We have all dealt with nightmare bosses and are often stuck with them. They influence bad performance and create more of their kind. You often find yourself wondering, how did a once good employee turn out to be a bad manager? Here's the answer.
Before an employee becomes a manager, someone above them must have spotted their potential to do great things. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been promoted. So how come bad managers exist? The answer lies with how they were guided by their superiors, the lack of proper leadership contributes to this saddening change of heart.
Leadership development is a key to ensuring that the good employee your promoted stays that way as a manager. Providing proper guidance will let them grow and prosper, and eventually be a great manager who will later spawn more good leaders.
According to Entrepreneur, defining the employee's career path is the core of leadership development. Followed up with consistent training and strict evaluation. All of this will cultivate an efficient individual who can lead people to greatness. And that is what a good manager is.
Pre-Managerial Phase
To develop a good leader, one must consider the employee's starting point because this is where it all begins. These fresh employees who have the interest to become managers would need an opportunity to knock on their door. It doesn't mean that the promotion offer just falls out of the sky. No. By that, we mean provide them with tasks to gain the experience they need to become a good manager. Tasks to prove themselves, to make mistakes and to learn from them.
It would be great if you, the superior, can provide the employee with a clear career path, expressing that you believe that they will eventually do great things. Once a career path is established, show them the steps on how to reach the finish line. Be there every step of the way, providing guidance and consultation. Along the way, the employee would have met their personal goals and career goals as well.
Employees who have the interest to become a manager one day will take all the opportunities you offer them and perform at the best of their capabilities. This will make it easier for you to determine which of your employees have what it takes.
Once you have determined the employees with potential, it is time to provide training. Not just any training, it has to be consistent. The worse kind of training is when you have the employee go through the course but they never get to use it on the field.
Provide proper training because managerial skills are not easy to pick up, and make sure to follow up with opportunities to apply what they learned. Information learned but not applied is training wasted.
Post-managerial phase
Despite providing the correct foundation for your employees to become great managers, there are other factors that can jeopardize everything. Including improper evaluation. A report from Grovo claims that 84 percent of their respondents believed that the companies they are with need a better evaluation method for their managers.
Improper evaluation triggers the wrong kind of mentality to spread in an organization. Where bad performance is rewarded and praised. On the same Grovo report, it was mentioned that 74 percent of the respondents observed that managers who are ineffective even received praise and are promoted. That is definitely a very frustrating and demotivating thing to witness on a working environment.
This kind of evaluation affects not only the employees who get demotivated and influenced to perform poorly but also the bad manager. The lack of proper evaluation will keep the manager blind from how bad their performance actually is, hence prolonging the agony of the rest. Providing proper feedback and guidance will help fix bad managers and assure them that their leaders care.
Have you had any hair-pulling moments because of a bad manager?Share your stories in the comment section below. Stay tuned to Jobs & Hire for more management tips and workplace advice.
