasn't!

[Ste]

I'm a middle manager! Currently managing a team of 10 people.

I never wanted to be a manager. Just ended up in that position after a restructure.

I always thought being a manager would be easy. I think because I naively thought everyone would have a similar attitude to me in that:
Most people work because they have too
There's far more important things in life than work
But - I get the job done and take pride in my work and accept that there are certain rules that you simply have to follow

It's all about perspective/balance. I think I've got the right balance.

But being a manager is tough! Having to deal with all different personalities and attitudes. When I used to do the job itself, if I made a mistake I felt personally responsible. Now as a manager I feel responsible for mistakes people I manage make - and some don't give a strawberry float.

My approach to management has been "I know this is just a job and no-one would be here if you didn't have to be, so I'll do everything I can to make being here and doing your job as "enjoyable" as possible but in return you are getting paid to do a job and I expect you to do it to the best of your ability".

I also know the job the people I have to manage have to do - having done it myself. I wouldn't want to manage people who are doing a job that I haven't done.

From a time keeping point of view, for me, I'm more interested in the job getting done that working x amount of hours for the sake of it. I quite often tell the people in my team to simply log off early if they've done their work for the day. No point being logged on for the sake of it. But in return, if there was ever a busy period and/or something simply needed doing by a certain time I would hope they worked a little longer than expected in order to get the job done.

Personally if someone is late now and then as long as the job is getting done then it doesn't bother me.

But I can see why persistent lateness is an issue. Ultimately if you are contracted to start work at a certain time then thats when you should aim to start.

I find too many people don't think about the ramifications of if everyone was doing what they are doing.

[Bunni]

I'm a middle manager. Anything to top don't want to do is my job, and anything the bottom can't do is my job. Despite being thrown extra work from both angles, I enjoy it.

[Jenuall]

Just received an email from someone with the non-word "ideation" in it. I think I threw up a bit in my mouth when I read it.

[Bunni]

Just received an email from someone with the non-word "ideation" in it. I think I threw up a bit in my mouth when I read it.

As in suicidal ideation?

[Jenuall]

Just received an email from someone with the non-word "ideation" in it. I think I threw up a bit in my mouth when I read it.

As in suicidal ideation?

No, that would be much more valid. The sentence in question was:

"As lockdown eases we need to see more solution ideation across industry colleagues before engaging with the client"

[aayl1]

Just received an email from someone with the non-word "ideation" in it. I think I threw up a bit in my mouth when I read it.

As in suicidal ideation?

No, that would be much more valid. The sentence in question was:

"As lockdown eases we need to see more solutions ideation across industry colleagues before engaging with the client"

They're not even saving time.

[Jenuall]

Just received an email from someone with the non-word "ideation" in it. I think I threw up a bit in my mouth when I read it.

As in suicidal ideation?

No, that would be much more valid. The sentence in question was:

"As lockdown eases we need to see more solutions ideation across industry colleagues before engaging with the client"

They're not even saving time.

I don't know, if the thing they are trying to optimise is the journey from someone reading the email to that person then being physically sick I think they have saved a lot of time!