Let's be honest; despite all the grief that middle managers get, surviving in that role is no easy task. You constantly and consistently receive downward pressure from owners and upper management to implement changes and pass on cost-saving measures that you know aren't going to work. To top this off, you only really ever have two choices—provide feedback to upper management; while this absorbs the stress and pressure, keeping it from being passed on to your subordinates, it rocks the boat and puts a target on your back, branding you permanently as a "trouble maker" in the eyes of upper management. Your other option is to wave your hand and pass the initiatives, along with all the stress and pressure, down onto your team. Workers may try, for a time, to push back, putting upwards pressure on you, making your life a living nightmare as you get pushback from both directions as upper management and productive workers fight a proxy war via your sanity. But, eventually, the pressure, having nowhere else to go once it reaches the bottom, will drive productive workers to a breaking point of stress and burnout.
So, it's no surprise that our favorite managers have always been those who were willing to stir the pot, absorb the pressure, and protect their team; for obvious reasons, these leaders often inspire the most loyalty and are looked upon fondest by those they're managing. Second come the managers who reluctantly pass on the pressure, absorbing little where they can but otherwise resigning to the whims of upper management with resignation and learned apathy. The third of managers are regarded as useful by upper management for their apparent inability to question orders or critically think, blindly passing any and all orders through to their subordinates as if they were a breeze blowing through an open door—but they'll get no love from their team, who curse their name behind their back. The final, awful, hateful group of managers are the ones who—either out of sheer stupidity or malice—devise their own ways to torture workers, going out of their way to be as abrasive, aggressive, and unpredictable as possible while devising their own tyrannical policies, thinking it's what their superiors would want.
The manager from this story would undoubtedly fit in well with that last group, with her bizarrely authoritarian policies even drawing the attention of her superiors and leading to her disgraced resignation. Read on for u/PneumaNOMAC2112's account of the events that unfolded at their workplace. Next, see this manager who tried to take 15 minutes off workers' time sheets if they were even 1 minute late.
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