Ever had a serial interrupter as a boss? How did it affect your performance?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I manage an inside sales call center. The account execs who work for me make and receive (ideally more of the latter) calls to businesses that (a) have an account with our company (instead of using us on a one-off basis) and (b) spend between $50-$200 a day with us. Their job is partly to act as dedicated customer service reps for the companies in their territories and partly to facilitate their using as many of our services as possible (as opposed to our competitors’, of course). There are, say, 300 execs under me, divided into about 15 teams, the managers of which are my direct reports.

One of those team managers–let’s call him “Sammie”–is pissing me off. See, in addition to my current job, I’ve been an account exec and a team leader and was successful in both positions. The former job–like all sales jobs, in my experience–is more about getting the client talking than talking yourself; the latter is about providing the support and training your execs need, which also means you need to listen to what they have to say at least as much as you yourself talk.

But Sammie won’t do that. He seems INCAPABLE of doing that. In meetings with me and his peers, he constantly interrupts others, assuming not only that he knows more than anybody else on every subject, but also that he knows exactly what another person is about to ask or say. He has enough sense not to do that with me, or persons above me in the hierarchy, but he does it with other managers and his own subordinates constantly.

Now as I mention I’ve worked as a team manager and account exec for this company, as well as a freelance writer, appliance salesman, car salesman, insurance salesman, and retail banker. In all those jobs it is important to listen as much as or more than you talk. Consequently I find myself not merely annoyed at Sammie’s behavior, but professionally disconcerted as well. His team’s sales numbers, productivity, and training are average at best, and I can’t help but suspect that Sammie’s constant interrupting – his refusal to listen – is a large part of the reason; it’s hard for me to believe that, when his crew comes to him for help, guidance, or training, they are able to get their questions answered effectively, because it’s hard for them get a word in edgewise.

Which brings me to my thread question. Have any of you had a boss like this? How did it affect your efficiency as a worker?

2

I haven’t had a boss like that, no, but I did have a minion that was constantly asking questions, well past the point where he should have been able to fly alone, and anytime a conversation came up where he “knew” something, he’d insist on the truth of it, and argue the point exhaustively for hours.

I started charging him a dime every time he asked me a question, and if he was ever proven wrong on a topic, he had to bring in a pie to share with everyone. Neither is particularly cruel, but he caught the point and mellowed out.

3

I AM a boss like that. I’ve taken to bringing stress-relief squeezy toys to our staff meetings, giving each of my people one with directions to throw them at me when I do it. It seems to work.

4

I had a manager like this a few years ago. In team meetings, which were generally conference calls since the team is spread out across multiple locations, he would ask a question and then, halfway through the response, jump in and try to finish the person’s sentence (most times incorrectly). He would just talk over everyone. One of my coworkers told me he did it in customer meetings too.

I always assumed it was was some sort of control-freak issue. This is the same guy who would constantly call or IM us to remind us of tasks we needed to complete, usually when we were already working on them. It was like he didn’t trust us enough to know how to do our own jobs. Fortunately he got let go and was replaced with someone much more laid back.

5

Yep.
Me: Here’s the situation but … Boss: You’ll need to do x y and z, check p and dot q. … Me: …but it doesn’t affect any of our clients/ I’ve spoken to the clients affected.

Fuck it drives me mad. I just have to get used to his brain working overtime and out loud.

6

Shoeless and Bam: did the bosses in question negatively affect your performance, in your opinions?

7

Sorry I have no germane responses to give to the questions asked in the OP, but I am curious to know if you are in a position to monitor this subordinate’s phone conversations with his own customers.

I presume he has his own customers and doesn’t only ride herd on a team of reps.

If he doesn’t, I wonder if there would be any benefit in transferring a high-performing member of another supervisor’s team into his group for a month or so, and monitoring for an effect on that rep’s performance.

8

I had one too, years ago. Yes, it negatively impacted performance. We had a VERY high turnover rate. People who stuck around tended to be too inexperienced to realize what they were getting into. Morale was extremely low.

9

Yep, we have one. He is smart, socially bright and friendly, experienced, empathetic when necessary… and everyone loathes working with him.

You can’t get three words out of your mouth before he cuts you off to let you know:

  • he knows exactly what you are saying
  • he knows the situation and has no doubt on how it should be handled

These “conversations” are endless one-sided onslaughts of his point of view. He is not listening to you and apparently doesn’t care about your point of view.

10

Sammie doesn’t have his own clients, except to the other extent that his reps’ clients are all his. He doesn’t make regular client calls; he handles escalated issues. If he were screwing up on those I’d have heard about it, most likely. What concerns me is the possibility that he is not providing the training and support to his reps that he’s supposed to, because his conversational style not merely makes that difficult but actively discourages them from seeking his help.

11

That’s a legitimate concern. I’ve been both the interrupter and the interruptee, I’ve improved on my own side but still fail on occasion, and my patience for those who interrupt me is still limited. I’m not really sure what you can do to help, but what got me to interrupt less were people who had the grit to call me rude, and I’ve dealt with the interrupters with “May I talk now?” when I get a chance to speak. My point there is that people can change, but you’ll have to find what works for this guy. Or perhaps he’s just in the wrong job.

12

Not as a boss but I have a new colleague who constantly does this with me, and others. She’ll ask a question, I start to answer, and she starts talking while I’m answering in anticipation of what I’m going to say. It causes me to lose my train of thought at times, rude and very frustrating.

When she does this I’ve stopped talking so she can finish cutting me off, and look at her and pause for a few seconds then start answering her second question. This isn’t working, when she does it again I’m going to say " I’ve lost my train of thought because we were both talking at the same time" If this doesn’t work, and I think it won’t I will have to come right out and say: “can you let me finish talking please.”
I suspect that won’t go over well for some reason, but it’s driving me batty.

13

Kind of. I was an SME/Product Mgr; spent about ⅓ - ½ of my day on the phone, mostly with either our customer service or with our clients solving some issue or another. If you were on the phone & you got a second call, all you knew was that you got another call; no call waiting details would display.

Sorry, but I believe if I’m talking to a client, the second call can go to voicemail & I’ll call back as soon as I’m done with the current call as it rude to put a client on hold for some unknown caller; it might be a problem, it might be a sales call. But noooo, my SVP bossman hated this. If it was him, he’d hang up & page me over the loudspeaker system. He’d always ask me why I didn’t pick up & my response was always the same, I’m was on the phone with _____.

He was the same way in his office. He’d call you in to discuss something & then answer the phone when it rang, usually taking the call rather than taking a # & promising to call back. More than once I got up & walked out. When he’d call me back later to ask why I left it was always one of two responses: 1) I’m busy & was wasting my time while you did something else (he rarely delegated routine matters & would help the client out with simple acct lookups instead of sending them to the right dept.) or 2) it was inappropriate for me to be sitting there listening to that (usually disciplinary) issue.

If you followed his method, you were being encouraged to be interrupted. :smack:

14

Not really. It was annoying, but he did it to everyone (including, as I mentioned, in customer meetings), and it just became more of a joke among the rest of the team than anything else.

There were some other aspects of his managerial style that may have had a negative impact on my work, but his talking over people was not one of them.

15

I’ve had interrupting know-it-all managers; I’ve also had interrupting know-it-all coworkers who were invariably backed by a spineless manager. Both situations are very different from the person who ahems and ahums, or from the one who tries to guess but does it as a guess, as questions. Or even from those who tend to jump the gun but are conscious of it and will listen after being glared at, having a soft doll shaken in their general direction or receiving the “timeout” sign.

Our performance did indeed suffer: in the first case, people avoided the manager as much as possible; in the second, completely inadequate “solutions” proposed by Loudmouth Runovereverybody would be selected and then the team would have to waste months implementing them, where the solutions proposed by those with larger knowledge and smaller mouths would have been both more effective and less painful to put in place.

If you have a manager that can’t listen to the end of “we have three options, A, B or C” without interrupting before you get to “tions” and you can get away with it, you end up rolling dice rather than ask the manager.

My mother gets one interruption for free. Two gets her a several-seconds glare and an “I love it when you listen to me, it’s a pity it happens so rarely!” This is from her children, her grandson (the granddaughter hasn’t caught up yet, I think) and a lot of her friends and acquaintances.

16

Yes I think so. A situation would arise, I would do A, B, C & D, then tell the boss, only to have him interrupt to tell me to do the things I’d already done. Sometimes I’ll tell him I’ve already done them, sometimes I’ll just make myself scarce for a while THEN tell him I’ve done it, it’s confusing and annoying and time consuming.

17

The worst I had was in a one on one with a manager who told me that a co-worker had accused me of something and then was dressing me down for it. I attempted to explain that I hadn’t done it but was cut off with “don’t do it again.” I was not just judged guilty based only on someone’s word (not even told who) but interrupted when I tried to defend myself. Some managers are just assholes.

18

Yes. It’s my boss’s boss. Not only does he serially interrupt, he will literally interrupt to tell you what you are actually feeling. Like this:

Q: What did you think of your performance this year in your event
A: Well, I think it went really well, because of this, this and this, but the downsides were this -
Interrupting boss: I think what you actually mean to say is this, this, and this (drones on for 20 minutes, no lie)

It stifles conversation and makes us feel like our input is not valued. Which clearly it is not. But he got promoted, so clearly the company thinks he’s doing fine.

19

I had a Dilbert cartoon posted on my cubicle wall where it appears Wally and the Pointy Haired Boss are going through some sort of evaluation checklist.

PHB: Question four. Do you have the tools necessary to do your job?

Wally: That depends. Do you consider yourself a tool?

PHB: I’m a resource.

Wally: Let’s just agree to disagree.
That’s pretty much how my manager was. I’m sure he thought he was being helpful or useful, but he was just a tool.

20

Never had a boss like that, but I did have a micromanager, but in the figurative and literal sense. He was a short guy who wanted to control every aspect of what work that came out of our section.