The Road to Hell
is paved with this kind of bullshit.
Low-key trauma is inflicted daily upon our working siblings, much of it by managers and management with the best intentions. This is for you, the leadership class. It might hurt a bit.
Y’all should know better, but you don’t. Managers get away with doing stuff that it seems like they’re supposed to, or saying things just because they sound official. We know it’s bullshit. Knock it off.
Hiring because they can
I heard a realtor complain about a property being listed “before it was ready.” They meant that the listing agent had only taken a few photos, and they couldn’t answer a potential buyer’s basic questions about the home. Everybody’s time was wasted, and the agent looked like a moron.
Eager managers often rush to start the hiring process before they’re ready, hastily whipping up ill-conceived job descriptions, failing to consult the rest of the team, and making a mess of the whole process. Eager hopeful candidates are interviewed by people who can’t answer questions about the role. Human resources isn’t sure who it reports to, don’t know what the job entails, or where it’s meant to be based.
Dozens of people have hundreds of hours of their time and energy wasted by an insincere company over an position that is unlikely to be filled. This is an abuse of power by people who have jobs and plenty of time to waste. They’re exploiting the inability of unemployed people to call them out on it. If you see this happening, be brave and call bullshit.
In the deep end
“Onboarding” is a neologism — a newly-invented word referring to how we ready a new employee for their service in the role. It resembles another recently-invented word, “waterboarding”, which coincidentally is a process also designed to be survived — but only just — by its victims.
Years of research, study, and consultants have generated reams of best practices, conferences, and training seminars about how to welcome new employees and train them up for success. After all of that, our corporate leaders, in their wisdom, have collectively responded “It’s on the intranet assholes, sink or swim!”
Managers spent ten interminable weeks interviewing candidates, boasting about their empathetic team spirit, will now unceremoniously dump a decade’s worth of forwarded email (with missing attachments and links to long-deleted web pages, of course.) Somehow you’re meant to make better sense of the poor shmuck who came before you.
When you hear the phrase “drinking from the firehose” you know you’re fucked. It’s another way of saying “we know there’s a better way to do this, we just don’t care.”
Good bad job
There’s no rule that says a performance review has to contain equal parts positive feedback and constructive criticism. Managers feel some pressure to make the review seem balanced. Often some effort goes into figuring out what kind of negative feedback to give an employee, so the manager can show that they’re being tough and “raising the bar.”
A really shitty thing that managers often do is dredge up minuscule errors or long-forgotten transgressions in order to fill out the “areas for improvement” section. Every manager knows that the employee will give about a thousand times more weight to each negative word as they do a positive one. As if they haven’t already replayed that moment a thousand times in their own mind!
Sadly, the real audience here is the manager’s manager, not the employee. So a little bit of blood must be performatively let.
Two ways for an emotionally intelligent manager to thread this needle: First, make absolutely certain that there is never a surprise in any performance review. Just write an email explaining why you chose to include each of the items you did. Be a boss and say something like “I included this because it’s helpful for me to demonstrate to my boss that I’m setting a high bar for everyone on my team.”
Another idea is to tie “areas for improvement” to the specific and literal promotion criteria given in your company’s guidelines for the employee’s job track as they become eligible for promotion. Show the employee that you’re thinking about their career progression as you do the difficult work of managing constructive criticism.