Survey: some bosses ‘not nice’
Posted on Wednesday 12 December, 2007
Filed Under Management bollocks
Workplace surveys, gotta love ‘em. Here’s a prime example of the genre, reported in this morning’s Financial Times under the headline ‘Rise in dictatorial company managers’:
British managers are becoming overbearing and dogmatic at the expense of productivity, a report from the Chartered Institute of Management claimed on Tuesday.
A follow-up to a 2004 survey showed more team leaders using dictatorial approaches, with a five or more percentage point rise in the number of managers describing their companies style as “bureaucratic” (40 per cent), “reactive” (30 per cent) and “authoritarian” (30 per cent).
When organisations fail to hit their targets, most leaders and managers become secretive and bureaucratic, the institute said, and 45 per cent of managers report that sickness absence rises where employees are treated with suspicion.
UPDATE: This from a management skills quiz at www.makemeabettermanager.com, designed to find out whether you are a Machiavelli or a Mother Theresa. Stop sniggering, you at the back! There really is a website of that name. Surprise, surprise, it sells management skills training courses:
4. Your staff are becoming disgruntled at being asked to put in extra time more and more often, as times are tough. The Board has come up with a new initiative aimed at putting the company back on top but it’s going to mean asking your team to work late even more often in the coming months. Do you:-
Organise a tree-hugging weekend and tell them what’s coming once everyone has bonded?
Devise an incentive scheme whereby the most successful 3 staff will get an all-expenses paid weekend in Paris?
Get them into your office and tell them they’re going to have to redouble their efforts?
Er … promise them all double time, or double time off in lieu? Offer them bonuses worth more than a year’s salary, because after all, that’s what the board gets? Hire more people, because your department is obviously seriously short-staffed? Not even given as possible answers. Shit, I knew there was a reason why I’ve never been promoted.
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3 Responses to “Survey: some bosses ‘not nice’”
The fightback starts here.
When I worked for the NUJ we had an extraordinary wave of strikes and strike ballots from 2002 onwards.
On the face of it the disputes were about pay.
But really it was because the bosses were so horrible that the journalists had nothing to lose.
They were brutalised from dawn to dusk for a pittance.
So they said things at chapel meetings like: “Well it doesn’t mater if we all get sacked – we can all get better jobs anyway.”
And “If we don’t go on strike we wont have any dignity left”.
Media bosses are amongst the most brutal (they own the Daily Mail after all). When I went on courses with outher full time union reps they couldn’t believe the things that went on in our industry.
So now everyone else is catching up.
The smashing of pension schemes is actually another thing that means strikers have nothing to lose.
The other unions need to get stuck into the private sector.
Now is the time for organisation and action.
I’ve been striking with PCS the past year and it’s likely that we’ll be striking again. Absurdly people across the DfT at the same level but in different departments get paid differently for the same job.
Also there are government imposed ‘efficiency targets’ which essentially means firing people – there are a number of staff leaving in March despite the fact over summer we had almost weekly overtime.
A Swansea Blog
Surely managers seeming ‘bureaucratic’ is not a surprise, given the government’s obsession with getting everyone to fill in bits of paper and stick to ridiculous health and safety rules. Mind you, the EU hasn’t helped either.