Lack of Management Responsability

devnull

Has anyone here had a situation with a manager that constantly makes bad and rushed decisions, that are not thought through and lack any kind of preparation and then has shifted the blame to the staff when things predictably go badly? If so, How have you dealt with that manager?

Got a re-occuring problem with a manager at the moment who seems to rush everything through without checking anything and seems to be of the attitude that she doesn't need to check anything?

OMM 0000

Use it to your advantage.

Ask her can you help review documents / processes / whatever she is creating.

Ask her can you take on some of her responsibilities.

Ask her can you help in any way to improve things.

Make yourself her friend rather than her enemy.

devnull

She's quite egoistic though, of the belief that she doesn't need to review any of these things.

I've previously made my feelings known about some of the flawed and rushed processes she has implemented and forecasted that they will have a serious impact on the business if they are not properly planned and thought through.

When things go wrong ultimately she turns around and says that she needs me to do my job and my performance is rated based on several key performance indicators that her decisions keep sabotaging.

Unfortunately there is a bit of culture in the company of managers shifting blame to subordinates who then need to bail the manager out for bad decisions by working excessive amounts of overtime for free to recover the situation.

The problem is, that each time we do that, we're an enabler of bad practice. One of the most recent cases involved in her accidentally deleting a batch of business critical paperwork from the last 6 months as she took it upon herself to clear up the shared drives based on what she thought was important without consulting anyone.

JustAThought

Who is her boss so? Put you concerns in writing to your boss and when it happens again write her a follow up. If it happens a third time to your financial cost then score to her again and then to her boss on the grounds that it is affecting your take home pay. You can kiss your salary and role goodbye thou.

HR are typically utterly useless and will side with managers on every turn while makig sucking noises to you.

If the whole place is used to running like that its probably an ongoing frustrating mess . Why not just start putting out CV's? Some things you cant fix.

Glass fused light

devnull wrote: »

When things go wrong ultimately she turns around and says that she needs me to do my job and my performance is rated based on several key performance indicators that her decisions keep sabotaging.

Unfortunately there is a bit of culture in the company of managers shifting blame to subordinates who then need to bail the manager out for bad decisions by working excessive amounts of overtime for free to recover the situation.

If the culture in the business is blame mistakes downward the best thing is a CV. If its a sh*t only rolls down hill organisation that is not going to change.
You can only document in writing
Document the risk and downsides of her decisions.
Document how the decisions are negatively impacting your kpi.
Document the additional overtime.
Document the impact on your pay.
do a simple exercise and determine your actual hourly rate:
take home/contract hours v take home/actual hrs worked
How much of a pay cut has she given by her actions?

You can spend your time document and fighting your corner but will the culture change and will it help your pay packet or career advancement prospects?

beauf

Cultural change happens from the top down.

You won't be able to change it from the bottom up.

So you have to move laterally or elsewhere.

Love2love

JustAThought wrote: »

HR are typically utterly useless and will side with managers on every turn while makig sucking noises to you.

That's simply not true. HR is there to protect the organisation and if that means taking measures against management for the good the company it will. HR like metrics so by calculating the cost of the mistakes as advised above is a good way of putting it to them.

I am in a similar position with a manager I can only describe as narcissistic and believes that anyone challenging her decision is insubordinate. I find now that I email everything when dealing with her. If she makes a decision I will follow it up with "This may be the potential outcome for this decision so can you please confirm that you wish to proceed?" Make sure you can track it back to her. I find she is less inclined to rush into things then.

devnull

It is not my boss - My boss isn't perfect but he's nothing majorly bad. This manager works in another department but the work that their department do has a lot of effect on the department that I work in so if they make errors or do not plan properly it has a fairly serious impact on us.

The latest issue happened this weekend. They were upgrading the server system for GDPR compliance for our documents which effects both the work we do in Ireland and in the UK. Before hand they asked us to clear our files and delete anything we didn't need to make the new shares cleaner.

This morning I was informed that as people did not clean their shares enough it will take another week to restore all documents. This is my departments busiest time of the year. I need those documents sooner and I pleaded for weeks that could the migration be delayed two weeks or done a week earlier to avoid any potential issues as I had concerns it was being rushed through. I am senior in my department and I was not consulted at all, neither was my boss.

The mail from the manager has gone out and said due to people not following instructions everyone has to suffer and we should blame the people who didn't delete enough of their documents and that she will not accept some of the emails and passive aggressive responses she has got from staff because it is not her fault since if we did our job properly the work would already have been migrated.

I've since spoke to the local IT guy who says that he felt they should delay the work by another week because they had no idea of how much data they were moving and it will not be so quick. However he was over-ruled on the basis that the manager felt that a lot of people had a lot of junk that they would delete so there is no need to worry about having to move vast quantities of data.

But that's the company culture all over, no focus on prevention of problems, just blame the people at the end of a long line of management mistakes rather than the steps that led to it in the first place. Working in a company that has strong links to the public sector really has been a baptism of fire for me.

Sir Oxman

Would you mind not using the term subordinates.

It's demeaning and shows where you look at yourself as well to be honest

Fcking hate that term.

beauf

The aim in the public sector is not to get the thing done, but to make sure you don't get blamed for something going wrong. They spend more effort doing that, than actually trying to get things done right.

Not all places but it's a recurring theme.

To be honest it all sounds completely dysfunctional and there's a lot more than one or two causing it.

qwerty13

devnull wrote: »

It is not my boss - My boss isn't perfect but he's nothing majorly bad. This manager works in another department but the work that their department do has a lot of effect on the department that I work in so if they make errors or do not plan properly it has a fairly serious impact on us.

The latest issue happened this weekend. They were upgrading the server system for GDPR compliance for our documents which effects both the work we do in Ireland and in the UK. Before hand they asked us to clear our files and delete anything we didn't need to make the new shares cleaner.

This morning I was informed that as people did not clean their shares enough it will take another week to restore all documents. This is my departments busiest time of the year. I need those documents sooner and I pleaded for weeks that could the migration be delayed two weeks or done a week earlier to avoid any potential issues as I had concerns it was being rushed through. I am senior in my department and I was not consulted at all, neither was my boss.

The mail from the manager has gone out and said due to people not following instructions everyone has to suffer and we should blame the people who didn't delete enough of their documents and that she will not accept some of the emails and passive aggressive responses she has got from staff because it is not her fault since if we did our job properly the work would already have been migrated.

I've since spoke to the local IT guy who says that he felt they should delay the work by another week because they had no idea of how much data they were moving and it will not be so quick. However he was over-ruled on the basis that the manager felt that a lot of people had a lot of junk that they would delete so there is no need to worry about having to move vast quantities of data.

But that's the company culture all over, no focus on prevention of problems, just blame the people at the end of a long line of management mistakes rather than the steps that led to it in the first place. Working in a company that has strong links to the public sector really has been a baptism of fire for me.

I am not fully informed on GDPR. But my impression was that you declare / justify your use of data, or lose it. It sounds like your team didn’t bother complying with GDPR regulations, and are now whinging because they can no longer access the data that they need.

Did you have an opportunity to guide your team as to the consequences of not following GDPR team instructions? If so, did you do this?

beauf

Sounds like everyone is ignoring everything unless it originates in their team. That includes communication between teams.

But if no one is made responsible then no one takes ownership.

Classic PS to be honest. Or large corporates.

beauf

Your posting is very specific and probably identifiable.

beauf

devnull wrote: »

The problem is the people who are responsible for causing other departments problems are depending on that department to fix these issues, even though they are caused by another departments poor decision making....

They should make a completion report detailing the time taken to fix issues, change requests etc.

People have a tendency to stop doing stupid things if they are documented. You have to do it in such way that it's not obviously highlighting anyone one person. Otherwise it comes across like a witch hunt.

beauf

Let metrics tell the story and take the heat.

Some trend lines can also be useful.