Reply to If you are or were a manager that micromanaged to push someone out for no reason

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No one will say they pushed someone out "for no reason." You may not know the reason or consider it valid but if it happened to you, the person had a reason they considered valid.[/quote]

Yeah, fired people often claim it's "for no reason." It very, very rarely is.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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