I have seen many employees change from energetic, eager and top performers to lazy and negligent. Studying the reasons behind that I found out that it was due to bad management. People who are managed by a bad Boss after sometime lose their desire to work and hence gradually lose their talent and start to under-perform.
One employee I have seen, has been a logistics manager for 10 years now and the kind of mistakes he does shouldn’t be done by a newly hired inexperienced employee. Although at the beginning of his career he used to excel at what he does. Looking at his manager, we found out that he screams and yells all the time. He blames him all the time even if it is not his fault, he deducts from his salary often. He intentionally keeps him after office hours just to prove that “if I want you to stay then you must stay” and not for any work need. And when he performs very well or accomplishes a difficult job he never gets any appreciation. His manager believes that if he praises his employees they will become full of themselves and hence will not work well. Given time the employee started to feel that it is all the same whether he did a good job or a bad job in the end he will be yelled at and will never be appreciated, so he decided not to do his job right. I don’t know if it is a conscious or unconscious decision but the result is he became an under-performer.
Do managers realize how they badly affect the performance of their organization by being bad managers? How many skills were killed? how many opportunities were lost because of bad managers? how many organizations under-performed or even shut down because of their managers inability to manage?
Managing people is a critical job and getting the best out of your staff is not an easy task, so before accepting a managerial post you must be confident that you have what it takes.
Doha Shawki 