12.
Management Pitfalls:

Avoiding the Most Common Complaints

Learning from the Mistakes of Failed Management Relationships

The bad management syndromes about which Xers complain the most have a common denominator: each attacks Xers’ individuality and personal power in their work and Xers’ corresponding pursuit of Self Building and self-based career-security. While the management practices highlighted here would not be welcomed by any worker of any age in any workplace, they are uniquely intolerable to Xers.

These bad management syndromes fall into six categories:

1. Poor time management;

2. Micromanagement;

3. Fear-based management;

4. Management without adequate feedback;

5. Unwelcoming corporate cultures;

6. Poor communication.

Let’s take a closer look at each category.

Poor Time Management

Some managers insist on maintaining control over Xers’ time, but fail to plan time and resources so that Xers’ work goals can be coordinated with their managers’ requirements.

1. Holding onto deadlines until the last minute, making Xers wait around all day and run around all night.

2. Holding up Xers’ productivity by taking excessive turnaround time reviewing Xers’ intermediate results.

3. Understaffing projects so that everyone is frantic and people must be pulled away from other assignments to fill the gaps.

4. Keeping Xers around late in order to justify inflating fees based on billable hours.

5. Demanding Xers’ “face time”/staying late just because the corporate culture frowns on leaving early.

6. Engaging Xers in gofer-weekends at the hands of managers who still don’t know how to operate the photocopier and the fax machine.

Micromanagement

If managers want to maximize Xers’ productivity, they would be wise to encourage Xers’ entrepreneurial spirit. Too many managers try to control Xers’ every movement, squelching their creative impulses and denying them any responsibility for tangible end-products.

1. Devoting insufficient time to senior-level work as a result of focusing on the most mundane tasks.

2. Second-guessing results and halting final products by insisting on round after round of changes.

3. Looking over shoulders and nit-picking details.

4. Denying Xers any responsibility for tangible end-results or even a chance to add real value to the final product.

5. Reducing the hard work of two or more people to the productivity rate of one micromanager.

Fear-Based Management

Xers interpret abusive managers in terms of what they know about other abusers, assuming that a manager’s abusive behavior has more to do with his or her own psychological issues than it has to do with Xers’ actual work performance.

1. Using employees as an outlet for venting frustrations that are unrelated to the employees’ work.

2. Using a loud voice, insulting words, or intimidating body language to make any point whatsoever.

3. Evaluating Xers as individuals, instead of evaluating their end-products.

4. Sending mixed messages by allowing personal mood swings to masquerade as spontaneous performance evaluation.

5. Unpredictable outbursts, which make it impossible for Xers to prepare and condition their behavior to accommodate their managers’ authority.

Management without Adequate Feedback

Because Xers know that job security is dead, they seek investment-friendly environments in which they can use their creative talents to achieve the kind of Self Building that will add to their long-term security. Xers cannot invest without short-term feedback, credit, and rewards to confirm that they are not wasting their time and energy—their limited reservoir of career capital.

1. Integrating Xers’ work into end-products and failing to give Xers credit for their contributions.

2. Providing no instantaneous feedback, positive or negative.

3. Spotlighting failure without making sufficient time to celebrate success and accomplishment.

4. Withholding recognition, thanks, credit, or reward.

5. Relying on formal reviews as the primary vehicle for feedback.

Unwelcoming Corporate Cultures

When Xers see in the signals of a given corporate culture that a company’s leadership undervalues the individual and treats its young workers like easily replaceable cogs in the machine, they know it is not an environment in which they can thrive. In response, Xers reject the company and its management by psychologically compartmentalizing the job and diminishing its overall significance in their lives. The result is sinking morale, lower productivity, and higher turnover.

The goal of building an Xer-friendly corporate culture is to let Xers know that your company should be the primary outlet for their creative energy. To break down the wall between Xers’ jobs and the rest of their lives, you have to convince Xers that your company is a worthwhile focal point of their personal growth.

1. Treating individuals as interchangeable and replaceable: Xers don’t want to be the paper plates of the job market.

2. Too many layers of management: Xers get caught in the middle, answering in all directions, trying to manage all those managers.

3. Teams with no clear mission and weak leaders: the worst of both worlds—autonomy sacrificed for directionless teams where Xers produce less value and receive less credit.

4. Inadequate diversity efforts: Xers cannot feel comfortable where their peers are not welcome.

Poor Communication

Xers are used to the information environment of mass culture and higher education—information environments that encourage voracious consumption. They are accustomed to leveraging information as a problem-solving resource as well as a security blanket to achieve comfort amidst instability. Xers have a hard time thriving in closed information environments, with poor lines of communication and environments that do not support learning.

1. Giving vague instructions while having very specific expectations.

2. Providing information on an “as needed” basis only.

3. Treating questions as unimportant interruptions.

4. Controlling training resources and dispensing training in limited doses.

5. Front-loading training in the early stages of employment without keeping up the pace of training.