Here are the 4 Qualities of Truly Horrible Managers.
One of the psychology research reveals the following below
facts.
Fifty per cent of managers are incompetent, so how did that
idiot get to be your boss?
Surveys keep telling us that between 65% and 75% of people
rate their managers as the worst aspect of their jobs.
Is this
just baseless moaning, or are they right?
Actually most are right since research into managers shows
that around 50% of them are incompetent (DeVries, 1993).
The reasons they can't do their jobs are pretty simple. When
Leslie and Van Velsor (1996) looked at the research across different
organisations and different employees, they found these four points summarised
the problems with failed managers (research described in Hogan & Kaiser,
2005):
A1: Poor
interpersonal skills. Horrible managers look down on you from on high
like irascible emperors. They are insensitive, cold and as likely to be nice to
you as give their pay-checks to charity.
A2: Can't
get the work done. They repeatedly set overly ambitious targets
and then repeatedly fail to meet them. They don't follow through on their
promises and they're likely to betray your trust.
A3: Can't
build a team. It's perhaps the most essential skill of being
a manager. Team-building requires building trust, assigning roles and goals,
promoting good communication and providing leadership. Terrible managers are
totally incapable of any of this.
A4: Can't
cope with promotion. Who knows how they got that promotion, but it's
clear the new job is beyond them. As soon as they're settled in, everything
starts to fall apart.
If 50% of managers are that bad, how do they become managers
in the first place?
The answer is that horrible managers do have desirable
qualities—that's how they got hired in the first place—but they also have
undesirable qualities, which often outweigh them.
Hogan and Hogan (1994) have looked at decades of research on
this and they find that most horrible managers have a personality disorder. And
the thing about personality disorders is:
Personality
disorders are hard to detect
Many horrible managers are narcissists and, sadly, people
like narcissists at first. They seem like fun people to be around.
In time, though, we come to notice that narcissists can't
learn from their mistakes and go around with a massive sense of entitlement.
What seemed charming on day one is revealed as arrogance
over time. Unfortunately this usually doesn't become obvious until too late.
Failure
of the selection process
Managers are often recruited from outside the organisation
using interviews.
Both narcissists and psychopaths are great at interviews:
making a good impression in these sorts of situations is what they excel at.
Instead, more formal selection tools should be used with
information collected about the person's ability to be a manager from the
people who know best: the manager's subordinates.
In other words: you should vote for your boss.
Can you imagine?
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