As a former manager (who sounds like a good one), are you able to shine any light on why management cultures appear so reluctant to eject malignant managers?
Any bad employee will damage the business and those around them. But where a typical bottom-rung grunt has a very small scope of influence and is relatively easy to fire, even a mid-level manager has more than enough power to ruin entire departments; and once they’re c-suite the game is all but done.
why management cultures appear so reluctant to eject malignant managers?
A typical engineer will gladly stab another in the back for something so trivial as what nearly-identical-anyway programming language or framework or IDE to use. Meanwhile managers, like lawyers, accountants, doctors, teachers and every other profession, prioritise solidarity within the profession. We can debate whether that’s good or bad but there’s no doubt why they prosper while engineers are the first to be outsourced or exploited.
Very true. I have noticed this too at my company. Other departments promote people more, hire faster, waste money on offsite fun meetings whereas engineering rarely promotes people and generally makes each other’s lives miserable. In the Gervais principle hierarchy I definitely feel we are the losers.
Don’t know if you ever worked as a lawyer but “solidarity” isn’t a core value.
Solidarity to the profession. They may squabble amongst themselves but they’ll never compromise the general prestige of lawyering. Nor tell the client that what they do is easy and anyone can learn it, even if that’s true.
I can’t comment on that. I have no problem firing anyone, including myself, if that was beneficial to the team. I want to enjoy work as it’s such a big part of life. And if I can’t create the circumstances that enable me and the people around me to enjoy their job, I’m out. Thats why for the last 4 years, I ran one man company, working from home.
Any bad employee will damage the business and those around them. But where a typical bottom-rung grunt has a very small scope of influence and is relatively easy to fire, even a mid-level manager has more than enough power to ruin entire departments; and once they’re c-suite the game is all but done.