I work for a start-up and needless to say, things are chaotic.  We started off on a roll but came to a halting stop because as much as revenue was growing, it was unprofitable growth and the wrong strategy.  We’ve spent the past 5 months attempting to get back on track but that is much easier said than done.  If there is one big theme that I have learned in my start-up experience, timing is key from launching products to market to getting operations in sync to growing.

Before I get too off track, this post is about the uncommon sensical manager.  Unfortunately, I have worked for multiple ones and if I ask all my friends, probably 75% of them would respond that all the managers they’ve had fall in the same boat.  I’m talking about the manager who unbearably micro-manages, stuck in his/her ways and in the past and who ultimately finds it difficult to make decisions.

My current manager constantly talks about his former employer, “at X company, this is how it was done and it worked perfectly so trust me on this.”  It is as though he doesn’t realize that there are numerous differences between where he is now and where he once was.  X company is a multi-billion dollar Fortune 100 company.  I can’t help but wonder if that is one of the flaws of recruitment of managers.  So many small companies try to pull people from established firms hoping that they will bring some of that legitimacy and structure to a forming environment.  Yet, there is a fine line  between trying to create a replica of an environment that one knows well and leveraging one’s knowledge and experiences to build something new.  More often than not, most managers from large, established firms struggle with this fine line because they had structure and are at lost without it.

 Today is a prime example of it.  He came into a meeting of 11+ people and altered the agenda to what he used to do at company X.  This entails him reading verbatim from a document as though no one knows how to read.  We ended up on the first half of page 2 of 8 after 1 hour during which most people had zoned out, asked trivial questions that were made into critical points when in the big picture they are minor.  Thank god the meeting was a hard stop.  Otherwise I might have had enough frustration to write 3-4 pages on this one topic.  We left the meeting with him saying, “this will get better, I’ve done this for many years and it’s exactly what we need,” without any acknowledgement of how things actually went in the meeting.  He is also leaving for vacation and leaving me to deal with the mess next week.

 If I had to narrow it down to 1 uncommon sense item from the above, it would be that there are differences between every individual, every environment, every firm, why is it so difficult for my manager to realize that what worked at his old job may not work in his current job at all?

I have mentioned other items such as his micro management and not too typical, his running with things I that I created entirely.  Today’s meeting was about a project that I had worked on with another co-worker.  Yet, it never seemed to occur to my manager that we should be the one speaking about it rather than him.  More stories on that later.

I am sure my Uncommon Male will have something to say about this…perhaps an economics framework of the incentive to be an uncommon sense manager.