Boss 1 : What not to do as a Boss !

Some of my random observations and rants about BAD managers and bosses…

Motivation : Manager thinks that every employee has the motivation and he need not do anything. This is a typical problem i see in the managers who grow up the ladder from the technical streams. These manager’s seldom believe that employees need to be motivated to do their best and not all “jobs” are interesting.

Don’t assume that  employees have Motivation because you are paying for their work.

Right Job : At the time of recruiting, you have a set of job responsibilities and tasks that you want an employee to fulfill. Things change in time and so are  the responsibilities. As a manager, it’s your JOB to assign the right Task/Job to your employee. Are you wondering why your team-mate is not able to succeed or he is not performing to his level you imagined ?

Choose and Assign the right job for your team. If you ask them to do an ODD job, then apologize to them and explain the situation.

Information Sharing : Information spreads fast. Very Fast! If something is happening with your team, project or customer. Inform the team with the right information AS SOON AS POSSIBLE – ASAP. Holding back the information or maintaining the secrecy has a negative impact on the employees. They loose trust on you. Be informed that your employees always have contacts to get the information.

Understand that Information Sharing is CRITICAL. Never share an information that is stale and known to everyone except you.

All-In-One Responsibility : Some managers have the concept of “All-In-One/ Open Responsibilities”. This means, everyone in the team should be able to do everything. You know what, this is the Disaster Recipe. When we call set of individuals as team, we are talking about individuals who are specialized in an area and able to collate different strengths for a common goal. The side effects of this theory is that the individual employees are completely demoralized as they don’t work on any specialized task anymore. They are not experts in any area as they switch the context of the tasks very frequently. e.g. today they work on Java issue, tomorrow they work on Perl problem and day after they work on Install Shield. The important side-effect that i see is that none of the tasks will be “Complete” or “Perfect” or “Designed to Last”, because no one owns it.

Assign the Ownership of tasks and define the Responsibilities to Individuals.

Appreciation of Efforts : Individuals like to hear their appreciation in group and criticism in private. Unfortunately, some managers do other way round and this really sucks. Even if you slog for months and months, this manager does not appreciate you and he does not even look at you. He probably has an attitude of “You are working and I am working. You are getting pain and i am getting paid”.

If you need a stable team, be a God Father to your team in every respect.

I will keep on adding more and more to this list with my experience. I strongly feel that everyone knows what to do but very few know “What NOT to do” 😉

Did you experience similar things at your work place ? Do you have more points to add to this list ? Please do share your experiences…