How Getting Rid of ALL Managers Made These Companies Record Profits - How Money Works
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- Опубліковано 23 жов 2022
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If a company is set up properly people really can just come into work, do their job and go home without layers of authority on top of them micromanaging their every move, getting in the way of actual business operations, and taking home the biggest salaries in the office.
Bad management can ruin even the best ideas, and end up costing their companies lots of money in the process, about three trillion dollars a year according to recent studies, which is why some companies are starting to rethink if the hierarchical business structure is a thing of the past.
In a typical business management is responsible for choosing the direction of the company, training their subordinates and providing them with the tools they need to move the company in that direction, rewarding employees that excel in their work and punishing employees that don’t meet their standards.
These five tasks encompass everything that a manager is responsible for, and they ARE all very important roles in running a successful business so it’s not like the role of a manager is redundant by default, BUT some companies are starting to realize that these five tasks can be without a manager at all, often with better results.
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#howmoneyworks #management #business
Edited By: Andrew Gonzales
Music Courtesy of: Epidemic Sound
Select Footage Courtesy of: Getty Images
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Hey my little pogchamp, you didn't post the ad link properly in the description, I don't know if that's part of the deal or not, but seeing as you're a busy boy, I though I'd point it out JIC. Love the video, and them shoes do be looking kinda sexy, but they prolly 90$ too much for me 🤣
this video needs a sequel... in the 90s there was a canning factory in Vaughn Ontario which was build to have about 600 employees including middle and executive managers. the reality is that the factory ran at 300percent above standard output with 60 employees and no managers. they used a management style can socio-technical, where employees follow rules to manage themselves. ... the company was called Crown Cork and Seal.
You messed up the link in the description
9:00 the Dilbert Principle is a blatant Plagiarism of the lesser known "The Peter Principle" a book by the same name written in 1969 by Dr Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull.
Yo
I’ve seen companies that keeps adding managers instead of more staff. I’ve had the experience having 5 managers just to manage me.
Holy that’s insane
You must have been a handful
NEIL WHY ARE YOUR QUOTAS NOT BEING MET?!?!
Neil: My guy I have 6 1-hour meetings a day in a 8 hour shift, can I maybe get more hours or....
WORK HARDER, STOP ASKING FOR HANDOUTS
@neil...you must work ITS? In ITS, there always seems to be more management then technical people.
been there done that got the t-shirt
One job I had was in a 24-hour 3-shift operation. We had practically no turnover on two shifts, and *insane* turnover on one - people quit or transferred in an average of 3 months, even if they'd worked for the company for *years* in other roles. The manager was awful, but no one in upper mgmt questioned the disparity, ever.
Umm, hard to believe. Upper management must have access to this data. How could anybody be that incompetent?
@@stevedavenport1202 Exactly what I wondered for years. Things didn't change until she retired.
@@epbrown01 Ahh, that's the key: "she". I find they don't fire terrible woman managers even if they are hell on Earth due to ESG quota.
When I was in the Air Force, I always volunteered to work swing or mid shift. Work was so much easier without without management around.
@@stephenpalfy8226 Night shifts are so great, nothing goes wrong and things just start working all by themselves. We used to have a midnight millwright.
I worked 6 years for a gas station franchise. I had to leave because of an apartment fire. Comments of me by coworkers were: he's the backbone of the store, when you walk in you can tell if he's working based on how clean and orderly it is, he does more work than any three others, this store was shaped by you in the time you worked here.
Yet, I never made supervisor.
I trained not just base employees but supervisors and managers for our district about how the store ran.
Yet, I was never promoted.
Customers told me they came to that store because of how well I kept it.
Yet, I never got a bonus.
I did many small things that improved the store, like check all egg cartons for cracked eggs and gathered the cracked ones in one carton. A few months after starting this, we were regularly selling all the cartons. Before we trashed most once the due date expired.
I did many such little things without asking permission because management didn't want to rock the boat and get fired for going against QA.
responsibility and contribution should translate to pay
Sad to hear you were not appreciated
Lmao
Have you asked?
Did you ever share the compliments you get and ask for a raise? You have to communicate these things, if they don't make it their way to the manager then they don't know
As a manager, I can relate. I was stuck at the bottom of the food chain in the beginning as I tried my hardest to do my job. Promotions didn't happen. So I changed my aim to "how can I do the least amount of work I can get away with". Climbing the ladder ever since.
Kinda the issue, the company itself wants to operate that way. Make the most money with as little effort as possible. As much as you'd think pet rock at that point this is more a licensing or software company thing. They have hundreds or thousands of employees who can do something simple over and over again (such as packaging and shipping a rock) but to simply make money without having to package anything? That's what they're after. So much of management is just a way to source new cost and corner cutting ideas. Sure they may suck as a manager but their laziness may lead to process and procedure improvements that can be used to squeeze the customers even further without having to do more. They may be costing production capacity by being ruinous to their division, but their lazy idea just made Bank so they'll keep them around in a lower or middle management position to see if they have any more ideas like that. If not no harm they can fire them and look for the next lazy tip they can use to make more money while doing less.
@@joshuagunthner1838 Well, to be honest I don't waste my nor my employees' time on needless demonstration of my own usefulness. I just learn new skills and ideas during my free time on the job. And to be fair to my employees I never care when they're clocking in/out so long as they have their job well done.
Thats really crazy that nowadays not the hardest worker is promoted, but the one who does bare minimum. It happened also at my job, where I didn't get promotion because I was a hard worker and it would be hard to replace me, so they promoted the lazy one who didn't do much. After that I started to rethink how hard I should work at the job.
@@_andry It depends on how you look at it. Personally I love "creatively lazy" people. The type that say: do I really have to do this? Or: do I have to do it this way? Wanting to avoid work is a good thing if it leads to overall less work needing to be done. Oftentimes teams and whole departments fall into a rut and keep rolling along, just because things work so smoothly. You need at least one person in a team that is motivated to reduce the workload, that keeps their eyes open for hacks and methodical changes that will make life easier.
Manager here. A good team doesn't need any management aside from making sure that their effort is properly rewarded, and generally looking out for their wellbeing. I'm the first one to tell someone if I think they're overworking and need some time off.
Most of management is making sure you recruit the type of people that you specifically don't need to micromanage. Give them fair incentives, effective systems, a good environment, and ample training, then get out of their way. You also want to be in a position to where you're leading from the front and know how to solve difficult problems either yourself or through your network. Gain respect by exemplifying company values and being more useful than anyone else.
Know people, know the project.
Yes, yes, YES!
lets goooooooo ACTUAL mangement. its true managers are mostly meant to deal with the employees feelings and prevent burnout/ turnover of good employees. i think most companies should promote good technical employees into better technical positions. like senior/cheif technician that deals with only the work side of things. while managers just give you a drink and a attaboy at the end of a hard day
Thank you for being the rarely visible good manager. Any jobs I've worked in life so far, the management have been brown-nosing bullies, who protect or promote lazybones who make them laugh, dumping more work on me.
On top of this they promoted an anti-western borderline jihadi immigrant who made constant vicious homophobic remarks. It wasn't even so much aimed directly at me, which was kind of worse.
The petty 40 something year old man-child would hiss these terms in english or arabic walking past me, or else yell them on the shop floor, just becuse the petty jeb end was angry and stressed at his job.
I'm reasonably sane, but incidents of white management protecting abusive embarrassments to immigrants and *BRITISH* Muslims is exactly the kind of factual fuel that leads to white Brits going Far Right. The 'Left' 'Liberals' the 'State' and businesses, all of them *FAIL* at minority - minority conflict, the Far Right take it, run with it, and make things worse in their own way too.
I ended up filing a complaint, and before fleeing the area, as I feared doing something that would land me in jail... I messaged him telling him that if and when I return to work, if he does it again I will sit on his head in front of the entire department leaving him utterly humilated 😂😂🤣🤣
"OnLy StraIgHt WhItE MeN ArE BigOts" - Backfiring Social Justice Warriors with neither facts nor logic.
Complitely agree. This is how i do my work also and despite upper Management not agreeing, the people and their well-being is what makes the job improve and working as a team. Listening to ideas being proactive and doing things efficitly. The. More stress the higher the turnover
That was how I was also taught when it comes to basic management in addition to accounting. Know the trade, and know your subordinates you are delegating tasks to.
My boss is great. She does our job and is the boss because she does it better than all of us. So when we need assistance she knows exactly what to do. Her management role is in addition to her day to day job. Wouldn't know she was the team leader if you met her. Just seems like one of the team.
I wish. When you actually do the work you know not the build sky castles so when it's time to push back against upper management for their "great ideas", they actually know what to say that's not just 'of course, boss".
this is something ive also noticed in all types of groups and teams. the more the manager/leader is a part of the team itself, the happier everyone is and everyone automatically starts figuring out what needs to be done and what can be improved upon.
i think it motivates everyone to basically micro-manage themselves and to go beyond their role by helping the leader etc
ive always been kinda against being a manager/leader myself, until i worked with a few like that who really inspired me
Man thats what a manager is supposed to be, hope she gets paid properly
@@panchotz100 That's not really a manager, that's "only" a team leader, a supervisor. Managers have a much more difficult job. They are supposed to lead a team without having their hands in the day to day business. I am such a supervisor myself, and have decided that I don't even want to take it to that next level. I have mad respect for people who get managment right, and I know I'd likely not be one of them, exactly because I'm so dependent on the information I get from being involved in the work.
My General manager at the Applebee's I worked at while in highschool and college was Great she listened to employees and was fair but also didn't take BS from the lazy employees and was always quick to jump on the cook line if they needed help, and when a new supervisor that was horrible was hired and half the staff threatened to walk out of any shift he was a on for (he was a coke addict and literally was so bad at management that my assistant GM gave me permission to go over his head) they actually fired the supervisor instead of just firing us lowly servers and carside employees
I worked at one of the biggest banks in the states. I didn't start at the bottom and even I had 9 layers of bosses before we got to the CEO. 9 managers of managers... by the time something got to us it had been so morphed with ideas and legalize that there was almost no way we'd say some of those things to clients/customers they wanted us to. I had an advanced colleague who I was complaining to about how "this won't help the client" and he told me "Just check the boxes and you'll be ok" that's pretty much when I knew I had to lease the corporate job.
All the managers and distract and area managers, all told us stories about how they were so good at their sales position... as you said, just because you're good at sales doesn't mean you're good at managing.
*legalese that there was almost no way
*to whom I was complaining
*leave the corporate job
*district and area managers
Actually thought I was the only trading with expert Eunice Berthold. She currently manages all my funds too and She also provides webinars on how to trade perfectly without loss, but I haven't started trading on my own yet, still building up my portfolio with her help for now.
The bots took over your thread.
@@burrybondz225 Just report them.
Fucking good God.
@Scarlett Rachel wtf, gtfo
Yeah. I work for a manufacturing firm and since the work is repetitive we can work without any care in the world as long as there is demand. We are working for months without a manager and all is well until they hired a manager. Now the manager doesn't know how to do his work or just causing inconvenience to us by setting up meetings just so that he has work. It's fuck up that now to rise in our ranks we need to suck up to pleasing the managers ego instead of doing work.
I got fired by a new manager at one job, he was saying I was underperforming. I didn't really like the job anyway so I was like okay no worries. But I was straight up the most efficient worker they had. Didn't add up.
He probably felt threatened by someone who was better than him. I've seen it happen to several people at a place I used to work. Everyone who spoke up against our boss got forced to leave in one way or another.
The problem is always information : does the company have a way to know if a manager is doing good or bad, and how the people they manage are performing.
It blows my mind in one way where the managers of managers have no clue what's going on in the company below those managers.
Yet then I also see many, many cases where those below the managers also assume they have a good picture of what's going on with their managers, all the way up to the ceo. Often times they have extremely distorted views as well.
by that logic it feels like you would do better with people whose job would be gather information about the company rather than not managers
@@khhnator that's happening more and more.
@@khhnator both
You're not wrong, but in practice it translates in brain-dead KPIs forced to wildly different departments who end up gaming the numbers in order to look better, which ends up often being a less productive endeavour.
I worked in an american company, worst factory manager, big problems, quit, how do they choose these ppl???? I have no idea. They will always have to pay engineers more and more because working with such managers is very difficult. They only watch for the women, maybe some day give some a/ss. You would expect an american company to be different but it was the worst experience
So on one side is Quiet Quitting and on the other is Busting Bureaucracy? I like it.
I'm still waiting for him to explain how money actually works though.
Money isnt real
If you're poor think of it as a representation of your time, if you're rich its a representation of your (or in most cases your family's) power and ability to influence, the area in the middle is more of a grey zone.
Mine comes out of my wallet and doesn't come back.
@@chrisp.lettuce8900 that second one is also just a representation of your time (in dedication) hence the often loss of your bank account if you don't follow your familial duties, it's just poor people are assumed to be undedicated or unenthusiastic, and middle only slightly. I mean would you trust your employee or your boss saying that you deserve a raise?
@@rewater Poor is a mindset. If you don’t have money, you’re broke (Dave Chappelle’s dad)
"You can train somebody to do a job but you can't train them to be smart"....lol....real words of wisdom.
Valve is a great example of a company with no management.
I was going to use them as another example but I didn't want the video to run for too long.
Are they though? I mean, do they actually do anything nowadays besides count money?
@@dee-jay45 Steamdeck and the use of Proton compatibility layer (games made for Windows being able to be played on Linux) has quite an impact
@@dee-jay45 Isn't that a great company? I would like to do nothing besides count my money...
@@jakadirnbek7141 don't praise the day before it's sundown - Steamdeck is not the first attempt of Valve to get into the hardware sector. Steam Machines were also looking good until they weren't. And I kinda have the feeling that there are just lots of people at Valve that are just good at being unnoticeable ;)
I feel managers get a bad rap, ironically due to bad management.
Managers aren’t there to be better at what everyone in their team does. It doesn’t hurt if they are but that’s not their role. They’re there to take care of all the administrative crap that helps the business achieve its goals but also would greatly hinder individual contributors’ ability to actually do the thing they are experts at.
Managers are supposed to keep track of department performance, expenses, team requirements, work distribution, and also know how to work their team to get the best performance out of them. One of the reasons many small businesses fail is because the people who are experts at a thing believe that’s all they need to know to succeed. Then they are hit with the harsh reality that most of their time may be spent on soul crushing paperwork they hate and don’t know how to do.
I agree but that requires management to be less of a path for promotion and more just a dedicated line of work, closer to a secretary for the team than management as we know it.
So it is still a gigantic shift away from how it currently works and it still makes it way less hierarchical (suddenly the manager is no longer the miniboss of the team, instead he is just one part of the team, an extension of it).
Renaissance was an exception case because it was backed by third parties that could provide some substantial long lasting seed capital to allow the renaissance project to flourish but yes in most instances you are correct
a manager is also very important in terms of managing budgets and also plays a key role in raising funds for the company's growth.
But if people who are experts at their specialized tasks don't get promoted to manager (and as a result stop doing what they are good at) then how will these experts ever earn a living wage?
If businesses only provide the path to better compensation through being a manager, then that right there is the core problem of the entire system. Everything else is just symptoms.
I once had a supervisor describe himself as a "sh*t umbrella," in that he protected his staff from all the politics and BS of our corporate overlords so that we regular employees could focus on getting our jobs done, and done well. Once he left and we no longer had that layer between us and corporate, it became apparent just how useful having that supervisor was, and most of us quit within a few months. Going through the same thing with another company right now.
Managers like those described by the OP are definitely necessary, but if they have bad managers/leadership then they're going to feel the same burnout as regular employees and leave. Companies should invest in supporting their managers and making sure they're competent, as a way to prevent turnover at multiple levels.
I worked for a while in offices. Having managers in short term is ok and can save you money, but due to turnover these days managers are necessary to ensure that company strategy is implemented. People eventually behave like cats want to do their own things. Business will lose money long term.
Bad managers come about because in many situations people are promoted because they can talk the talk (only) or have sucky personality so they get promoted up.
So true lets not pretend everyone works well in their job and never needs supervision, that's a lie.
Sad but true fact: Want to get promoted to a higher management role? Stop being an expert and the best in what you do. They will try hard to exactly keep you in that spot for as long as possible. Instead learn how to delegate and make everyone around you work hard for your success. I had to learn this the hard way myself.
@@pointvector1951 I honestly wouldn't want to be a manager, but I do want to be paid more. First time my request for a pay raise after at least two years was denied, I'd be looking for a new job. Switching jobs after two years is the average and is plenty of time for your work to be assessed for a raise.
That’s the exact opposite of what I’ve seen in my career.
A good boss is someone who takes care of things that would waste the time of the employees and gets them trained and pointed in the right direction. They help organize who is working on what, and they deal with the clients, the other departments, and attend all the meetings that are necessary but would otherwise waste the time of the employees on the team. They help the team when there is an overload of work and they are the fallback when push comes to shove. If the boss is not being these things then their role is not being fulfilled and they don't belong there.
amen!
As one of my favorite managers said "my job is to go to meetings so you guys don't have to."
Those meetings are usually not necessary. They are busy work, to justify the managers existence. The best teams are self managing.
You mixed up Dilbert principle and Peter principle. Dilbert is promoting an incompetent employee to get them out of the way and absolve the hiring manager of the responsibility of a bad hire. Peter principle is the one you meant. A good solo contributor is promoted to manager but they don't have the skills to manage. 🤓
Nerd glasses off. Love the content. Would love to see a managerless company succeed.
Glad i searched the comments for this before posting
I know it's a mistake too because he introduced these terms in an earlier vid
Tell me more or send a link, I’m interested in learning more.
It's hard to take seriously a channel that confuses a "principle" intended solely for comedic effect with an actual principle that well explains a dysfunctionality of the real world.
@LCCWPresents "The Peter Principle" is a short book written over 50 years ago by Dr. Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. It explains how competent employees are promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer competent. It should be required reading for any college degree as it is short and to the point.
The whole bit about renaissance exemplifies why we are driven by cooperation and *not* competition. Not letting down my peers as a stronger motivator then competing with them to be able to rule them down the line is basically what is at its core. Of course there are still people who will just want to rule, but that is the reason why amongst CEO's the percentage of sociopaths and psychopaths is so much higher then in the average population.
Becoming a CEO and "having all that it takes" is basically a good reason to keep that person as low down as possible. Let them manage a bucket and a mop.
Studies generally show that the higher the IQ, the more cooperative people are. (either genuinely better, or at least are able to play long term strategies where careful cooperation tend to be optimal). They picked a group of people where people were supposed to have very high IQ and noticed that different organisational structure could work. Possible, just it merely how outlier their example was, should make one wonder whether it's replicable.
I like that you brought up public bureaucracy. I've often argued this for public schools. The avg cost per student is over 10k, with class sizes of about 25. 250k per classroom. And, we know teachers are underpaid, getting about 60k per year. Where does that other (nearly) 4/5ths go?!
The buildings need to be maintained and tables and seats and blackboards and chalk need to be bought.
How else can you pay the army of administrators doing nothing?
@@tachobrenner The teachers buy the chalk and other consumable supplies
@@tachobrenner that still shouldn't cost millions of dollars each year
@@mojus2890 Electricity and cleaning staff need to be paid too.
I love the supervisor i had in my first job out of grad school. This women was efficient and knew that instead of constantly "following up" with things i know how to do, she let me do my job.
Those are some of the best
I work at an organization (the USPS) where I'm reasonably certain that we need our lower management, but middle and upper management are useless.
Same for my school district. The kids see very little of our tax dollars. Meanwhile administrators are making mid 100K salaries and get nice bonuses. Old timer teachers have told amid bloat has exploded over the decades.
And the CEO is actively out to destroy the organization.
Lower management is responsible for the operational tasks that's why you notice their presence more. But you need the middle management for tactical plans and upper for strategic plans. Making their value to the company greater with less time.
@@fraliv5526 Are you being sarcastic?
@@burrybondz225 I'm referencing the most relevant literature. You can ask the scholars if they are being sarcastic.
I’ve read that the prototypical corporate org chart has its roots in US railroads, the first truly gigantic businesses. And they modeled their organization after the military, because they came into their own after the US Civil War, when a huge proportion of the population had been in the military.
Sounds quite plausible. The authoratic kind of management often reminds me of militaristic structures (at least from what I can imagine, since I never served).
Here in Germany it also is still quite present and in schools as well.
I previously worked at a digital marketing agency where the office manager did nothing. She served literally no function. She would come in to work, then talk on her phone in the owners’ office for about two hours a day before the owner arrived. She also repeatedly tried to take credit for the intern’s work. Furthermore, she knew NOTHING about digital marketing. It was ridiculous.
Office managers are basically admin staffs who do the mundane jobs and also things like payroll (if your company does not have a full time in hoise accountant)+ scheduling your bosses appointments
Their job is basically sit around doing nothing much if there is nothing for her to do...
You wouldn’t want her start looking for unnecessary work to do coz if she starts doing this, you can bet my see you guys would also need to be involved, that means extra work for you..
If your boss, the owner, believes that an office manager has the technical/actual skills to bring in money for the company or to kee the company business activities going, then your boss is an idiot
You left out one of the most important roles of managers. To keep teams in different parts of the company working together towards a common goal and coordinating that. Even with management, I often feel pulled in different directions by different parts of the business. Instead of wasting my time negotiating with every person on every team I work with, I can tell my manager that they need to work out with their managers what actually needs to be done.
It's funny thinking about this in the context of grocery stores (at least the ones I have worked at) where the managers literally do everything. As a grocery manager, especially when I am closing, I am not only in charge of the whole building but I have to try to balance loss prevention, throwing load/backstock, keeping track of all the departments, helping out up front when necessary, facing up a bunch of the store, keeping eggs, milk, and water filled, help the other managers with their tasks like ordering and maintaining inventory, and more. And even when I do have "help" on occasion, usually it is more trouble than it is worth and they do almost nothing. Depending on who I was working with, I would literally be given 12+ hours of work to do in 8 hours.
Large grocery store chains and companies like Target and Walmart usually reward the lazy and throw all the work on the ones who actually obey and don't fight back.
So the more you say 'yes' to whatever level is above you, the more work they will give you. If you show them you can do 8 hours of work in 8 hours, they will ask for 9. If you do the 9, they will ask for 10.
The more you show you can't or won't do the work, the more they will leave you alone and let you easily earn your paycheck...
Seems like a horribly inefficient way to do things... but these chain retailers are so big they can still always offer the lowest prices.
Dominos gms and assistant managers also must be able to cook the food and run logistics at the store at the same time.
This 100%. Target and Walmart managers actually do a lot behind the scenes. Most employees don't actually understand how stressful it is behind closed doors. There isn't a single retail franchise in North America where a retail manager is able to chill and coast along. Slower stores maybe, but you'd get phased out quickly. The managers who appear lazy are often the ones who are actually able to delegate effectively or the ones who can hide their stress and remain professional. The only stores that have managers that get paid well for all the work they do is probably Costco. Every other franchise underpays their staff, including managers.
@@1O1O11that's where you actually need a manager.
wow reminds me of when I walked from a junior management position in a financial company back in 2009. I had worked my way from entry to running a team of 15 staff in customer service/ sales. I took a brand-new team straight out of the training department and within 6 months they were hitting and exceeding all the KPI's, such a great group of switched-on cookies that going forward I shadowed their interviewers to learn from them. I then started delegating extra responsibilities spending the time to go through what they needed to do and writing a training manual with them for the role (this had not been done before in the company at this stage) and had them co-author it with me (I'm told they're still being used in the company) once each person had an additional support role there was an immediate point of reference within the team if I was pulled into a meeting (there where waaaay to many meetings, each running for about an hour each time 🙄) by the time a year was through with the team I still had my team of 15 staff, in an industry with poor attrition and high turnovers of staff, and I was taking on additional responsibilities and projects with my department including rewriting the entire sales and service training manual for the company at the same time we received our 1st ever dedicated department manager who came in from another company. Her 1st meeting with me was a disaster, she'd never worked with me before sat there and stated that I didn't have any higher qualifications above leaving high school and to do my job I needed a degree and that she believed I had been promoted to quickly as it took her 5 years to get promoted to the same position I was in AND she had a degree, I refused to step down so she broke up my team and assigned me a new group of 15 staff straight out of training. 6months of her on my case everyday with BS meetings, increased project responsibilities (I was working 6-7 days a week 12hrs a day no holidays) and secret meetings with my staff behind my back when I was sent to the national head office for 5 days at a time (waste of time as nothing a good skype meeting couldn't have resolved), trying to find out what complaints they had against me or if id broken any laws or procedures (both cases non) when 1 project was completed I was exhausted and requested that I concentrate on my team and finishing the remaining projects before taking on any more new projects she wanted doing (our main project we were in the middle of was a new business customer accounts migration that had to be handled very delicately and I liaised with outreach and ensuring correct technical transfers took place between the old companies systems and ours) so she decided to use that opportunity to tell me I had to choose between my family and my carrier..... yer you read that right. She also concluded that as I'd had very little interaction with my team and they continued to hit and exceed their targets they functioned well without me was I really leading the team or living off their success. I went back to my desk and wrote my resignation letter. Next day I was called in with a meeting with the regional manager and her and asked if I wanted to just step down as a manager and become a senior customer service operator, I respectfully declined and worked my notice which led to 5 other managers leaving and 30 staff too.
The company was really good and I enjoyed working there but she was really bad and dangerous, just a shame it took all those staff to leave before the national director for HR got involved (middle management had tried to keep a lid on it but the resignation levels couldn't be hid forever)
Use paragraphs.
She is a leech and a parasite,these folk can never do anything on their own.
So you were taken advantage of, you knew you were being taken advantage of, and yet you did nothing with that fact? I'm sorry, but some of you people out there are really clueless.
@@mllenessmarie There is such a thing as give and take, I eventually decided enough was enough. I did do something with the fact, I left. Should I have followed through with employment tribunals, transferred to another department in another part of the country or take what I'd learnt from this experience develop and build something better?
This is but a snapshot of a series of events to quote my grandfather "when the proverbial hits the fan, use it as fertiliser and grow roses"
@@HelicopterShownUp fair point, does look like a brick wall when reviewing this. I'll try to keep that in mind for future comments 👍
When I was 19 I washed dishes at an IHOP; I was training on the cook line when I heard the the gm tell another dishwasher in the pit to go clean shit off the bathroom wall.. he said he'd quit before he would. I said the same when he came to me. Then he went and asked the cooks. They all said no. The gm had to do it
At my current employer, middle management is mostly just an interface between the executives and the workers. They don't have much time or authority, and they don't/can't really manage.
Honestly, the old-fashioned boys' club type workplace I was at previously, for all its fault, probably had more effective management.
I like Graeber's work, but I honestly don't think that secretaries or receptionists inherently fall under the "useless" job category. In a world where nobody can get anything done because they get 50 emails a day, the value of someone to screen your calls/visitors for you and set your calendar is readily apparent. Granted, some organizations might have these positions when they don't need them for the same reason that new businesses waste money on the trappings of a business (uniforms, cutesy business cards, etc.) before they actually have a revenue stream flowing.
I was hoping to like his book, but I disagreed with almost all of it. Keeping things running through ducktape and prioritizing what needs to be fixed better and coordinating all of that isn't some unnecessary thing; it is just about the only thing that matters.
As a manager I can assure you, most of us are pointless and only hinder productivity. Had to train myself not to follow that example.
Also, usually when major companies look to “trim the fat” it is almost always middle management and this is one of the reasons why
A good manager is as valuable to a company's operations as he is rare. "Manager" could be re-titled to "corporate coordinator" and make more sense. They don't actually manage anything and are not supposed to. They're supposed to coordinate everything and make operations run as smoothly as possible.
@@StarboyXL9 exactly, the main thing that middle management is necessary for is making sure that the various parts of the company are working towards a common goal or at least not working against each other.
I had a sweet job as a manager making more than my employees to do the same exact job except be required to work often 10-20 hours more per week than them. They could have hired three more employees to cover most of the lean-scheduling issues that I and my other managers had to cover.
But instead, middle management decided to make everything fucking stupid and make our lives harder.
It is a bizarre feeling I always have when hearing about USA management. I come from a poor country (Poland). Most companies are either international corporations or small and medium-sized local companies. Too many reasons to explain why is that.
Because most firms barely make ends meet and corporation treats us as backwater branches there is almost no middle management. There are either competent, hard-working direct managers (best of employees) or heads of departments having specific roles to fulfill. The second group is often just pure nepotism. When you get a job with no qualifications or competencies just because you are a son of a friend of the CEO.
So whatever employees will produce with blood, sweat, and tears the upper management will squander with stupid decisions and policies. So I have a lot of respect for managers. That includes regional ones. Hard and thankless position. I was one before. Yet I can emphasize substituting your middle management with my upper one. You don't need 9 layers of the corporate hierarchy. It is enough that 1 layer is bad.
it's more or less the same in my country (India)
I really didn't expect to read "Poland is poor" (And I take my time to research a bit and yeah, I understand the reference)
@@marffe_ve That's what communism does to you :) Although it would be dishonest to blame only the Soviets. Yet Poland would probably be twice as rich as it is now if it could go for western capitalism after WWII. And that would make us a developed economy by this point. Albeit a weak one.
@@xSkyWeix Communism, yeah I got the whole experience too in Venezuela and leave the country for good, I'm living now in Llamaland (Perú)
9:00 The Peter principle: Employees are promoted based on success in their current position until they reach their "level of incompetence" whereas the Dilbert principle: Companies tend to systematically promote *incompetent* employees to management to get them out of the actual workflow; Those who can get stuck doing the work, without any chance of promotion; Those who make a mess of the work, get promoted into management.
I cant lie, when you first explained a worker co-op I thought it was the most insane idea. Like wouldn't the workers just vote for things that's in their own short term best interest over what's good for the long term company? But when you explained it I realized that the workers have a vested interest in making their company succeed by increasing returns and not letting down their team, at the same time it allows pure genius ideas to manifest itself without having to needless layers of bureaucracy.
"Like wouldn't the workers just vote for things that's in their own short term best interest over what's good for the long term company?"
Some probably would. I would imagine an organization like that needs most everyone on board with the system so that if some group did have this short-term thinking, it wouldn't derail the company.
I can't imagine needing someone's sign off on your ability to print when most people I meet struggle to even connect to the office printer.
The best manager I have had is the one I have right now. Very little micro managing, helps us with the hard conversations we have to have with other departments and is our biggest cheerleader. And she helps find ways for us to be more productive (within reason) and enjoy our jobs more. And she fights for us to get raises every year.
I work at a tech help desk for a SaaS firm. I barely see my actual manager and he's usually very unhelpful and makes my job more difficult to do. I have a team lead who feels more like a manager and works with me every day. I feel way more encouraged working under him. It feels like fighting alongside a Sargeant. He's still my lead, but not just a taskmaster. He's not a boss, he's a leader.
Worked 3rd shift at a hotel. I was the second most seasoned worker in the whole place at 6 months. I saw 5 different managers come and go in that time most of them were so busy learning the ropes they just left me alone because I got my work done and had little to no issues the nights I worked. Except that last manager who felt the need to change things up and take a hands on approach with everyone. I was already working a different full time job so the decision to leave was relatively easy but what a shame cause I did quite enjoy that job
Soo funny im going thru that rn
I was recently promoted to management, and I'm the type that gets involved in projects, but then I was considered the most expert among our team prior to my promotion, so now I get the flexibility to move from project to project helping my team instead of owning the tasks entirely preventing me from helping others.
The last manager was a manager-only, and had no skills relevant to the teams work.
I've always been a proponent for managers being skilled in the jobs their team does, while having people and political talent/skills. As a manager I see my job as keeping the rest of the company out of the way of my team getting their job done, then helping my team get the knowledge/skills to get the job done, then doing the minutia and paperwork assigned as mostly company busy work. It annoys my leadership, but they can't argue with the results. My team is high performing, effective and well respected among our peers and adjacent teams.
It's a simple formula realized, not "discovered" by someone in the trenches for decades that boils down to effectively following the golden rule. Ultimately if you treat adults like adults, they will generally behave that way. Treat your staff like toddlers and they'll make sure you're stuck with terrible twos forever.
I used to be a basic worker in a medium-sized factory with 500 employees. Things were good and serene until out of nowhere this random guy coming from another business stepped in and was immediately hired as production manager of all hangars under direct orders of the production director (which... sounds quite redundant already, doesn't it?). We quickly found out he was close friend of the director, and was clearly hired just to hoard in more money for their happy little group of friends.
He quickly changed the approach people were taking onto the factory when going to work. Soon begun to unreasonably yell at people before fact checking. Pushed few factory-wide-trusted people to drop the job and find work elsewhere because of own incompetency. Would constantly tell people "no" at the request of better equipment and told them to deal with what we had already. His response at explaining an issue that requires his attention would automatically be "then fix it." (uh... thanks?) to then refuse to elaborate and just go back to the office. Would pretend everything, every choice, every purchase, to pass through him to review, becoming a gigantic bottleneck for production. Completely hypocrite, as he would lecture people "busted" chatting (yet while still working while doing so), while a friend of mine in the office told us he would spend most of the time talking about own hobbies and sometimes even tell others to stop talking at the phone as his chat had priority. Hired people on important spots that later were found to be part of his own gang of friends. Workers morale went down quite a lot during those few years he was in.
He then left to yet another business. His assistant, that was hired by other people than the director, took his place and begun to change management strategies again. Hired proper people to go around to ask workers what is needed to increase efficiency and report to him. Trusted own workers and provided equipment they asked to improve production. In just one year, things were improving drastically as things were being brought back to the hands of multiple people there to perform specific improvements acts rather than sabotaging them by becoming a bottleneck. I left that place to follow my own path with heart at peace that at least for my ex coworkers things are probably going better.
What’s funny, too, is that by promoting your best employees into managers, you’re oftentimes just losing your best employee and ending up with a mediocre manager. Peter Principle
I've seen multiple managers run companies into the ground. One company that had a 35 year old monopoly servicing contract for multiple chemical factories owned by a massive oil company without an end date lol, litterally the magical golden goose contract that showers you with money, no questions asked..
A 26 year old girl straight from business school that was sent by the new company after they bought our company managed to get the contract terminated and company boarded up in 18 months...
It's both sad as well as hillarious at the same time.
It landed me a project manager job at our client, basicly doing her job inhouse that was previously outsourced to our company and we where able to take most of the staff over as well. So it all ended well in the end.
How did she do that?
Maybe it was 4d chess to absorb your company into that one and they knew she was a walking disaster.
@@StarboyXL9 no she was sent by the company who bought the company i worked for.
Then our customer canceled the contract and decided to do what we used to do inhouse themselves. So the company i worked for went out of business.
So after we got fired from our company, our customer hired us to go work there and basicly do the same job we used to do.
@@iironhide6209 like i said, we where bought by a big investment firm, for top dollar probably since we had exclusive rights to do maintenance logistics on an industrial park with several chemical plants owned by sabic chemical.
That was a legacy from a long time ago when those factories where subsidiaries of a state owned mining company. It all got split up when it was privatised 30 or 40 years ago or so and these exclusivity contracts where created for one reason or another.
Anyway, like always with these kinds of take overs the first thing they want to do is cut cost in order to start recouping their investment.
She spent a couple of weeks making excel sheets and powerpoints and found the optimum way to run the company much more efficiently.
Mainly by using temp workers to do the offsite work at the customer sites, send multiple people who had worked there their entire life into early retirement and replace them with more fresh and young mba's who never held a wrench or set foot in a factory in their lives.
So as you can imagine our service quality took a nosedive, engineers and architects on the customer side now had to interact with these new mba's.
Over time more and more things that always worked fine started to go wrong and the customer was not happy.
Until the day that a massive 2 month factory refurbishment turned into a 4 month refurbishment because 2 key pieces of custom equipment got lost somehow and that factory stood idle for 58 days. Losing almost a quarter of a million in profits every single day lol.
After that this decades old golden contract was ripped up in a matter weeks and we no longer had a customer to work for so we where basicly shut down.
But we did hit our productivity targets those 18 months, so we operated at peak efficienty at least. And that is the important part i have learned haha.
I can laugh about it now but those 18 months where living hell seeing everything slowly slowly slip away while she recieved constant praise from the execs at headquarters because she always beat the cost control targets set by people who never even visited our company once while they owned it.
All they ever saw where graphs and monthly reports with numbers in the black, so they thought things where running smoothly i imagine.
This kind of stuff happens more then you might imagine. Lots of great smaller specialised companies have been destroyed in this way and lots of knowledge and skills have been lost because of it.
Notification squad!! Such a pertinent post - thanks for the consistent and informative output!
I work for one of the top 5 (by market cap) companies in the world as a manager. Management is largely a lateral, I have individual contributers on my team with higher pay then me. It is not a required promo path. At my level I see my job as clearing the path for my team to do their best work. That means stepping in front of process, stress, politics, overwork, budget and all the other slings and arrows they'd otherwise have to deal with. This materially frees up their time and ability to focus free from context switching, they can just do their jobs. No micromanagement, no setting of schedule, no blame and so on. I love hearing about ideas to optimize business, but I think a blanket 'managers are redundant' is untrue and reflects poorly thought out structure and duties in a company.
Always interesting, thank you.
I am a middle manager, I do the same work my subordinates do, except they run certain things by me so that if it goes wrong, I will be the only one accountable for the department. There has been a higher management reorganisation recently and now instead of reporting directly to the COO, I have three more layers between me and her. Drives me nuts.
I worked in academic educative for a while with very little management. I really disliked it. The project management was awful and there was no place to voice complaints, while at the same time my colleagues were my senior, so therefore they did not really listen to my suggestions. For example, it was very time critical, but there wasn't even a schedule of when which milestones should be hit. It got to the point the deadline was set at a certain date just because I decided to go on holiday the day after.
Education is A LOT different to a regular corp though. You don't have to actually bring results, you should, but it's not an obligation. That leads to a whole other new set of behaviours, and usually, means needing to have a someone to do the police. I hate this kind of work environment.
Management is necessary but can become a structural cancer. I've seen it in person and it reminds me of a Carl Icahn talk about one of the first companies he ever bought that made rolling stock. He visited their corporate offices and spent several days bouncing between departments talking to everyone about what they did there and where they fit in to the company. He struggled to understand who in the management actually did what, if anything, then he talked to the people at their factory who actually did the work. Eventually he asked the lead there how many extra people he would need if the corporate office was liquidated, and his answer was 'minus 30'. Not only was he not asking for a bigger team to 'take over' the corporate tasks, but he was pointing out that many of the people he had were only there to feed the insatiable demand for pointless reporting going up the chain so every level could pretend they were doing something. I've been in companies where decision power is arrogated to people two levels above where the actual decisions need to be made, and most of the layers in between seem to just churn out reporting that could be produced by an automation script, or spend their time filing reports that only the other managers read and in turn convert in to different reports before they are sent to the archive for aging.
There is one big flaw in the comparison to Renaissance Fund (also there is a typo at 12:00): If you only the best, they might be better in self-regulation und self-organization than most other people. I am in no position to judge if we have too many managers, but I think Renaissance isn't the best example to generalize on that matter.
Thank you!
Managers are not NEEDED! Workers can manage themselves! All workers should be the Board of Director's as well. You can have a CEO type position BUT workers vote them in and out not Private Boards. Private Boards shouldn't even exist! Workers should have 100% say in what is done with the Profits they made as well as Wages!
The irony of shareholders wanting to get rid of people who don't contribute to the business is not lost on me
I tend to think of myself as providing a service to the people I manage - removing obstacles so that they can do their thing. A manager shouldn't be more prestigious than any other role - the idea of elevating them on the social ladder is fundamentally flawed, and probably a major cause of the issues outlined in the video.
Agreed. Finding the kind of person who loves doing all that coordinating is hard though. So managers without that talent complain their job is hard to push the bosses for privileges.
"removing obstacles so that they can do their thing" - this is how I approach it too. And I agree with the criticism of social elevation. But I don't mind the extra pay because I do have to come up with solutions to new problems all the time, so the basic workflow can continue uninterrupted. Maybe a bathroom sink stops working. Maybe a vendor stops carrying an item we buy. The world is always changing. My job is to reduce chaos.
Best job I've worked at didn't have a manager, all come to work and did their jobs and decided who man which department peacefully. We never had issues until manager was sent and dramas ensued.
I seen redundancy times in companies and they removed the a lot of people doing the heavy lifting first - ie the unseen workers, the quiet ones that just got on with the tasks, no brown nosing, no glamours hero positions just behind the scene workers. Certain managers stood on their shoulders to get to their positions.
Once these were getting knocked out it was like seeing support columns of a grand building go. The strain on the ones left drove moral through the floor and more started to quit. Then they start another redundancy round and got rid of some managers too but with too many of the unsung hero workhorses gone, the key people, the whole thing started to crumble. The managers who stood on their shoulder were found out as they couldn’t do the job they gladly took credit for and place continued to collapse until the entire office got shut down (other international ones remained)
Are you F'in kidding me? I never get financial ads, but I watch one from How Money Works and they are back! Dude, that video about UA-cam ads was so right!
your editing style inspires me
I worked at a big bank and It was great when my assistant manager was on vacation. Everyone was so happy and cheerful.
I have been advocating this for years. You just need a team lead (who has the same rank but deals with bureaucracy and can make a decisive vote in case of dispute), but for the rest slack polls should be plenty.
totally agree. I'm more impressed with my team lead who's more present and knows what's happening on the ground than my manager who only comes with write-ups and pulls people into the team who are ill-equipped
I was once part of a productivity project designed to eliminate pointless reports and meetings. The amount of pushback from people wanting to keep them made no sense to someone who has been spending the last few months making a chemical production system work better until I read BS jobs and realized these people just wanted to keep stuff to do to show their worth and if these were eliminated they would have to find something else to do to fill up their day. While in a different pointless meeting I would hear the same people complaining how much they had to do.
If you’ve ever worked for a really good manager you know how critical they can be for individual contributors. The problem is, it’s rare to find and companies don’t care to invest the resources in the right people.
the alternative is not necessarily all fun and games. law firms often run with minimal staff, if any, dedicated to management. the result is that people who are still expected to bill 2200 hours a year, they're now expected to also put in 500 non-billable managing stuff hours too.
Now imagine if there was a manager taking up a big chunk of the payroll, while also giving people 300 hours of bullshit work in exchange for solving that 500 hour admin work.
Probably better to get a team administrative assistant instead. Way better return on investment with no power/ego shenanigans.
@@ChasmChaos honestly, i'm not even gonna try, because i have avoided those sorts of situations all my life. you might as well tell me to add an hour driving to work each way, another thing i've avoided.
people really seem to me to not be trying very hard to figure out what makes them happy and going for that, generally speaking.
I agree. In software development we have this "scrum" and "Agile" snake oil thing. We are promised we are taking important decisions. Reality is we are constantly on a meeting doing the work of the 3 layers of management above us. Is tiresome.
I got laid off at a company that shutdown their largest department and at the end of the day 28 people lost their jobs and not one manager they let go 3 supervisors and now have the same 5 managers as before but now all in charge of 1 department it's crazy you hit it on the head
I’ve worked at my current company for 3 years and while it doesn’t seem like a lot of time, my job a fairly simple and is mostly accomplishing general laborious tasks. Stuff I am capable of doing. And because a series of manager transfers or resignations I had to rise and take on many of the responsibilities of my manager temporarily. This is all to say I am more than capable of doing my job. However recently we got a new manager. A manager with now management experience and no experience in the department I work in. And suddenly I have started to get a lot less done and have a lot more tension with the store manager for that same reason. My hours have been cut because of this and the store manager has not listened when I have told him that my immediate manager tasks me with redundant tasks or makes me change tasks before finishing my original tasks leaving a lot of tasks half finished
I was once worked under a korean boss who didnt know anything about the modern workplace, had weak english and became too dependent on me. I was his researcher and he was the “scientist” - i should be the one doing all the lab and field work- ok good- but then i was also the one doing the data analysis, supervising technicians, executed admin duties, formulated the experiments, and even wrote all our reports and scientific papers while he dilly dallied about minor to senseless editing, microminaging and personal requests that had nothing to do with the job. My breaking point was that he shouted and shamed me in front of others once or twice. I admit i was a doormat but ive learned my lesson and moved on. I just cant wait for these types of people to retire soon
No, companies hire excess managers because those at the top or who want to climb to the top, want to do less work. No CFO wants to enter invoices or process purchase req's , into their NetSuite or Concur systems themselves. It's primarily, people want to get into Director and VP positions so that they can have less work to do and then take credit for the work of those they delegated their own jobs to. This is why I left corporate world 17 years ago, started my own business and never looked back! One working for oneself is the best type of job in the world. No one to answer to and earning potential is all on one's own efforts!
I manage an engineering team. My job is to get everything, including myself, out of their way so they can complete the projects I put before them, while maintaining standards for documentation, architecture and security. I do not have enough time in my day to micromanage anyone and, honestly speaking, I don't have enough time to properly mentor them and make sure they have high job satisfaction. I do have to sign off on expenses and timesheets, but that's more because my boss doesn't want to.
well said
So, it's less that managers are bad, and more like effective management structure is very hard to execute.
At my business I have a policy that a manager needs to be someone who can do the job as good as or better than their subordinates.
Moreover, I have a compensation structure where a subordinate can make more money than a manager - and several do - because an effective implementer isn't necessarily an effective manager.
Managers at my company do the following
- training and coaching their functional team
- hiring and firing their functional team
- capacity filling in their team when demand is high or someone is off on vacation or sick leave
- review and sign off on work done by their team
- develop and deploy systems and processes
My managers have the respect of their team because their team knows they can do their job better, so feedback on being better is taken seriously and believed.
And my managers don't fret when a member of their team earns more, because that person is crushing it
Some businesses can do without a manager, but many cannot.
Unfortunately a bad management development system can be as bad as no manager at all when it's needed
For hierarchical structures, I believe having a separate Team Leader and Manager makes sense. The manager ensures the team complies with corporate stuff (security, etc), the team lead ensures the team gets stuff done by working with them.
Dig the sponsor vessi, actually first sponsored product ever seen any channel i cared to hear about😂🎉
Manager here. I have had terrible managers most of my career, but at the same time, having and being a great manager does make a big difference for the company’s bottom line.
Point 1:
If a company have no management, then the structure will be very flat. I have worked at a flat culture company before, many people left within a couple of years as they don’t see any room for advancement or growth.
Point 2:
A good manager is supposed to be a leader, a mentor and a carer to their direct reports career. When there’s zero management, individuals will just keep working without anyone to help them advance in their career or help them when things go wrong.
Point 3:
Managers are supposed to be the strategic overlord to help their employees understand the company’s directions better. Individual employees can also attend the meetings, but then things can get complicated and take up all the employees time be stuck in meetings for all the “high level” discussions. Good management is supposed to filter out the noise, determine clear directions, and offer focused and streamlined instructions to their direct reports. Individual contributors should reduce unnecessary meetings for them and staying focus on getting the work done.
Management in my opinion is necessary, however we would all benefit if it wasn’t a full time thing. Worker / manager combos (especially if it is done on a per initiative basis) can simplify structures immensely while giving the status and appreciation that people desire.
A managers job is to train and help guide people when needed.
Ironically the test of a good manager is too see how well they do with the manager not being there
Pro worker’s co-op 🙌🏾 more democracy in the workplace 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
RenTech is a legendary firm, and I very recently started hearing about it. Apparently, you just can’t apply for a job there. They hunt extra-ordinary talent on a regular basis like PhD in AstroPhysics, Computational Statistics, Math, CS, Neurobiology, Psychology etc., and contact them privately. And, if you’re interested as well, after a grueling interview process, once you’re in, you’re banned to work in the same industry, you’re in an NDA that restricts working anywhere else in the near future. But, honestly, why would anyone do that? Looks like employees earn millions, if not tens of millions in the first few years itself.
RennTech? RennTech is a tuner of Mercedes cars.
You probably mean Renaissance capital as mentioned in the video.
@@jakadirnbek7141 Oops. It's RenTech. Yeah, I mean Renaissance Capital.
Managers are like folders and staff as files in windows explorer. Files are required to organise files. But over-organising slows accessing files.
As someone who invests in real estate, I can see the value of having managers rather than managing everything myself. Do you know how much of a pain it would be to manage multiple properties? I already have a full time job I'm good at, I don't want to take on an additional job.
Management is necessary in businesses trying to rapidly expand. People will be pushed into roles before they are completely ready and they need someone to teach them as they go, set productivity expectations, and put out their fires. The role of a good manager is to make their subordinates better at their job. In an established, slow growing company, incentives can be set up such that the workers can be accountable to each other and "management" per se is no longer necessary. Management is still necessary if there is high turnover; bad management can make this worse, but some industries like food service and manual labor are going to have high turnover no matter what.
Eat the rich? Start with eat the managers!
Since graduating, I have only ever worked for a very small business or my current job which is in a consultancy type business where heirachy and day to day management just doesnt exist. We have such a flat structure and more senior consultants (directors) are responsible for just bringing in and doing the work, they delegate and find the right juniors with the skillsets. We have team and division managers but their jobs are very much part time and have specific roles which support other consultants, they do monitor high level stats and performance and but micro-management and several layers just doesnt exist
Ths reminds me of how I got more work done per day in the period of the year that my boss was on vacation.
I dont understand why this video only has 150k views this needs 1m views at least
That's not the Dilbert principle it's the Peter princibile.
The Dilbert principle states that, middle management is a way to remove idiots from production.
7:40 The pointless tasks. Like, why is it that once we have something done the manager feels the need to give us an absolute timewaster? They don't do anything, and sometimes it feels like borderline bullying.
I am the type of person who is better fit at second in command. I focus on plying my skills the best I can, while observing at my peripheral vision on what could be improved. That way I can pick up the slack of my peers even if I don't excel at it unless the task takes advantage of my critical flaws in skill or personal traits.
However, for that same reason I do not prefer taking leadership positions unless done as a contingency or emergency. I build and optimize structures based on the goals set by the one in command, but I will falter in setting goals myself, as I will be caught up evaluating and assessing the process that I can't create new processes that are not relevant or synergizing with the existing.
At my job. We have been short people a bit. But now all managers have one day a week where they work production. But all they do is the prep work we hire college kids to do for a few hours each day.
I think team size plays a pretty large role in the effectiveness of a management system. There’s a certain American manufacturer that I am familiar with that has adopted a model for their corporate offices that keeps teams to a size of no more than 3-7 subordinates to 1 supervisor, a model applied from the executive-level down through director-level and department leadership.
Still isn’t perfect, but they’ve taken away a lot of the power of these leaders and handed it over to Compliance, QA and HR. Subordinates don’t have to worry about job security or quality if they clash with their boss.
Flatten the hierarchy.
I saw Steven Cohen at the end among those with the biggest returns. Let's remember his insider training, which suggests that at least for some, you have to break the rules to get near the top. Or alternatively, among the high performers, you should expect to find some that break the rules.
Our CEO upped and left. Another CEO came in for 4 weeks then left and so we spent a whole year without a CEO. 1 year later the company had stopped declining and losing clients, had stabilized, and was starting to move forward. Now we have a new CEO so let’s see…
I think these 5 tasks make sense when talking about internally hired managers, who have moved up thru the ranks. But in corporate management, they are mostly outside hires with BAs. They don't know squat about what their ppl do, can't train, and can't effectively gather needed resources. They punish good employees by putting more work & stress into them, bc they're reliable. They reward bad employees (and bad behavior) because those people are never actually fired, acting as an anchor on everyone else.
Managers seem to need about a year to become competent, then start looking for a promotion soon after.
I'm lucky to have my current boss. He's just being a peace keeper until he retires in a few years.
Two points:
A- Status is the main motivator behind almost all desires of wealth, not profit. if firms cared about profit, they would have done with the management crap long ago. Groups that learn to avoid this trap become "ironically" wealthier, there are both historical (the knights templar, the Quakers/Shakers communities) and modern ones Valve was probably mentioned in another comment. Yet, some businesses would rather lose profit to maintain status.
B- it is better to see the management structures as a spectrum, with "rigid hierarchy" on one extreme and "free for all" on the other. Providing more options for people who wish to construct businesses for profitability rather than"I just want a yacht" that could greatly benefit from such alternative structures.
I worked much better when unmanaged (minimal management). When I had a manager that did not understand our job, it was much harder to get things done.
This video was created by a person who watched one episode of the office and used Wikipedia for his research.
Micheal Scott ran the most profitable branch in DM for many years. He was a hands off make sure everyone has fun manager that kept things interesting.
Removing these managers just means extra work to the workers below because whatever responsibilities these managers have/had will still be expected and the companies aren’t going to raise those worker’s wages.
I wasn't a "manager," technically but I was a department chairperson (in a college academic department). That's essentially a department supervisor. I'd say only about 20% of my time was spent supervising the 6 to 7 faculty staff in my department. About 80% of my time as the chairperson was spent on projects that the managers above me wanted me to work on. Plus, I was still teaching my own classes, doing my own research, etc. In other words, managers may have lots of responsibilities and projects that aren't related to supervision.
My take and a owner of a small company myself. Zero management is not possible because there are layers of bureocracy enforced by government (and in most countries they do it way more than USA), but anything beyond that should be avoided as much as possible. Specially the depth of the chain of command should NOT be above 4 levels, most likely 3 levels if possible.
I believe the issue of management / no management comes with the people you employ. I worked for a bank before where there was a standard management structure. Some people there would do nothing without the manager being behind their asses all the time and without the looming threat of a performance review. Then I've switched jobs to work at a research institute (been working on my Ph.D. there and they've offered to hire me) where there is no apparent management structure (sure you have more senior researchers who know more than you and a director + administrative staff, but I do not interact with the latter directly, only when I need something like order a piece of equipment or something similar). The difference is night and day. It may be because the people there are really interested in their research and the projects they are working on for the outside companies and so forth, but the institute does not even enforce strict working hours. If I could theoretically get all the work done within one hour of the entire month, than there's that and I do not need to come again that month and still get paid the full salary. This will not happen obviously as there is more work to be done.
What it comes down to may be that people who are interested in what they are doing can govern themselves, which Ph.D. level employees generally are. The management can kill that interest by being overly zealous of course, but there may be employees (the majority of them as per my observation given the region) who just try to get by doing the bare minimum, which may not be entirely their fault, only that the job they are performing is not interesting to them and/or is paying them close to minimal wage but there was no better alternative etc, ... both are valid reasons to be doing the bare minimum of course and there may not be a better solution in a given time period for some.
Most of the people do not work in research and most of the companies do not have the majority of their staff a Ph.D. level professionals, so the standard may be unattainable in some cases (like who wants to go above and beyond when working the cash register for instance while not expecting a promotion) but in certain areas it works marvelously. I cannot imagine explaining what I am doing and why am I doing it that way and why I am not performing the experiments faster etc to a manager who does not understand the field. That would be hell.
I'm currently getting my MBA in finance. I now appreciate my employer so much more.