The Worst Manager in the World - Article Example

of the Business of the Concerned 21 February The Worst Manager in the World There is no denying the fact that the discipline of management tends to be very vast and spacious, thereby making an allowance for all sorts of abominations and crap passed on in the name of efficient management. Though, it is true that every second employee believes oneself to be at the beck and call of a boss who is inapt and a virtual heathen, yet the irony is that there is a species of organizational talent that could very well qualify all the attributes of what may be called to be the worst manager in the world. The organizations, big and small, scattered around the globe tend to have more than their ample share of what may be called the bad managers, whose only concern seems to be to mar the organizational efficiency and nip the talent right in the bud, wherever it is deployed within or outside the organization, thereby restraining the organization from achieving the levels of productivity and efficiency that may shock the shareholders, pushing most of them towards a premature stroke or heart attack (Lussier and Achua 5). One other role of bad managers is to give way to a pervasive despondency, apathy and cynicism within organizations so that employees may genuinely end up believing that they scarcely deserve a promotion or a raise, thereby sparing the organizations from splurging much money in the name of motivation and efficiency. When it comes to recruiting bad managers, the organizations may complain of a serious dearth of real talent. However, the good news is that bad managers happen to be just like regular managers with a discerning pool of skills and abilities at their disposal, which help them justify their title and denomination. While talking of bad managers, the one person that emerges on the canvass of my memory is Mr. Dam Doolittle, a paragon of managerial dexterity and a virtual paradigm of a bad manager, whom I came across while working in a local advertisement firm. One thing that outshined Mr. Doolittle from the pool of inefficient menials working under his tutelage in the firm was his panache for professional outlook. Mr. Doolittle had a passion for designer suits, ties and Italian patent leather shoes. Perhaps his guiding maxim was that if one successfully managed to look like a manager, than perhaps 99 percent of one’s job is done. No wonder, Mr. Doolittle’s managing acumen stood to be merely skin deep and superficial like the garishness of his apparels. However, sadly, this was not the be-all and end-all of his managerial acumen and talent. Mr. Doolittle indeed was endowed by the providence with some rare and special skills that aptly placed him at an assorted place in the hall of fame of the worst managers. His reputation was indeed well deserved and well earned, scarcely impervious to any tarnishing by the ravages of time or bursts of organizational change. When it came to micro management, it goes without saying that on this entire globe there scarcely existed a manager born of a human womb that could match the adroitness of Mr. Doolittle. Mr. Doolittle scarcely believed in the obsolete concept of ‘vision’. He was a stickler for change. He believed that in the current times defined by fast altering consumer preferences and the onslaught of digital solutions, ‘vision’ happened to be a thing of the past. He not only believed in leading from the front merely, but generously spread his management talent, right, left, behind and center, firmly convinced that the day he contracts his managerial acumen from the floor, the business will virtually fall down on its knees. He believed in ruthlessly cracking the whip whenever and wherever the need be, luckily restrained by the organizational norms from wielding a whip in the literal sense. Being deprived of the superfluous notion of vision, the employees mostly felt insecure, confused and intimidated, and that is how Mr. Dam Doolittle expected them to be (Benfari 109). Esteemed to be a manager worth his salt, he had never heard of the things like space and delegation, fearing that employees could seldom be trusted for their talent and even more scarcely left on their own (Wiggins 29). Averse to empowerment, it was his firm belief that no team, no matter how good it may be, could not be trusted to achieve results on its own. By the flick of luck, being placed in such an organizational environment devoid of true talent and adroitness, ‘stress’ happened to be the second name of Mr. Doolittle. In fact the entire employee pool within the organization, right from the office supervisor, to the liftboy, strongly associated Mr. Doolittle with stress and tension. Mr. Doolittle not only had a congenital capacity to generate stress by his very presence, the sad thing was that the poor chap was himself the utter victim of stress. In fact he ardently believed that if a situation was not attended by a commensurate level of stress, it strongly smacked of mismanagement and inefficiency. So, his reactions to problems and situations happened to be replete with stress and but naturally he expected his employees to be and look stressful. Words like stress management and empowering teamwork scarcely existed in the dictionary of Mr. Doolittle. He could scarcely bring himself to believe in the fact that a creative approach towards things alleviated stress and enhanced organizational output. For Mr. Doolittle, stress was normal and emotional restraint was a big no, no. This great bad manager was akin to a standing wireless tower within the organization that continually emitted the signals that he was badly in the control of stress and expected his employees to do the same. If per chance some employee missed getting stressful, courtesy the benign aura of this great leader, he himself accepted the responsibility of making one feel pressurized and stressed. ‘Pressure Cooker’ was one other nicknames of Mr. Doolittle. Irrespective of being hyper emotional and the true prototype of a bad manager, one other big ability of Mr. Doolittle was that of managing distances within the organization. Though he took care to have a watch over each and everything being done by each and every employee in the office, it says a lot about his acumen when one acknowledges that most of the employees found him to be distant and aloof. Mr. Doolittle was a strong believer in hierarchies, and there was a word going around the organization that in his student days he happened to be a closet communist. As if it was not enough, the suffering souls lying at the lower wrung of the office hierarchy were repeatedly reminded by this boss, in one way or other of their menial status within the organization. Mr. Doolittle was a craftsman at creating real and perceived distances within the organization, seldom stopping to think the extent to which they vitiated the office environment and suppressed employee efficiency (Johnson and Turner 203). Mr. Doolittle seldom cared to interact with his employees in a true spirit of solidarity and equality. Managing things from his corner office, whose doors remained mostly closed was his style of managing things. It has been a long time since I had the ill luck of moving out from the circle of managerial concern of Mr. Doolittle, to work in other organizations, where the managers happened to be more regular and ordinary. Yet, when it comes to talking about bad managers or say worst managers, I have still not found a contender for Mr. Doolittle. Works Cited Benfari, Robert C. Understanding and Changing your Management Style. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Print Johnson, Debra & Turner, Colin. International Business. New York: Routledge. Print. Lussier, Robert N & Achua, Christopher F. Leadership. (5th edition). New York: South-Western College Pub. Print. Wiggins, Dave. “Stop Doing it All Yourself! Some Keys to Effective Delegation”. Journal of Environmental Health 60.9 (1998): 29-30. Print. Read More