Terrible (and good) Managers

To complete the trio of manager threads, tell me about your worst managers, your best managers and your current manager, if you wish.

Tim Sherwood was shit

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manager in a call centre once bought us all ice lollies one day in the summer

don’t remember anything else about her but she was probably my favourite manager because of that. what a cheap way to buy someone off.

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All of my managers at M&S were jobsworthy cunts. Having been given the heave ho one thing it taught me was to always stand up to your manager if you think they’re in the wrong. Spent far too long in that job thinking they were doing me a favour.

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I like managers who don’t check my browsing history

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My last manager was a really lovely person and I really liked her away from work stuff. She was actually brilliant at the pastoral care side of things and totally had our backs, but…

She was an absolutely insane micro manager, I’ve never seen anything like it. People used to tear their hair out trying to get documents finalised with her as it could take MONTHS of review. Almost every single person that quit under her did so because of micro management. Used to email me big long emails at 3am.

Examples included:

Calling me at 8pm on a Sunday because it was snowing down south and wanted to check I wasn’t going to be driving in the snow. I explained I was 400 miles away and it wasn’t snowing here and snow wasn’t forecast. We spent another 20 minutes discussing the risks of me driving the next day :woman_facepalming:. The following day I arrived on site to 3 missed calls, two text messages (on both work and personal phone) 2 voicemails and finally an email wanting to know I’d made it onto site ok. :woman_facepalming::woman_facepalming::woman_facepalming:

Another example: I was away for four days in four different cities. Emailed everyone I worked closely with to inform them and tell them I couldn’t deal with any emails unless they were urgent. In the time I was away she sent me 45 emails. All of which I had to respond to individually on my return, which took me till 10pm at night.

So my current boss - I have a 30 min phone call with her once a month, and that’s it :joy::joy::joy:

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He sounds like a fine manager.

I heard JI was shit anyway and needed binning

love you really @Jeremys_Iron

I like to think I’m ok, but probably tread the line between being friendly, empowering yet tough enough, and allowing them to take the piss, too closely.

Anyway, best manager - never really had a standout one. Had one I used to go bike wankering with a lot, so it would be him because of a shared interest in bikes and music.

Worst - too many to remember tbh. But the guy who stopped me progressing my career because he didn’t want to lose my experience and work ethic as a supervisor was a cunt

Am I tough enuss? Hell yes I’m tough enuss!

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it’s a bummer when you really like your manager personally but they’re shit at their job

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It’s what stopped me making a formal complaint.

This post has really riled me. I would not have been able to handle this.

whenever i’ve had to manage people I’m sure it’s a nightmare for them. I’m all like
“yeah it’s cool, you know what you’re doing, just use your intuition man, it ain’t rocket science, anyway see Game of Thrones last night?”

time passes

“Excuse me but this does not seem to be EXACTLY how I would have done this work - go away and do it again EXACTLY HOW I WOULD HAVE”

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Just remembered another good one. The director sent out an email telling us about a talk that was being given in another part of the organisation. Open to anyone, free to attend, in the evening after work. It sounded really interesting so I immediately signed up. The next day we got an email from our manager saying ‘I’ve considered it and I’m happy for you to attend if you wish’. Oh really? You’re happy for me to attend something that is free and is in my own time? THANKS!

One more of these and I’m @ing the mods. Don’t make me do it.

Mate I have three and a half YEARS of stories like these.

Take them to the SCARY DOOR thread I say. They’re too chilling for here.

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I did an internship with a left wing think tank and the boss was pretty demanding and critical considering I was earning travel expenses. I remember once he swivelled round in his chair suddenly and entirely out of the blue was like “joe, we need to get a list together of Government ministers who might be opposed to Royal Mail privatisation, what have you got?”
I had no insight into this whatsoever… I had zero contacts and twitter didn’t exist but I managed to come out with “Peter Hain?” which given the circumstances amounted to playing a blinder tbh. He just said “yeah that’s the obvious one” and swivelled back round in his chair.
I felt like one of the rubbish aides in the Thick Of It. Was quite exciting to be honest.

Another time, I think this might have been my first week in the position, I’d been asked to take notes at a meeting of about 15 top NGOs about international development, and they were all asked to go round the table at the end for closing thoughts, and rather than excusing me from this part he pointedly asked me to make a contribution. Obviously I had fucking nothing to say! I guess you could say it was empowering, but you’d be wrong of course.

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I think to say I was exploited would be overplaying my contribution to be honest. (but yeah).

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