by Ian Buchanan

Created on: February 16, 2009

I worked for a large international corporation for a long time and experienced life under several poor managers: fortunately I also had some wonderful managers as well. It's not unusual to find poor supervisors or managers in large companies, so the corporation can normally survive as a whole, but it's another matter altogether in a small company where its entire future can rest on the vision and decision making of a Neanderthal. In both cases, poor management has a detrimental effect on subordinates, and it generally results in poor overall performance no matter where it's practiced. Although even large companies now cull more of the dead wood in recessionary times, poor management in difficult circumstances is more pronounced and fatal in a small company. In my consulting practice I have seen both, but I've never seen the results manifest themselves as quickly as they do now in the 2008/9 global recession.

I'd like to review some of my personal experiences to show some poor management practices, but I'd also like to say that individuals can actually make progress because of bad situations. I was fortunately one of those.

My first job was the lowest of the low in the mailroom. Talk about a frontier mentality: the mail must get through, rain, snow, natural disaster or whatever. The supervisor held the lowest supervisory position in the company and lived in dread of the slightest complaint, and each one of those resulted in pure torture for the staff. We had time schedules for each delivery and taking a minute longer than demanded drew the man's wrath. The only solution was escape to another department, any department, in the hope that hell there might be a little cooler than we suffered in the basement.

Not so, hell can exist in large departments among the rows and rows of functionaries all seated at their steel grey desks, one supervisor for every twenty people, charged with processing 100 documents an hour. "Please sir, I've been writing the same numbers on all of these pages for a month now, can you explain what they mean?" "You don't need to know that, get back to work, and by the way I saw you walking to the far end of the office, and you walk far too slowly. You're now ten invoices behind!"

Escaping the canyon was hard because everyone had a reputation as being a robot.

I was lucky to get an interview in a more cultured part of the organization and apparently got the job because I was inquisitive, not an attribute they had expected from the line. Within six

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>