Don't Ask SME Where All The Productivity Went: Management Horror Stories

[stuff_it]

The UK continues to have dreadful productivity stats, and poor management/leadership is rife. I'm guessing we've all got a few corkers to tell about laughably poor management and leadership practices at work.

It's probably best if we try and anonymize things.

I'll get us started:

"A small manufacturer of consumables for a popular hobby/sport had just been taken over by a global leader in manufacturing equipment for this same hobby/sport.

The merger was going poorly, and a manager was , parachuted in from The Netherlands to this company's base in the UK, daily team meetings including temps and everyone were made compulsory, and the multinational purchaser basically went all out to drag this company and its management/admin into the 21st century.

The Office Manager had been in charge of deploying a CRM solution prior to all this. They had no idea what CRM was or what it was for, but was too scared to ask for training due to impending redundancies. She banned any other staff from making changes to it, kept it all on her work laptop instead of the server, and in the end walked out, locking her hard drive with a BIOS password before disappearing."

I also had one temp job where I wasn't allowed to use the photocopier, as I hadn't been on the one-full-day training course, and didn't have the certificate. There was nothing unusual or different about this photocopier.

 

[equationgirl]

Well there's a lot on the work frustrations thread already...

 

[Pickman's model]

All management is a horror story

 

[Abscissa]

That sounds so horrible.

 

[dessiato]

My uncle once worked for a food processor which, although small, was always busy. They decided, because they were always busy with new orders coming in, they didn't need a sales department. So all the sales staff were made redundant. They closed within two years.

 

[nogojones]

That sounds so horrible.

Truly horrid Abscissa

I like your compassion. Welcome to Urban

 

[8ball]

My uncle once worked for a food processor which, although small, was always busy. They decided, because they were always busy with new orders coming in, they didn't need a sales department. So all the sales staff were made redundant. They closed within two years.

Similar decision at a place where I worked, there was a common and very costly error that people were making while in a bit of a rush, so a programmer created a warning that came up when pressing a certain combination of buttons that said "STOP! - CAREFUL, NOW! - Have you checked for...etc etc".

This simple step of adding an alert massively reduced this particular cock-up. So management patted themselves on the back at a job well done, and promptly switched off the alert.