Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

[Balfree]

Re: Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

I'm lucky to be my own boss :E

[Kurb]

Re: Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

I've got a good one really pi$$'s me off to think of it but ere we go.
Opening of the last Harry Potter film 400+ ppl in watching it 5/6 dodgy looking tinkers walk in fair enough nothing wrong about that.Towards the end of the film someone puts the bags in and this father runs out asks for the manager.Turns out not only were the tinkers running around shouting when we were not in there at one point one of them threatened to stab anyone and there kids if they complained.Nobody pointed them out but from a description he gave us we spotted them.We were told to barr them on sight.3 weeks later saw em told them they were barred manager on duty walks over I tell him y they r barred ....... he lets them walk straight in.. yup

[Fliegar]

Re: Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

I have the same problem, sort of. I work in the warehouse for Canadian Tire (think Walmart, but less fantastic) and I have 3-4 managers that are constantly bossing me around. Now, when I do something wrong, like.. showing up 5 minutes late, 3 of my managers go and tattle to the big manager who runs the store, and he comes running down the stairs and explodes.

There was also a time when a co-worker of mine was setting up a display of anti-freeze, which was turning out horribly. He stacked a few layers and it fell over and a few containers broke, so he runs away to find a mop. Meanwhile I'm there cleaning up the containers and the manager who gave my co-worker the task is screaming at me, and, after I come back from lunch a few hours later in the day, I get a 'final' warning for being angry that he screamed at me for nothing.

Gotta love shitty dead-end jobs.

[Mhurron]

Re: Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

I have the same problem, sort of. I work in the warehouse for Canadian Tire (think Walmart, but less fantastic) and I have 3-4 managers that are constantly bossing me around. Now, when I do something wrong, like.. showing up 5 minutes late, 3 of my managers go and tattle to the big manager who runs the store, and he comes running down the stairs and explodes.

8 bosses Bob.

[Durahansolo]

Re: Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

So much stupid stuff goes on at my job I could write a book. I work for a Intermediate School District in the business office. I have 2 supervisors, a direct and a indirect. My title is Materials Clerk/Typist which is nothing more than a glorified Data Enterer. With me being a Data Clerk I have to assist the Accountants with Accounts Payable related data entry as well as things like answering phones and switchboard coverage, the latter of the 2 I don't do much of anymore. I started working here 3 years ago and at that time there were 2 people working on Accounts Payable but they were both working on other things so I got to pick up the Data Entry part of it. 2 months after I was hired they hired a accountant to take care of AP, what eventually happened was we got called in for a meeting (Me and the AP Clerk).

In the meeting we sat down with the person that did AP, not the one that was doing it when I got there, but 2 years before. Mind you that was when data entry consisted of 2 folders of invoices, it is now about 8. AP Accountant starts whining about all this work she is doing, which 90% of it she wasn't even doing, and she complained about working all this overtime that she didn't need to work. When she couldn't get any sympathy out of the Ex-APer she made a declaration that I was shocked to hear.."Dura doesn't even do anything, he just plays on the internet all the time." Now at that time I had just started working there so that was a lie, I didn't spend 1/10 of the time I do now on the internet, I was always working and learning the job. I was so shocked she had said that I couldn't even say anything. Before I could get a "Orly!" response out, the Ex-AP shot her down because she said "IDK what you're talking about because everytime I've asked Dura for help he helped me and from what I've seen he's doing a great job!" Which is what she told the supervisor which started a fued between the AP Idiot and my boss and the Ex-AP....Eventually AP Accountant took some time off for psychological reasons and ended up quitting. Nobody thinks there was anything psychologically wrong with her, they just thought she was stupid and or crazy.

[Fliegar]

Re: Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

Now that I think about it, I saw a tiny bit of backbone at my job recently. One of my co-workers, being the stupid asshole that he is, decided to break into the vending machine in the staff room (after eating a $15 lunch from Subway) and got fired. The funny thing is, he was telling them that he'd pay for it, and that he just wanted to see if it'd work.

[Kitalrez]

Re: Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

Hi, welcome to the US. The horde of lawyers that made the country the way it is is sitting over there.

The horde of lawyers would like a few words with you...

Nah, that's blaming the tool for the user's error. Like if you decide to blame the army for messing up Iraq. Certain errors are the Army's fault, (Abu Ghraib, etc), but the major errors are Donald Rumsfeld's and George Bush's. The Army didn't really take it upon itself to go invade Iraq, pick up tasks beyond its usual scope, etc. The Bush Administration made those decisions, and then added to them once they saw their initial plans start going wrong. Same deal with lawyers. The majority of lawyers don't start with a potential lawsuit and go hunting for clients. There's a reason we think of Jack Thompson as such a freak for doing exactly that.

Lawsuits happened, and that did change things, but the lawsuits aren't really the factor that caused the problem. Lawsuits are more like a symptom of that problem. The problem, as I see it, is that we tried to integrate two groups of people who weren't part of our traditional office culture, women and minorities. For hundreds of years, we had white guys yelling at other white guys, and the second group fixing the problem or finding other employment. It became normal to have that relationship with your boss. Now, you have two other groups that enter the white-collar workforce and don't really fit this culture. If you were a black man, for instance, you had other things working against you, but you could to some degree "play the game". Same deal with any other minority dude. Part of the shit you were getting from your boss was racist, but a bunch was just the normal boss/peon crap. If you were a woman, though, you never really had to deal with anything like this before. This is pretty much where your Equal Opportunity lawsuits arose. Yeah, some of these were frivolous. There were a fair amount that were perfectly justified, though. "You know, Ray, I could give you that raise, but I don't want all you darkies getting uppity on me..." "Jane, you'd go a hell of a lot further in this business if you'd just spread your legs a little more often." etc.

We still have perfectly legitimate lawsuits on this. Here's a case from 2001, for instance. I linked a data recovery company's website here, I figured it would be more entertaining than the actual court record. Basics were that a woman was promised a management job when her supervisor retired, UBS decided to hire another guy, he changes business around so that they're going to strip clubs to entertain clients, then rides her for not being able to bring in new clients because she's not comfortable going to strip clubs, etc. UBS's defense was that the new boss couldn't be discriminatory, because he's a complete dick to everyone. Apparently, no one on UBS's legal or management teams has the sense inherent in the common five-year-old, because they didn't ask themselves the question: "Why keep a manager no one enjoys working for?"

So, you get lawsuits. Some of them have merit, some of them are crap. These now add to the crap MBA programs started churning out in the 80's about chasing quarterly reports instead of building realistically good companies. Lawsuits cost money, money effects your stock price quarter to quarter, therefore we can't have lawsuits and need to make sure we train managers to avoid them at all costs. Which is a problem with MBA programs in general. They've deluded themselves into thinking they can teach leadership from scratch. They can enhance it, and give you tools to use it, but you can't open a car wash in the Sahara. That's the big running gag in "The Office". The only way to tell if you actually have any leadership skills is to actually try doing something yourself at work. If 8 hours passes and no one came to check on you or offered to help, chances are good that you suck as a boss.

You're at the end of that chain. It'd be like if I dropped the butt of my cigar down through one of the holes in a manhole cover. I expect it to go out, but the gas company running a line under this particular manhole hasn't maintained the pipes and there's a pool of gas there from where the pipes cracked last winter. This pool ignites, and, low and behold a sewer access grate near this puddle has been left open since the last maintenance run. This becomes a problem since gas has seeped through this opening into the sewers and mixed with methane. So, shortly after dropping my butt, the manhole covers for about 8 blocks blow off in fiery shots and a major city fire blazes to life. Is it my fault that the great city fire of '08 just started? Yes and no. I caused it, but I didn't create the perfect storm down there that lead to it. Any spark could've caused that fire, I just happened to cause the particular spark that set it off. Could've been someone's brakes grinding, the cinder from a hot dog vendor's wrapper that just ignited from the grease, etc. The normal course of events when I drop a cigar butt down a manhole is that it goes out. Unless I had reason to believe it would turn out differently, they probably won't charge me with anything. The gas company is probably screwed, though.

Same deal with your mess.


{Edit}You know, it's just a tad annoying to type a message with actual paragraphs and end up with a wall of unreadable text. Any chance we could look at the board code so I'm not typing < b r > after every paragraph?

[Susurrus]

Re: Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

Stuff

Damn smokers.

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Is there ANY backbone in management these days?

{Edit}You know, it's just a tad annoying to type a message with actual paragraphs and end up with a wall of unreadable text. Any chance we could look at the board code so I'm not typing < b r > after every paragraph?

I've never had to use html to make paragraphs.