HOW TO BE THE WORLDS WORST MANAGER: A STEP BY STEP GUIDE ON HOW TO RUN YOUR DEPARTMENT AS INEFFICIENTLY AS POSSIBLE

PART 4

Before we proceed with today’s lesson on management inefficiency, let’s take a few seconds to review what we have covered to date.

• In part one, we learned that ineffective managers should never develop job descriptions, grade positions, conduct performance appraisals or implement succession plans.
• In part two it was explained why a bad manager should never delegate responsibility and accountability to their subordinates, as well as the pitfalls of including employees in the decision making process.
• Part three of our series focused on leading one’s employees by example and embracing the three key behavioral patterns of dishonesty, negativity and disrespect.

Today we will take a look at how an ineffective manager should go about ensuring that their employees feel underpaid and under valued.

Let’s face it, virtually every single employee in South Africa (and most likely worldwide) is of the opinion that they are underpaid. This simply cannot be true.  The more likely scenario is that employees are simply unable to manage their personal finances, and as such you could continually increase their salaries and still be faced with the same complaints.

However, this is a reality that seems lost on most human resource personnel.  They are constantly advocating that the following be done:

1. Finalization of employee job descriptions.
2. Grading of all positions within the company.
3. Comparing jobs with current market salaries and / or salary surveys.
4. Establishing a minimum and maximum earning threshold for jobs and grades.

This is simply madness personified. The sheer cost of the exercise alone would be enough to give one sleepless nights, then if you think of the impact of having to increase the earnings of employees who have been found to be “underpaid” one might as well throw oneself in front of the bankruptcy express! The fall-out of having employees who feel underpaid and unhappy seems minimally disruptive in comparison.

Why all of a sudden should a manager’s main concern be with the “feelings” of their employees?  Not only is management being constantly nagged about underpaying their staff, but they are also being cautioned to be wary of creating additional unhappiness by behaving in a manner which further accentuates the salary discrepancies between their own earnings and that of their employees. This is beyond ridiculous. Surely employees are savvy enough to know that in any organization the boss will always be the higher wage earners (they do after all carry the bulk of the responsibility for the business’s success)?

This being said, what exactly is wrong with managers or business owners enjoying their hard earned money? So what if they arrive at work in a brand new Mercedes, days after having retrenched staff? Who cares if they spend their days complaining about the building costs of their new beach house, when they have just advised staff that there are insufficient funds to pay bonuses? Employees should be smart enough to realize that as the managers and owners are the driving force behind the enterprise, their financial needs must take priority over that of lower-level employees.

So how then does one address the issues above, without actually having to stick one’s hand into one’s pocket? Well one of the secrets of management success is to circumvent the issue of underpaying employees, by ensuring that staff feels as though they are valued. If necessary overstate the importance of their contributions to the company. This will go some way towards buying management some goodwill from their employees and further postponing those hideously awkward and time consuming debates surrounding salaries. Some may argue that this creates an unfair expectation amongst employees – after all if their contributions are so instrumental to the organization shouldn’t they be paid accordingly? That is ultimately not the concern of management – the point is to simply placate them for the time being, until another viable excuse can be derived.

Another way, in which one can circumvent the unhappiness of staff regarding their pay rates, is to play around with their job titles. You would be amazed at how easily an impressive sounding job title can immediately make an employee feel more valued and important. But be warned, this can sometimes lead to an unexpected backlash as you’ll always find the idiot employee who feels that their salary and their job title should be in alignment. The fact that they do not carry out half the functions normally associated with that job title is apparently irrelevant to the salary equation.  Now while some would argue that this problem is caused by management themselves as a result of playing games, one could also argue that it simply reaffirms the earlier assertion that employees will never be satisfied.

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