The regional manager has to chew your group out and report that he did to show his boss that he is doing his job. Even though there's rarely ever any repercussions, him not scolding your group tells his boss that he isn't doing his job as his boss sees it.
A couple of days ago in my local supermarket I spotted a chain bigwig with the store manager in tow and the bigwig scolding the women in the bakery department that the sale signs aren't at the same level on all three display tables. Really? Sign height? Of course in his mind he has to provide some type of constructive feedback to every department in every store to justify his inspection of every store?
It's like doing employee reviews. You are discouraged, severely by HR, to give everyone in your group excellent ratings, even if they all are. You are told you have to nitpick to find areas of improvement and fit all the review to the "curve" so at least one employee on your team is "below average". Of course if your team is heads and tails above another manager's team and when that other team's best person is still worse than your "below average" person, when layoffs or raises come it doesn't matter. Your boss simply fires all "below average" people or dole out raise amounts based on reviews.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
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Or at least that's what a bad, inexperienced and badly trained manager thinks, or a retarded boss of his expects out of him.|
Originally Posted by Father Xmas
The regional manager has to chew your group out and report that he did to show his boss that he is doing his job. Even though there's rarely ever any repercussions, him not scolding your group tells his boss that he isn't doing his job as his boss sees it.
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A manager should not just bark at people, he should improve the work environment and improve morale. Demoralized employees perform badly. Unfortunately, many managers think employees full of moral either slack or are threats to his own position.
Quote:
| It's like doing employee reviews. You are discouraged, severely by HR, to give everyone in your group excellent ratings, even if they all are. You are told you have to nitpick to find areas of improvement and fit all the review to the "curve" so at least one employee on your team is "below average". Of course if your team is heads and tails above another manager's team and when that other team's best person is still worse than your "below average" person, when layoffs or raises come it doesn't matter. Your boss simply fires all "below average" people or dole out raise amounts based on reviews. |
Interestingly: Microsoft has a Stack Ranking and has been heavily criticized lately for losing extremely bright people to it. Not only people that are fired but bright minds that leave because they cant take the hostile environment anymore.
This isn't about workers actively sabotaging each other, it's about the idea that members of each team were required to graded to fit a Gaussian curve when there is disparity between teams. In software development the number frequently tossed about is 10 to 1 productivity difference between best and worst individual. So if one team is composed of 7 through 9s while the other 4 through 6s, one team's 7 is classified the same as the other team's 4, in the eyes of HR review guidelines.
So when the boss of the two team's manager or even his boss determines who gets what for raises or who will be let go, he has reviews that don't show him the true worth of the individual because each team is measured separately and each team is required to bin their members according to the curve. No backstabbing required.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
The immediate reaction from every manager: determine this should be the new production standard and make everyone else kill themselves to match it.
Which, of course, is ridiculous. It's good to have goals, but you can't expect the same number of people using the same equipment to increase their productivity ad infinitum. In practice, what happened was that we'd seesaw up and down, and in the down months we'd get chewed out in a meeting by the regional manager -- but his threats were usually toothless. The whole thing was more-or-less symbolic, a ritualistic formality that served no purpose except to allow the semi-local bigwig to save face.
In any case, that was years ago, and I only stuck around for a couple of years as a youth. Your comment about your mother struck me, though, and perhaps for the wrong reason: my first thought was to shake my head and mumble to myself, "Yeah, and the young'un pushing everyone else won't have the long-term stamina/interest to keep up the pace." Long ago, I was that young'un, and I got a fair amount of praise for my naive enthusiasm -- but in retrospect, that younger me would've annoyed the living crap out of me now.