Administrative incompetence
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Certain administrative behaviours are dysfunctional. They do not contribute to the attainment of the organization's goals. Given the importance of management's roles within an organization, havoc can result when employees in such roles lack certain key competencies.
Some of the most common and potentially damaging shortfalls are:
- Poor communicator - The manager that has difficulty expressing himself can leave his subordinates confused. Often relies on buzzwords to apear to be communicating.
- Aloof - The manager that keeps to herself may seem cold and uncaring to her subordinates.
- Inconsistent - Does not apply the same criteria in similar circumstances.
- Hypocritical - Says one thing, then does another.
- Cowardice - Has a poorly performing employee but won't confront him/her for fear of conflict.
- Dereliction of duty - Has a poor performer but gives him/her a good performance review as a way of facilitating the employee's movement to another department.
- Self-centered - The manager whose self-interest comes first will appear selfish to his subordinates. A variation on this is the manager whose chief drive is to curry favor with senior managers at levels above him in the organization. His subordinates are likely to view this as brown-nosing.
- Secretive - While some information cannot be released at certain times, the manager who is habitually secretive keeps her people in the dark. This will not engender trust.
- Focused on minutiae - Although the details are important, some managers fall into trap of micromanagement which can drive co-workers crazy. Some managers do this from a desire to feel involved; others from a genuine belief that their employees are not competent to make these decisions themselves.
- Focused on appearances - When a manager places undue emphasis on sprucing up the office, more important priorities can slip.
- Focused on short-term - The manager who is not strategic in his focus can fall victim to the demands of the moment. This fire-fighting style might be appropriate at a crunch time but can be demoralizing when it becomes the manager's norm.
- Inflexible - While, as a general rule, policies and procedures should be followed, the manager who refuses to be flexible may be viewed as insensitive to the needs of others.
- Unrealistic expectations - The manager demands that a task be completed on an unrealistically small budget, or with an unrealistically close deadline, etc. Employees who point out the unrealistic constraints are often castigated, and discouraged from making such comments in the future, exacerbating the problem. Typically employees are in any case blamed for failure to meet the manager's expectations.
As dysfunctional as these behaviours are, perhaps the worst forms of incompetence are:
- Intellectual incompetence - The manager that is slow-witted, prone to not understanding people or processes.
- Harassment - The manager who crosses the line into illegal harassment, whether sexual or not, has created a hostile work environment.
- Malice - This is the manager who, for some reason, sets out to make his subordinate's life miserable. This may, in some cases, be the run-up to a planned termination.
Sometimes, two or more of these traits are fused. The Intellectually incompetent + Focused on minutiae + Self-centered + Inflexible profile has been satirised in the Dilbert comic strip as the Pointy Haired Boss. And the Harassment + Malice + Secretive profile has been satirised as a BOFH in computer circles.