Or why is it that managers need managers to manage their management? 🤔
Checkmate, managers
manager here. I’m just a jerry. I kept crawling, and it kept working. I don’t like it any more than you.
I made it to jnr management by being too stubborn to resign under any of the previous ones.
It sounds like you have an example to share.
Luckily I’ve been self-managing with a rather free-form management style for the last few years! But I have now updated the original post to clarify my point.
I love me a good manager. Luckily I was able to work with a few in my lifetime. The good ones have no problems managing your and their own work.
Shit floats, as they say.
It seems that managers managing the managers cannot manage to manage the management of managers and therefore we need managers to manage the management of managers managing the management of managers.
It’s a hierarchy. You have a department, or other such division, with a manager to coordinate it. Then you have a manager who manages all the departments, or a subsection thereof, to coordinate them; this is “managing managers” and typically more complex due to the interdisciplinary nature. Then you have managers to manage the manager-managers, who oversee entire regions or similar sectors.
Sometimes manager-manager managers are necessary, but if you need managers to micromanage manager-managers, your organization has problems
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
Ah, same as a real mathematician can mathematically mathematise mathematics in a mathematical mathematiculation, so if a mathematician can mathematise mathematics in a mathematical mathematiculation, why can’t you mathematically mathematise mathematics in a mathematical mathematiculation like the mathematician who mathematically mathematises mathematics in a mathematical mathematiculation…
I like this answer best.
Yo dawg, I heard you like management, so I got management for your management.
When I was in warehousing, it seemed like it was the people to kissed the most ass that ended up in management, not the people that were capable. The quietly competent workers stayed in entry level positions, some of them for decades. And over time, more and more of these positions are created till you have guys that do nothing except drive to different warehouses for ‘inspections’. We’d have 3 or 4 different managers come through multiple times a year, rent a convertible to drive across the country, stay in hotels, have all meals paid, to walk into a warehouse for 15 minutes and then leave. Sometimes one would come just weeks after another. We always had to work extra hard to make sure the warehouse is spotless, and they often wouldn’t even walk around.
Meanwhile, we might get a pizza once or twice a year, and wages were capped. Ask for a raise? Can’t afford it sadly
if you need the manager to come to make sure the warehouse is spotless, do you even do your work when the manager not around 🤷🏻♂️
You’ve never worked somewhere when “higher ups” are coming? Supervisors start freaking out and obsessing over the smallest details, and most of the time the people coming either never set foot in the building or they have no clue what they’re looking at in the first place.
I once had a job where I had seven layers of management above me. Other than my immediate boss, I had no idea what the rest of them did all day.
Middle manager in an IT company here. My job description is saying “no” to requests outside the official pipeline, in order to shield my team from outside interference and burnout. I need a manager to fight for me whenever I pick a fight with one of the VPs who think we need to drop everything and refocus on their pet project.
This is because managing is the easy part of the job. You have to have someone to push and threaten you to do MORE and MORE for the same or less pay, then dangle that carrot in front of you and keep moving goalposts.
source: was a top manager in the country of a certain tire chain.
Myself and some other managers I know became managers for being competent at our science-based jobs when the company wanted to expand. Our education and career up until this point mostly had not involved learning skills like delegation, teaching, scheduling, and team-budgeting, not to mention the interactive social skills needed to successfully manage individuals.
Some bad managers are just good workers that weren’t able to suddenly learn these skills when their employer insisted they manage a team so it could pursue its endless quest for infinite growth by setting up hierarchies of workers. Good managers are either trained in management or extraordinarily talented.
