I didn’t actually challenge my boss to a cage match. I actually have gotten along with MOST of my direct supervisors. Because I get shit done. When anyone else is too busy or (how convenient and over used) doesn’t know how. Fancy that.
Added on edit: fucking idiot
To add to the above, last I checked, this IS The Pit. If your little feelings are hurt, I say again this is The Pit. Get over yourself.
That explains a lot, actually - the massive disconnect between the people making the decisions and the people getting them implemented all over them. The show “Undercover Boss” intrigues me for this reason - owners of a company finally get to see things they may have never seen before (and in all honesty it isn’t always their fault - people don’t act the same way around the company owner, naturally).
I especially liked how the CEO of Hooters reacted at the sight of the jerk manager who ordered his workers to go dip their face in a bowl of beans to compete for time off.
Have they gotten a hold of any nasty CEO-equivalents yet?
And if the store has a policy of NOT ushering customers out of the door at closing, then the company should not have a hissy fit if the clerks don’t clock out at nine on the dot every night. On a related note, it’s perfectly acceptable for a company to want people to show up about 15 minutes before their shift, alert and ready to work. However, it’s NOT acceptable to put them to work until they’ve actually clocked in if they work hourly. If you’re paying someone for 35 or 40 hours a week, then you don’t get to have them work for 36.5 or 41.5 hours that week. It goes back to that “respect is a two way street” thing I talked about. Sure, if there’s an emergency, then you can put people to work…AFTER THEY CLOCK IN. Anything else is illegal (in the US) and unethical (anywhere in the world). I know that management is salaried, and I also know of at least one company that tried to get almost the whole damn staff declared as management of some sort or another, simply so they wouldn’t have to pay overtime.
I saw that one. MY favorite part was when he was trying to work a street promotion, and he learned that a lot of people consider the “Hooters girls” to be trashy. Gee, you hire women to wear skimpy outfits, train them to be flirtatious, promote them as being “friendly”, and your whole business plan revolves around being tasteless and tacky…and you’re surprised that people consider the waitresses to be trashy? And that jerk manager should not have been allowed to keep his job. He did that shit because he saw nothing wrong with it. He’s sorry that he got caught, but I very much doubt that he’ll change his ways when he think that he can get away with it.
I do think that the owner respects his waitresses and cares about them and the rest of his workers. I also think that he’s believed his own publicity. He’s the son of the guy (or one of the guys, can’t remember which) who founded the place, so he views Hooters as a positive thing. However, IME, Hooters restaurants are regarded as low class, they’re not known for the quality of their food, they’re in bad parts of town for the most part, and their customers are not regarded as being very classy, either. Yeah, that’s the demographic they’re going for, so why is he surprised at the public perception of Hooters and Hooters Girls as being low class?
Too many managers/owners are willing to eat the BS that some people try to feed them. It’s great to be a people person, someone everyone wants to work with. It’s great to have the customers love you. But if someone is not doing his/her job, sooner or later it’s going to show. I’ve worked with salesclerks who were absolutely fantastic at selling. The way they were managing to make big sales was to give customers unauthorized discounts, or just plain give stuff away with purchases. This is a great way to gain customer loyalty, if management knows and approves. And it’s also a great way to get everyone in that store fired, too, when the inventory shows a lot of shrinkage, because the management will believe that either everyone knew about it, or everyone SHOULD have known about it, and it’s easier to just fire everyone and start with a fresh staff.
There’s a lot of people who are willing to dump their work onto co-workers, and most co-workers are willing to do a bit extra to help someone out now and then. After all, if you help someone out, they’re more willing to help YOU out, in most cases. But some people try to dump all their work on other people all the time.
As a consultant, one of the worst sources of pain is that most clients do not give us any kind of access to the “peons”, not even to site managers; often, the people we deal with are all from Home Office and have never set foot in a single one of their factories, warehouses, construction sites or stores. Those companies are also the ones which have impossible policies, post-its stuck to monitors with lists of passwords (including the passwords of several other people), etc. The people who act as our contacts know what must the yearly report look like, but have no idea what goes into it and don’t give a shit about how much work other people will have to do in order to get it Just So. Those projects always go over-calendar, over-budget and under-satisfaction.
The clients who give us access to people at all levels are the ones whose projects go smoother, whose end-users (at all levels) are satisfied with the final results, and which even sometimes manage to not go over budget. Don’t try explaining that to the first group, though: it’s being tried, there’s articles and books and whatnot on it, but they’re just not ever going to hear the message.
SteveG1, you can’t “hurt my feelings” because you are nothing to me. Just some anonymous angry jerk on a message board. I am merely baffled why you are projecting all of your job woes on me.
Of course your angry. You’ve been at the same stupid job for 20 years. “Superior promotions” but only “acting tech lead” and “acting supervisor”? Yeah, sounds like you are on a fast track to success.
Your coworkers don’t like and respect you. They voted you “Union VP” because no one else wants to deal with that crap.
You’re bullshit. All these things you claim to have done and yet still grinding away in a shitty low level role? You’re so good at your job but never thought to maybe get an MBA and take on a real position with real responsibility? I mean if you think you can do a better job.
“Oh boo hoo! My coworkers were dumping work on me!” What a freakin gaylord.
A lot of management types are highly educated and self-important. They graduated from the best schools and probably got their start in prestigeous corporate management training programs or at consulting forms like Accenture, McKinsey or the Big-4. They often consider the actual “doing stuff” parts of the company to be beneath them. Or at the very least they would be so distanced from that work it would be nothing to them but a line on a status report.
When you are distanced from actually having to get something done or make it work, it becomes very easy to think of it in abstract terms. And the more abstract you think of it, the harder it can be to implement in reality. That’s sort of why being a middle manager is such a hard job. You are the last layer between the fantasy of the super duper enthusiastic MBA management geniuses and the people who actually have to get that bullshit to work.
That boy was begging for a sexual harassment lawsuit, if not from what he did do than what he might decide he can get away with later on.
The CEO was in a bit of a quandry with the people who think Hooters girls are trashy. What can he do? Dress them up? The problem is his family founded that business on the premise of luring in arrested adolescent males - boobs with a side of chicken wings. If he changes course he loses that niche market edge and becomes just another chicken wings competitor. His business would get dead in a hurry.
Now I can’t forget to mention the HIGHLIGHT of that episode… the woman manager who got down and dirty with her workers and who knew how to really MANAGE.
The problem for him is how does he escape this image and save his business? We’re talking about a total reboot of the company. The big question is how long will Hooters last?
And you aren’t shit to me. Same stupid job? You come here and take my place. Good luck with that. You wouldn’t know where to start and I wouldn’t train you. I had to figure it out myself. Shitty low level? I’m a GS12, Step 10 engineer. That’s as high as we go without being management these days. I’ve had a hand in the design of the F16, A7, P3, SSME and ISS. I created much of the database we use here for our records and many other sites have come to use and they come to us (me) for advice and assistance. What have you done? Not a fucking thing real. Sometimes, the attitudes are the result of some underlying cause, but that might mean an asshole like you would have to deal with it, instead of the usual “be a team and do ownership stuff wne deal with it yoruself” crap
I’m a “gaylord”? I’d LOVE to see you say that to me in person. I’d break my damn foot off in your ass. Fuck you.
SteveG1, I don’t care. Go off and beat your wife or something.
I bet that’s not all you’d like to do with my ass, princess.
This entire thread is about the results when middle management fails to perform that function, and as a result some idiotic “team-building exercise” is inflicted upon the workers instead of being shuffled off into a paperwork black hole and forgotten.
Know what you need?
Ice cream cone.
Turn that frown upside down.
ETA: Don’t take that the wrong way. Just trying to lighten the mood. Pretty decent rant, btw.
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. You’re an incompetent lickspittle whose only skills are kissing ass and taking credit for other people’s work. Accordingly, your idiot boss loves you. When you get high enough to start promoting people yourself, who do you promote? More people like yourself, obviously. If you promoted truly competent people, you’d be fucked out of a job.
1.) No, he’s probably someone who everyone likes and respects except for shitty management and the abovementioned lickspittles.
2.) The word you want is fomenting.
Shit. Rolls. Downhill.
Some bosses entirely deserve to be held in contempt. And if you think it’s stupid to keep a job that you hate, you must have been handed your first job by Daddy when you failed out of whatever college he bribed your way into.
This entire post? Grade A+ fucking asskicking rant. msmith537, you got fucking owned.
Hey, anybody who disagrees with you must be gay? Why do you seeing gay as being a negative thing? Would you find it acceptable to say, “If you think that, you’re so stupid you must be Black”? What other deliciously retarded viewpoints must you hold?
Actually I was handed my first job at the age of 15 by my daddy … who taught me to work at my job whether or not I actually liked it or the people I worked with, because it was my job to be in that place, doing that job to collect my paycheck … Unlike a lot of kids that had a similar background, I actually got a work ethic from my dad. Only free ride I ever got was in the form of a family trust endowment for an education [well, that and a scholarship I earned through being a good scholar and not slacking off in high school.]
I am of the firm belief that requiring management candidates to have a business degree is mainly to blame, when management came up from the work force, you had people who both understood the industrial/sales aspect of business, and understood how the business actually worked from the bottom up. They could make rational decisions based on concrete experience, not wafty bullshit business theories that some idiot decided upon without actually knowing anything ‘real world’ combined with the idea that you should grab as much cash as fast as possible from your investments, instead of husbanding the business as it grows for slow steady profits is the problem. Also the problem with the whole offshoring that is dragging the country down [combined with those wonderful investment assholes that gutted corporations and fucked up the mortgage industry] is that it is gutting the country of a trained workforce, and concentrating the cash in the hands of a few greedy people that have no interest in the stability of the country as a whole.
I see merit in this view.
The business degree isn’t to blame. How is actually educating yourself about accounting, finance and marketing a bad thing if you want to manage a business? I haven’t seen much of a correlation between being a shitty manager and having a business degree. There are shitty managers both with degrees and without.
The problem (as stated in the aforementioned Peter Principle) is that just because you are a good individual contributor does not mean you will be great at running a business. And the higher you go in a company, the less your job has to do with “how do we make these widgets 10% more efficiently” and more to do with figuring out where the widget market will be in a few years and how your company will compete.
Again. I’m not sure what ** SteveG1’s**psychotic ranting has anything to do with me. I’m not his boss.
But if it keeping him happy enough to keep him from going all Falling Down for a few more days, more power to him.
Maybe he’s the kind of person who thinks all management is “shitty” simply because they are management?
Who said I was being negative?
And what’s your problem with the mentally disabled?
I see zero evidence of that. Please provide a cite or shut the fuck up, plzkthx<3.
They’re people just like anyone else–some of them delightful and fun, some of them assholes–who have a demonstrable problem with their cognitive abilities. Do you disagree?
I wouldn’t work for you. I’d put in paperwork and get reassigned or relocated before I’d want to deal with you, As for the “get you fired whatever it takes” and the “princess” comments, I’d have you up on charges and end your career just with that. Let’s see. Harrassment, hostile workplace, there are plenty of regulations and statutes. Yes, I would end your career.
From our contract:
*D. Labor-Management Relations Committee (LMRC)
I am ON this council, which means I would have direct and immediate access to YOUR superiors.
A. Consistent with 5 U.S.C. § 7114(a)(2)(A), as the exclusive representative of unit employees, the Union shall be given the opportunity to be represented at any formal discussion between one or more representatives of the Agency and one or more employees or their representatives concerning any grievance or any personnel policy or practices or other general condition of employment.
B. The DCMA Council Local will be advised in advance of the time, location and general nature of the subject matter to be addressed at these formal discussions. Normally the Agency will provide such notification two (2) working days in advance. Copies of any briefing charts/documents provided to the bargaining unit employees will be provided to the DCMA Council Local prior to the formal discussion.
C. During the formal discussion, the Union representative will be permitted to respond to issues affecting bargaining unit employees and any comments made about the Union and/or its views.
Try that “princess” remark there, I’d own you. Further, any bargaining unit person could REFUSE to talk to you unless a union rep is present, due to YOUR attitude, and per the contract, you’d be forced to OBEY.
Upon a written request demonstrating a particularized need, the Union has the right to reasonable access to data normally maintained by the Agency pertaining to personnel and conditions of employment. Release of data to the Union is subject to applicable regulatory and legal restrictions.
By law, I can use your own records and data against you.
Employees have the right and shall be encouraged to bring matters of personal concern regarding conditions of employment to the attention of the appropriate Agency or Union representative at the lowest level capable of resolving the matter.
Which means you don’t get to chalk it up to the individual’s attitude when there is a problem they expect you as management to correct.
A. A representative of the Union shall be given an opportunity to be present at any examination of an employee in connection with an investigation if: (1) the employee reasonably believes that the examination may result in a disciplinary action against them; and (2) the employee requests such representation. When such an examination is held, every reasonable effort will be made to schedule it at a time and site, which is acceptable to all of the participants.
B. When an employee exercises their rights under this section and when the DCMA Council Local representative of the employee is not immediately available, the meeting will be deferred for a reasonable period of time to permit the presence of the DCMA Council Local representative if the Agency elects to hold the meeting.
C. The Agency shall annually inform all members of the bargaining unit of their rights, as set forth in this Section.
D. The Agency will recognize the employee’s right to seek DCMA Council Local representation at any time after the employee has been asked to make a statement about another bargaining unit employee should the employee
You don’t get to play your power game in the absence of witnesses or in the absence of someone who can stop you. Further, I could set YOUR meeting to MY convenience.
A. It is the Agency’s policy to promote a safe working environment for its employees. The Agency and the Union are committed to working with employees to maintain a work environment free from violence, threats of violence, harassment, intimidation and other disruptive behavior.
B. Violence, threats, harassment, intimidation and other disruptive behavior in the workplace will not be tolerated. Such behavior could include oral or written statements, gestures or expressions that communicate a direct threat of physical harm. Reports of incidents will be dealt with appropriately. Individuals who commit such acts may be removed from the premises, subjected to disciplinary action and/or subjected to criminal penalties.
It would be incredibly easy to get you on intimidation and harrassment, if you made the “I’m gonna get you and fire you no matter what” Or, if in the case of the office psycho, take you down for scolding the workers about attitudes and refusing to deal with the office psycho/sociopath.
I can keep going. Let’s just say I would destroy you.
Added on edit: From the Federal Agreement Contract, “AGREEMENT BETWEEN DEFENSE CONTRACT MANAGEMENT AGENCY AND AFGE COUNCIL 170”
Less than three, SteveG1. The smackdowns just keep coming.
And this is why I’m making an effort to accommodate my employees within the bounds of their job duties.