Wednesday, 3 July 2013

Annoying Manager

So after all my good intentions about writing here about the things going on in my life  - not just the drama I haven't written a single post since March.  However I now have something to write about and its not my mother (no contact since Christmas).

The subject of today’s post the annoying manager.
I work for local government (not saying where or what I do).  The team I am in has seven members of staff at my level and two managers. The seven staff members are all intelligent people with the ability to manage our own workload and do what needs to be done with very little supervision. 
The first manager, who has been here the longest. knows the team back to front, knows everything we do and is very supportive.  However he is also not afraid to give us a hard time if needed and to be fair sometimes we need it.
The second manager has only been with the team 2.5 years.  He was moved from another section, supposedly on a temporary basis, where he was surplus to requirements (first warning something was wrong).  We have been stuck with him since and it looks like he may now be here for permanently.  Since he arrived he has been nothing but trouble. He hasn't learnt anything about how the team works, the processes for what we do or even how we file things. Despite being a manager he refuses to make a decision about anything and tries to get us as staff to do it for him so if anything goes wrong he can blame us. He puts the wrong information in reports and then delegates it to someone else to fix, usually at the last minute and usually when they have something else that needs doing, then continues to pressure them to do the work he should have done.  If he needs papers for a meeting he will ask someone else to print them out even if he has time to do it himself.  He asks people to send emails for him, again he could do this himself and he won't arrange any meetings. He won't research information for himself (even if its in his email) and he forgets on purpose to do important tasks.  Not to mention he is rude to staff and clients.
This was annoying enough before but he wasn't my line manager so I could ignore (while supporting the other team members to stand up to him) however I have been assigned to assist him on an important project and I may have to kill him by the end of it.
Every day I have to remind him that I am not his secretary, that he can print things himself and that he should be making decisions.  Every day he comes out with some stupid notion that I then have to spend time correcting and I am currently not getting any of my normal work done as I am too busy sorting out the mistakes he has made, or working on the next random thing he throws my way.
Every day I get angrier and angrier and at some point I will lose my temper and tell him off.
I have come close and had to point out proper procedure on a number of occasions but have kept my temper so far.  The person who sits next to me is already sick of me ranting about this.
So if anyone actually reads this can you leave a tip for controlling my temper otherwise if you see a headline reading Council Worker Kills Manager that will be me

1 comment:

  1. or me, check out new blog, confessions of a demented manager

    ReplyDelete