As a previous worker-drone, why should you take on the responsibility of managing Henry instead of you manager who probably gets paid a lot more than you to … you know … manage.
OP checking in.
I haven’t really been keeping up with the thread since the advice I sought was received and followed.
Quick update, though: the manager meeting never happened, at least not yet. So I did not have to not share my thoughts.
Also, Henry did not show up for work today and did not call. The manager called him an hour after start of his 7 am work time and left a message for him to call. Henry did not call him back until noon. Henry then texted me and apologized for having to “call in” today (even though he never actually called in).
mmm
And, in an effort to clear up some confusion…
The inside info I have on Henry comes from his previous co-worker who happens to be a friend of mine. The friend - we’re gonna call her Hazel - says that Henry has had a pattern of calling in and no-showing for the past year or so. They had some incentive bonus going on during random weeks because of short staffing, a bonus that you could not collect if you had missed any days of a given week. Henry would work the week that the bonus was in effect, then, like clockwork, not show up the following Monday (a missed day that would not affect last weeks bonus).
There are other past behaviors that make me very glad I will be out of there in a year.
mmm
And that brings to mind the old Soviet worker’s joke – “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
No. When an employee requests FMLA the Department of Labor isn’t generally involved. A lot of companies, mine included, actually hires an outside vendor to manage their FMLA claims. The reasons for doing so includes taking the decision to grant FMLA leave out of our hands, to free up HR employees to perform their other job duties, and some employees like it because they don’t necessarily have to report their health condition to their employer.
They worked all right - just not for the people who were paying them.
I have a friend who is a CTer, and she has a book where the UN invades the US (it is an end times book, she is an evangelical.) I laugh and laugh. The UN couldn’t get it together these days to invade the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.
Doesn’t really sound like an “excellent manager”.
A managers job is to lead his or her team to perform some corporate function that aligns with the goals and objectives of the company. Part of that does include “managing upwards” or “protecting their team from the idiots above them”. But it is also making sure the “idiot’s bullshit gets transmitted”.
If you work at a company where each layer of management is a “bullshit filter” for idiots, that may be a sign that it’s time to find a new job.
I’m not in HRS, so don’t quote me on this, but I don’t think FMLA gives you a free pass to just no-show without notifying.
And I did! But before I did…
…the least-favorite part of my job was to listen to the CEO/Owner rant about how he’ll have to “knuckle down” on my team, and discipline them for minor infractions (including some of them being TWO minutes late… after working til midnight on a big deadline the night before).
I treated it like trying to reason with a crazy. So as I backed out of his office I’d say “Y’know what, Boss? You’re busy, so DON’T confront all of them yourself. I’ll take care of it.”
(which consisted of me rolling my eyes and telling my team “Next time, before we all work til midnight, we’ll negotiate the next morning off”)
Some people who join our group are honest, hardworking, and selfless. Others are not: they spend lots and lots and lots of time studying The System™, and figuring out clever & creative ways to use The System to their advantage. All of their time, all of their focus, and all of their energy is spent understanding and mastering The System. I have discovered that, not only can nothing be done about these people, but my job & career will be put in jeopardy if I try; they are very well protected via political forces. YMMV.
Usually that’s a sign of a crappy system.
I do a lot of work with companies trying to fix management processes. They all have their various challenges. But ultimately you need to have people who want to be there, are interested in doing a good job, and believe in what the company is doing on some level. No companies need people who just want to collect a paycheck and go out of their way to avoid work.
I’m sure most people would rather do other things besides go to work. I just don’t understand people who spend year after year at some job they totally hate or where the company is totally dysfunctional. Like are they afraid they can’t find another job doing anything else? Even if every other company is just as bad, wouldn’t it be refreshing to be on the receiving end of different abuse?
My advice? Call in sick.
Well, I left out the part of the job about hiring people who won’t need a lot of micromanagement. He specialized in hiring people who knew things he didn’t, and he was a brilliant polymath. Then he made sure he wasn’t in our way. We were doing research, and he made sure we had adequate funding for it.
Managers scared of hiring people smarter than they are do have to give lots of direction, true. Ditto bad managers who don’t trust their reports.
But sometimes you have to learn to leverage The System for the good of the company. When we got bought by Oracle my boss couldn’t get any college hires through. I took over and talked to an HR person who had come in also. She told me the secrets, and I could game the system to make some crucial hires.
I thought I was down the rabbit hole while she told me this stuff.
I’ve heard the “managers should hire people smarter than they are” theory before. Isn’t that how we end up with a sort of “inverse pyramid of competency” with idiots at the top and all the geniuses at the base as worker bees? 
So they should hire people dumber than they are? 
It’s theoretically possible that dumb managers get on top because of this, but in my experience they are scared of hiring smart employees for fear of being shown up. In places I’ve worked it always makes sense to hire the smartest people you can find (assuming basic social skills, of course) but I can imagine some jobs where this could be a problem, where smart people would get frustrated and leave very quickly.