Sunday, May 08, 2011

Lousy management

From my previous employment, I have come up with my list of what makes a lousy management.

- When your supervisor tries to borrow 5 thousand dollars to finance the surgery of her in law, it's a big red flag. It does not only create an ethical issue with the workplace environment, it also get very difficult to collect once you terminate your employment. Thanked goodness I lied and did not lend her the money.

- When your supervisor would rather take the short cut to complete online learning assignments, it shows her priorities are not in the right place. We have these yearly online learning tasks to complete and my supervisor would just complete the test and not read the assignments. She would rather tell us what the answers are on the test and skip the learning process all together to save time.

- When management prioritize quantity over quality, then you know you have lousy bosses. When a supervisor would shift therapist from one patient to another to maximize the amount of patients seen, this clearly shows that consistency and quality of patient care is not the priority.

- When the director would make a quick major decisions without exhausting the facts just because he is going away on a vacation shows his poor management skills. Some decisions needs an exhaustive investigation and if he is going away for a 3 week vacation, then this decision should have been done upon his return to complete the investigation.

- When management is too afraid to anger a doctor that their principles are thrown out the windows just to cater to an unreasonable doctor shows weakness of character. If you know that you are in the right, you should be able to defend that to your superior. And as a management team, they should be able to defend their subordinates who are doing what is right rather than just doing what the doctor wants.

- When management would only allow one staff out of 15 to take a vacation at a time shows their shortcoming in managing staffing needs of the department. They would hinder their staff's ability to choose when to take vacation and rather they dictate when their staff can take vacation. How reasonable is it to just have one person take vacation when there are 15 in the department? At least 2 people should be able to take a vacation at the same time if there are 15 of you.

PS. In all fairness, one of the member of the management team was OK. From my conversations with her, I can see that her priorities and ideas are in the right place.

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