13 Signs of a Bad Manager
Ever hear the saying “people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses?” Whether they’re dealing with a manifestation of a toxic work environment or just a bad apple, top performers have no interest in working under bad managers for longer than it takes to find a new job. Some of a bad manager’s direct reports might stick around, but they likely won’t work as effectively or feel particularly motivated to push themselves. A bad boss can kill important projects, stall career growth for their direct reports, and potentially affect progress toward broader company goals.
Whether you’re checking in to become a better manager or you’re an employee looking for a list of red flags, here are the top signs of a bad manager to look for.
Poor communication skills
Communication skills are essential to just about every aspect of a professional’s work. It impacts how they collaborate, their understanding of their role, how they share what they’ve worked on, and more. With managers, communication is doubly important. That’s because it doesn’t just affect their work, but everything their entire team can achieve.
A manager who can’t clearly communicate their expectations to their team will be continually disappointed by their output — and a particularly terrible manager might blame them for it. Additionally, any time a team member brings a problem up with them, a manager with poor communication skills might completely misunderstand the issue, creating more problems.
In some situations, managers who become aware of the issue will be determined to improve things. Some managers, unfortunately, almost make a conscious commitment to being poor communicators.
Micromanagement
Micromanagement often starts from a good place. A dedicated manager wants top ensure important tasks are done well and that their team excels. That’s their role, after all, right? But there’s a reason micromanagement is a hallmark of bad managers: it signals a lack of trust.
Depending on their management style, a manager’s responsibilities might end at giving gentle nudges when their team goes a little off-track or involve a more direct role in planning strategy and assigning priorities. But when managers are constantly asking for updates or, worse, taking control of important tasks themselves, they’re doing more harm than good. They’re getting in the way and hampering their team’s growth.
Inability to delegate
Hand-in-hand with micromanagement comes a total absence of delegation. If your manager constantly does everything themselves, from mission-critical tasks to data entry and other mundane work, it’s not because they’re a hard worker, it’s because they don’t know how to delegate.
Delegation allows managers and leaders to free up time for high-value, strategic work by assigning tasks to other employees. A manager who can’t delegate often ends up working late and still struggling to get everything done. They put unreasonable expectations on their own abilities, and that usually trickles down to their team.
If managers can’t delegate work to their employees, it’s either because they don’t trust their team or they’re perfectionists.
They make employee well-being optional
Employee well-being is key to building a team of high-performers. Employees who aren’t at their best — because they’re stressed out or overworked — can’t do their best work. And while most employees will go through occasional difficult phases where that well-being is challenged, it shouldn’t be the norm.
A bad manager who doesn’t take employee well-being seriously might see their team call in sick more often, lack motivation to work towards big goals, or leave the organization altogether. While making sure your employees have a great quality of life at your organization is an investment, it’s one the best managers are always happy to make.
Preferential treatment
This can be one of the most damaging signs of a bad manager. When it’s obvious that there’s a different set of rules for each team member, the foundation of trust that should exist within a team becomes so eroded it’s practically non-existent. People on the manager’s good side care more about staying there than doing good work, while anyone else has to constantly watch their back.
It’s normal to enjoy spending time and working with some team members more than others. But a manager needs to treat their team members equally, otherwise they won’t have much of a team.
Their team has high turnover
The old truism is you don’t quit your job, you quit your boss. Studies actually suggest that’s only half the story, though. From this article in the Harvard Business Review:
…[W]e learned something interesting about [employees] who eventually stayed. They found their work enjoyable 31% more often, used their strengths 33% more often, and expressed 37% more confidence that they were gaining the skills and experiences they need to develop their careers.
So when someone quits a team, it’s because they don’t enjoy their work — which is usually the boss factor — but they’re more likely to be driven by believing that their work uses their strengths and that they’re getting skills and experience which will help them develop their careers.
Some organizations go through periods of high turnover, which can make this a bit of a false flag. But if a specific manager’s team has a much hire turnover rate than anyone else, it might be a sign that this manager isn’t a good fit.
“Did we have a meeting today?”
A good manager respects people’s time. Scratch that — a good person respects others’ time.
Managers who are always late to meetings and expect their team to wait around create two problems:
- They’re communicating that their time matters more than their team’s.
- They’re costing the company more money because they’re forcing their team to wait around when they could be doing something more productive.
Everyone’s late to a meeting from time to time. People even forget meetings occasionally.
If managers are always 10-20 minutes late to meetings — or worse, they miss them regularly — that’s a bad sign.
There’s no plan beyond the current project
Leading teams is like juggling fish. It’s difficult, prone to slip-ups, and only when you’re really good does it look like it’s no effort at all.
Especially when you’re working on a complicated cross-functional project, it’s challenging to get a team aligned, working on the same project, and delivering on time and under budget.
But it’s even harder to make sure that everyone is equally 100% busy for every single day of a complete project until the very end of it whereby everyone will magically wrap up tasks at the same moment and it will all be done and perfect.
When put that way, it’s a good deal harder than hard, isn’t it?
So a smart manager doesn’t only plan for the project that’s in front of you; they make sure that they know what the next couple of projects are, and they have them planned out in enough detail that team members can easily move from one project to the next one if they’re finished before other team members.
The pro-level version of this is to create high-level objectives they want their team to hit, equip them with the info they need to succeed, and then get out of the way.
No one goes to them with problems
Management is about repetition and problem-solving. Be consistent in your message and your goals and communicate them clearly. Then solve the team’s problems so they can accomplish what they need to.
But if no one goes to their manager when an issue comes up, that manager can’t do anything about them.
If it’s not in an organization’s culture to embrace problems and learn from them, then employees are more likely to try to hide them. If it treats problems as an opportunity — for the organization’s growth or the customer’s benefit — then employees will bring them up. But when their own boss doesn’t see these as opportunities, then they’ll go back to hiding them.
They yell
Outside the limitations of high-noise environments and maybe the military, there’s basically no reason for a manager to shout at their team. Some managers feel that keeping their team motivated and driven requires that they crack a whip over the team members’ heads and keep them focused by keeping them scared.
In practice, that doesn’t work.
A manager who’s feared by their team creates a corrosive environment where people are afraid to do things for fear of getting their heads bitten off. It means people hide problems because they are afraid. It means people leave to go find somewhere else to work where they hate their boss less.
A good manager doesn’t want their team to love them any more than they want to be feared. In between adoration and fear is respect, and that’s a good situation for a manager to be in.
Too busy to help
There’s a difference between the kind of day that the average manager goes through and the kind of day that the average maker or worker goes through. This is the well-known idea of maker time vs. manager time. A good manager can balance the workload that he has to juggle between those two areas of maker (or worker) vs. manager.
If managers don’t have time to help solve problems for their team, to pitch in and deliver when the chips are down, then they’re probably not doing a great job as a manager. When the going gets tough and everyone has to chip in together, it’s valuable if a manager is there to ease the load.
It’s important that, busy as they may be with meetings and manager time, managers are still there when their team needs you.
Never having the hard talk
When someone makes a mistake once, it’s a chance to learn something. If they make the same mistake again, there’s probably a bigger issue that needs addressing. If someone keeps making the same mistake, they’re not motivated, they’re dragging the team down, and so on, their manager needs to have a talk with them.
Often, we don’t address problems critically when they’re small and more controllable. The quarterly or (heaven help you) annual performance review is an awful feedback mechanism simply because it provides guidance long after a correctable event.
A good manager has weekly, or at the most monthly, talk to each team member about overall performance. If something has gone wrong, talking to the team member as soon as possible about what went wrong and how to address it next time is essential.
Any criticism a manager gives should be constructive, but keep that feedback loop as short as possible between problem and discussion.
Avoiding these conversations creates larger problems, potentially even leading to that team member being terminated.
They only solve the problem right in front of them
This last one is a pernicious problem. It strikes good managers and bad ones alike.
It’s easy to get lost in the hustle and bustle of daily work and focus on tactical problems that need to be solved: write that email, plan this meeting, scope the next project. It’s easy to forget that a good leader’s job is to look ahead and see what other problems need solving after the one that everyone is working on.
Managers who only worry about how to solve the next problem on their plate will struggle to grow as a leaders. The more senior they are, the larger a problem they can tackle with less guidance and assistance. One sure way to improve their capabilities as a manager and a leader is to position their team to do work that doesn’t solve just one problem, it sets them up to make solving the next one a little easier.
Each project a team completes is a chance to test new ways to run that team, create new processes, and improve the way they communicate. It’s on the manager, to tune the machine of their team and make it work as well as it can.
That can’t happen with managers who just look at the next task on their list with tunnel vision.
Watch out for these warning signs
If you recognize some of these signs in your manager, don’t fret. You’re not necessarily dealing with a terrible manager. This is especially true if they’re new to the job and still learning the ropes. You can try and approach your manager about your concerns and hope they’ll be inspired to improve. But if more and more of these red flags keep showing up over time, you might need to alert someone higher up the org chart or look for a new job.