If you are or were a manager that micromanaged to push someone out for no reason
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Anonymous
| This is so common in education. I am currently watching our principal ‘micromanage’ a colleague, and it isn’t going to end well. The colleague is a young teacher who doesn’t have much experience, but she’s in my department and I think she’s doing a good job. The principal really seems to dislike her on a personal level, and has put her on an improvement plan and subjected her to multiple ‘observations’, which has resulted in making the young woman a nervous wreck. She confided in me last week that she can’t sleep and has no family or support network because she moved to the area for this job. I hate watching this kind of thing, but I’ve seen it before and there’s nothing I can do. I know her contract won’t be renewed because that’s what this principal did to the last person she targeted. It’s a private school and we don’t have the same protection as in public. The principal does this periodically to teachers about whom ‘important’ parents have complained. I hate it. |
Anonymous
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Micromanagers didn't reply here.
OP they are not jealous or envious of you. They micromanage to justify their existence. Managers are usually "kiss up, kick down," unless they have some technical skill and are very secure. My best managers have been prior military. They provided cover for me by attending meetings and shielding me from the worst of it as an individual contributer. My worst managers allowed junior staff, like the receptionist to bully me and offload her tasks to me, tasks like stuffing file folders. |
Anonymous
But we’re not talking about people who get fired. If someone gets fired, it’s “for cause” so even if that person doesn’t want to admit it, there was a reason. I’ve listened to people dissemble about stuff like this “oh they just hated me for no reason” and then it turns out they just weren’t doing their job. But this thread is about being passive-aggressively pushed out— having your work environment made so miserable you leave on your own. This is something else. If management had a reason to fire someone like this, why not do it? Or give negative reviews that provide the specific reasons for the problems? If management has a reason, why not just be clear? And the answer is often that there is no valid reason. The manager is scapegoating the person to cover for their own incompetence. Or they feel threatened by the workers competence and want to neutralize them as a threat. They have a totally non-work-related reason for disliking them (reasons I’ve heard people don’t like a person: he’s too tall, she seems stuck up, she has a bad haircut, he went to Duke, she’s Canadian). So they micromanage or staff them to terrible projects or “forget” to include them in key meetings. They spread nasty rumors, exclude them from informal socializing, bad mouth them to higher ups or other supervisors. They make work a living hell until the person leaves because they can’t take it any more. It happens all the time. There are so many people who, when given the minimal power of middle management, will wield it selfishly and unfairly. Lots of jerks in the world. |
Anonymous
| Jealous. I was much more competent and had ideas. I’m a woman and not white. He was a white man who was coasting on his brief experience as like an intern in the Clinton White House.I was a high level political appointee Unser Obama. I was well liked by the team. He was despised. He would point to one project in which i failed to get results. It was a fake project that no one cared about. It was impossible to promote and was made up. He wanted to replace me with a young white woman who had worked for him in a previous job. |
Anonymous
Or the person feels like they are pushed out but it's because they aren't doing their job. I have a subordinate like this. He constantly tells me I am micromanaging when I expect him to know what's assigned to him and follow the prescribed format for doing his assignments. I send his work back with the same corrections each time - formatting, typos, wrong citations. He says I'm micromanaging and that's for the paralegals to fix, not for him to get right the first time. He accused me of age discrimination and trying to force him to retire. No, buddy, I'm just trying to get you to do the bare minimum everyone else does. (Though I would be over the moon if he retired, but I am not treating him unfairly. No one else turns in shoddy work like that and I already do certain computer/admin tasks for him already because it's easier for me to do it for him, than for me to have to fix it when he does it wrong. Did that for 2 years before I just took it over.) His substantive work is okay. But we're in a field where you need to get details right and he is not a detail person. It's not enough to fail and be fired, but it's enough to get just a passing grade. And he doesn't fix it even though I point out the same issues each time. Maybe he's incapable. Anyway, what I perceive as maintaining basic quality in my office work product, he perceives as micromanaging and attempts to force him out. |
Anonymous
Chance of a manager saying she is a micromanager - less than 1% Chance of a manager saying she pushed out someone - less than .1% Chance of a manager saying she pushed out someone for no reason - less than .00001% |
Anonymous
Probably. If you are more qualified/educated/have more experience or all of the above than the "manager", then yes. Where we work, one or two people were given "titles" to pacify them, as they had been in the company for years. In all honesty, they added very little, and their jobs could easily be filled by temps - who no doubt would have done a better job, AND most definitely would have gotten along better with people, been more professional, AND had better attitudes. I think in some cases, it comes down to the company being afraid of being sued. Point blank. Some people are not meant to be managers" or "supervisors" - heck, some people are not meant to be in a professional setting. |
Anonymous
+1 Could be any employee, not just manager, but some people are really terrible at what they do. The PP who stated that those people "kick down" and "kiss up" nailed it. In reality, that can't go on forever. |
Anonymous
This is what I've observed most often. In one case, a bunch of us got a new manager. She was insecure and jealous. We had been a high-performing team who won awards. But, suddenly, we all had a lot of "problems" we had never had before she came along. At first, I thought she was just targeting me, but then I saw she was targeted a whole bunch of us. I resigned and left. She is gross and sad. I heard later she drove many of the people out and then couldn't meet the revenue goals...She was still there when I last checked. Companies like bullies and mediocrity even though they say they don't. |
Anonymous
It's funny to me that people here believe a company over an employee. Why is that? I'm referring to the comment that it's "very, very rarely" for no reason when someone gets fired. I spent years watching the competent and skilled people leave while the terrible managers stayed (eventually they were let go but waaaay later). Yes, I did go back and look to see how things turned out. In one case, several of us resigned on the same day bc the manager was that terrible. We didn't plan it. They still kept the manager who asked me to stay and then later said it would be better without me. LOL. Years later, they finally figured out she sucked and let her go. But it took them a long time. Someone should pay attention to how many people leave under each manager. They would save so much money and earn more revenue if they paid any attention. People quit people--not jobs. Then the company blows hot air about culture and so on. When you said it's usually the employee's fault, you don't really know. You're just guessing unless you've done a study on the subject and have hard data. |
Anonymous
| Is there a field where there is less chance of having a psycho manager with a power trip? |
Anonymous
This is what I can never understand-- why leadership seems to view these awful managers through rose-colored glasses and will never fire them when it becomes obvious they are failing as managers. If an award-winning team suddenly begins to fail under an inept-- and highly disliked-- manager, just MAYBE it's the bad manager who has to go? So sad leadership is blind and opted to keep her and permit her to destroy a good team because.....? |
Anonymous
| I guess you could say I've done this -- my boss used to make me supervise people the other managers kept saying weren't completing their tasks. Mostly they just needed some extra support or something. But I had two who I ended up micromanaging out of desperation because I couldn't figure out how else to get them to do anything. One turned out to be trying to work a second consulting gig at the same time as he was working for us. The other one I never figured out his deal -- he seemed willing and he had interviewed well I think but he just didn't seem able to put together even the simplest anything about our field and maybe didn't know how to use google? Not sure. Anyway, the former person was fired; the latter chose to leave eventually. |
Anonymous
Because leadership is just as horrible. Bad management from above hires these pyschopaths for managers then the company gets in trouble. Leadership got there through kissing ass or nepotism not their qualifications or experience necessarily. |
Anonymous
You should speak up. That sounds like harassment and a hostile work environment. |