In my decade long career, I’ve observed different types of managers: Good and bad; effective and ineffective; powerful and poor. Different.
Today I’m going to write about some of the common acts; one or more usually found in the managers who can be classified as ‘poor’ because they fail to serve the organization’s goal.
Here are 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Managers:
- 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 the self’ and don’t know what they don’t know.
- Cannot deal with change: It is said that ‘Change’ is the only constant in the business. Things change. Situations change. People 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 are not good at it.
- 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 replacements.
- Set lousy goals: They don’t really understand what it is like setting SMART goals. They don’t keep the goals written and their personal and professional goals are often overlapped. Pity is that, they are not much worried about it because they are unaware of their true priorities of life.
- 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 the available pool of talent…that’s what distinguishes them from the poor ones. But they just miss noticing that.
- Steal the credit: Whenever they get a chance, they love to grab the credit. “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, sometimes indirectly, encourage the poor manager to become poorer.
- 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 for people, for clients, and 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:
- Do you perform – knowing or unknowingly – any of the acts mentioned above?
- Even to a minor degree?
- Do you think you need to change it in order to be an effective manager?
