Am I Just Old or Are Management Types Getting Stupider?

This doesn’t require any replies. It is very much a rant.

The incompetence shown over the last 5 years since my transfer back into the white hot environment of central London, has both angered and confused me. I am nowhere near perfect, but parts of me are excellent. I manage staff by consent. I ask them and they oblige. They want to work for me (even those that I rather they wouldn’t).
I have very little ego at work and I don’t play office politics. This has probably held back my progress, but I like to sleep and I’m not devious enough. If I fuck up, I hold my hands up rather than covering up. If I have work to do, I get on and do it. That seems really obvious to me, I’m certainly not getting paid because of my looks ! But it seems I am a rarity. Every day there are excuses for leaving work for me to finish, or follow up, or whatever. I’m far from a pushover, but some of this work is just so simple it takes no time out of my usual day. It surprises me on a daily basis that they can’t (or won’t) finish this stuff.

What further surprises me is that some of the management team seem to think playing at being a thicko will get them out of work. “I don’t know how to do that, will you finish it ?” “No mate. Find out how to do it and finish it yourself !”
This is my approach to constructive laziness.

I am frequently approached to get involved in various projects. Partly due to my skill set, mostly down to actually being able to finish them in time. However, when pressed to complete a major project, I will refuse depending on who is going to get the credit. I don’t care about my profile but I hate elevating cunts’ profiles.

Out of 7 Duty Managers, only only 3 of us do any actual work. We work hand in glove with our supervisors, have their trust, and work well together. The other 4 fail regularly to meet targets or competencies. And yet, they are still here.

Sunday Nights fiasco, highlights my plight. Due to Covid, I was teamed with a fellow manager (not a supervisor). Needless to say, he isn’t one of the 3 ! His indecisiveness, obfuscation, and incompetence caused issues that we really didn’t need. I made a formal complaint about his performance.
Today I find out he has blamed me for his fuck ups.
Sadly, our Area Manager is too thick and self-centred to be able to decipher his lies.

No reference to previous performance, no investigation, no consultation. We are now both been given Action Plans to improve our performance. While initially, this seems a bit unfair, I see it as a win. He obviously thought that he could cover up his incompetence. However, my colleague will fail to meet his targets. Also, I may have told a few too many people about it.

It’s been very quiet in the office this evening. I believe he may be sulking. Frosty is an appropriate word.

It does ask the bigger question though…How thick is acceptable in the modern office space ?

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I guarantee he will be promoted above you :rofl::rofl::rofl:

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I truly don’t care if he does. I’m on the home stretch. So if they want non-functioning children running the show, then good luck to them.

One thing that I have found in my years in work is that “quietly competent” never gets promoted.

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Most of these senior managers are quite insecure, so they’ll surround themselves with clones. See Johnson, Trump etc

I’d expand that to quiet or competent

I haven’t been seeking promotion for nearly 2 years. I really have no interest in the roles that have been available. As I say, I’m so close to retiring (although not as close as I expected to be…Fuck you Covid) I really couldn’t care less about being promoted.

Having a decent team around me, respect from my workforce, and a less stressy couple of years are my goals. Oh well, two out of three ain’t bad.

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Terry, as you and many on here know, I work on the projects side of things for LU and it’s no better there than on the front line.
I’ve worked with good and bad. The bad seem to know how to play the game better than the good. The good get exasperated and fuck off out of the company leaving the bad behind.
The amount of times I’ve seen the graduates / apprentices leave after two or three years because the company won’t (can’t) pay more is many. Some stay, and if they have a good mentor then they may do well. Others just get moved up or sideways to get them out of the department they were in.
Not sure if it’s the same in other organisations, but I suspect it is. Seems to me it’s how you play the game. I wasn’t very good at the game hence why I joined the dark side and went contracting.

The Peter Principle is as alive in the 21st Century as it ever was.

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The second part follows, but the first part doesn’t apply where I am. They don’t know how to play the game. They just continually get away with underperforming and, in the worst cases, fucking up ! There is just no accountability or morality.

Do little, make a mess, get paid, go home. No guilt. No embarrassment. No shame.

It may be unique here as you either need to steal money, kill somebody, or fuck up the Lost Property to get sacked. There just appears to be no consequences to bad behaviour.

That’s you Terry.

That’s them.

I’m not even sure that they know it better. But it drives them more, so they put a great deal more effort into it. Where I worked we were unusually results-focused (I guess you’d expect that from measurists) so playing the game did you less good than it might have done elsewhere. But at the highest level we had to extract our resource from politicians. So scheming wasn’t a valueless skill. Mrs VB used to complain all the time that self-promotion and walking away from your mistakes was what got you promoted at Vodafone.

VB

Terry’s Torpidity, maybe ?

For what very little it is worth, I have long preferred to work in small companies because ineptitude has fewer places to hide. Once an organisation reaches a certain size, it seems to be a given that it has a quantity of people that seemingly cannot do anything. Of course, I took this to its logical extreme and now work alone meaning I only have myself to blame for fuck-ups which is… sub optimal.

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Just about sums it up.
Could also be used in any new job advert

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My boss had an incident a few months ago that resonates. She fell ill and was taken to hospital on their first day at the race track in Austria, and was there all week. She left her head chef in charge of carrying on with the work. As well as minor things like not checking in with teams to confirm numbers before service (because he didn’t want to), he managed to serve up a now infamous chicken carpaccio. I’m not talking a slightly pink piece of chicken, but full on raw in the middle. It’s about the worst mistake you can make in cheffing.

It cost Celine two contracts with a combined value of 80,000€ or there abouts.

When they were having the post mortel on the week, Celine wasn’t planning on firing him, but she understandably wanted him to apologise and accept responsibility for the colossal fuck up that had happened under his command. He absolutely refused. When Celine then said she’d have to make some changes he decided to quit on the spot without even hearing what those changes might be. I think he was expecting her to do a whole “oh no, please don’t do that we still need you” and was rather shocked when she simply replied “that’s fine”.

It’s amazing what some people seem to think is acceptable.

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I see what you did there.

The Boomer theme tune.

Not only that but the Civil Service don’t like (or can’t) sack people so the only alternative is to promote them out of that team.

See it all the time here where total fuckwits end up as G7 or G6 just to get rid of them.

I am a bit inured to most of the bollockspeak I hear but we have one senior manager who keeps saying ‘mute’ when he means ‘moot’.

And he uses the term quite a lot

Drives me nuts!

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