Someone forgot to tell this senior manager that “The beatings will continue until morale improves” was a bad joke from the ’70s.

The bad habits of a miserable manager

Imagine being on the every-Friday receiving end of this via your one-on-one session.

Your boss dictates your detailed to-do list.

  • The focus is identifying everything you didn’t do from the prior week’s list and verbally chastising you for each. This is not just gentle, constructive behavioral criticism but full-fledged yelling combined with a monologue questioning your competence, intelligence, and motivation.
  • When the task list portion of the beating concludes, the session switches to the hearsay feedback on what you allegedly said or didn’t say or did or didn’t do in your interactions with others.
  • Interspersed throughout this verbal beating session is criticism for taking initiative: “You did it wrong,” or “Why did you do that?” or “I didn’t tell you to do that.”
  • There are always a few minutes of criticism for areas where you didn’t take the initiative, even though the topic of the initiative was something you didn’t understand in your new role was yours to take.
  • Oh, and one of my favorites: the criticism for not engaging or not engaging properly with the location’s senior leader—a person this senior manager was clearly at war with.

“Oh no, it’s Friday.”

Week after week after week. It’s enough to make you rethink your view on Fridays. Instead of TGIF, it might be OFIF. (I’ll let you interpret that!)

This same senior manager has multiple critical openings throughout their region and is a revolving door of people coming and going after dipping their toes in the toxic environment.

Senior leadership asleep at the KPIs

I have issues with odious manager behaviors such as the ones described above. I have more angst over the organization’s leadership, which allows managers of this ilk to remain in the environment. Of course, the location’s KPIs are good. I suspect the corporate bureaucrats are naïve and happy and don’t care how their local managers do the job as long as the numbers look good in the corporate slide deck.

Just as that meme, “The beatings will continue until morale improves,” is tone-deaf and anachronistic, so are those managerial practices.

The Bottom Line for Now:

My love note to this odious manager is: “The firings of toxic managers will continue until morale improves.” In this case, it’s not a joke and it will work. Imagine the potential for performance if this manager was replaced by someone who understands the power of supporting, coaching, and developing others in pursuit of delivering outstanding results.

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