Dick is a bad manager

<i>He’ll assign a task, tell you exactly how you should do it, and then "stop by" repeatedly to check on progress.</i><p>Let's not forget the rest of the story: Dick is not a dick by accident. He chooses this management style to keep his people on edge. Do you recognize any of these other things...<p>1. Dick will omit one or two critical considerations about the task that you have no way of knowing. You're expected to gain this knowledge by osmosis or through the ether. It's your fault, not his, if you don't.<p>2. Dick assigns no priorities to any of the tasks he assigns. Since by definition, there will always be <i>something</i> not done, he will choose that thing to delve into. You can't win.<p>3. Dick waits until 4:55 to start a conversation. Once is an instance. Twice is a coincidence. After that, it's a pattern.<p>4. Dick only uses first names. If you don't know who he's talking about, you're the idiot.<p>5. Dick will pull his people off partially finished projects all the time for the emergency du jour. Then he will act as if he never did this when the bumped project is not done. Again it's always your fault, not his.<p>6. Dick will always find some outlying case no one has ever thought about and drill down 8 levels deep until he's the only one who knows what he's talking about. Everyone else is an idiot.<p>7. If Dick wants something, he yells. If he doesn't get it, he yells louder. If he still doesn't get it, he cusses.<p>8. When you least expect it, Dick is manic. The greatest guy in the world, as happy as can be, and everyone's buddy. Don't worry, things will be back to normal tomorrow.<p>9. Dick never uses formal functional specifications and rarely commits to anything in email. That way, when things are not built exactly the way they are needed, he can't be pinned down. It's always someone else's fault.<p>10. People come and people go, but Dick is still a dick and always will be.

A Dick-style manager is a sign that you've already hired some B and C quality employees. Theoretically the only bad hire could be the manager, but I've never seen a company with just one sub-par employee. If people don't get work done, bad managers overreact. Terrible managers will also take the opportunity to overreact when everything is going smoothly. They check on tasks constantly. They run extra meetings so that you need to have something new to report within a 5 hour timespan. They play "Gotcha!" style games. They create a butts-in-seats environment of fear to keep employees working at all times.<p>In some environments, a close eye is required on an employee or two. Never everybody. When Dick appears, he is a sign that a company is already trending downhill.

Dick is not a bad manager, he is a manager for a different kind of employee. I agree that Dick hurts the productivity of the Creative employee than loves his job. But on the other hand there's lot of employees that if not for Dick, would be all day slacking around doing nothing.<p>You can say that firing the Slacker is the solution. Unfortunately it's hard to find the Creative and most of the time that person will ask for more money than the Slacker. Plus the Slacker is able to do the job just fine with just a little bit of pushing.<p>If a Creative is working for Dick it's only natural for him to realize that he is not a right fit for the organization and leave. Eventually leaving only Slackers in the organization, the way it should be.<p>The problem comes when Dick is a manager in an organization that _requieres_ creativity, then you are doomed.

This is a related tangent that I'd like some input on:<p>One of the characteristics of "bad management" that's shown here is Dick constantly hovering. At my company, we've arranged the cubicles so that they still offer privacy (walls are about 6 feet high), but that anyone walking by can see what's on the computer screen.<p>Would you qualify this as hovering? We generally have no issues with casual gchatting, facebooking, stock picking, and have never really reprimanded anyone for that. We also don't do any sort of Internet monitoring.<p>Two of our employees, however, have taken it upon themselves to re-arrange their desks so that no one can see their monitor. One of them flipped their whole desk setup around (probably spent a good morning working on it), and another employee has turned his monitor 45 degrees - to compensate he has to crane his body at such an odd angle for 8 hours a day that I wonder if I'm going to get a workman's comp claim soon.<p>Is it bad management if I insist that they go back to their original configuration? I wonder if they think they're trying to pull a fast one over me - do they think I'm an idiot and do not realize what they're doing? Am I a "Dick" manager for wanting to know what they're up to whenever I walk through the room?

Dick is insecure in his own abilities and has probably hit the wall per the Peter Principle. Good managers get out of the way of their developers; Dicks micromanage and hamper the creativity and growth of their developers because they fear that one day a developer may make them irrelevant. Nobody likes to work for a Dick.

From the comments:<p>"There is a third kind of manager, who is typically a ‘nice guy’ who doesn’t have a problem with chicken suits or a bit of browsing or working time as long as the job gets done <i>but</i> micro-manages the crap out you stopping by every 15 minutes to see ‘how you’re getting on’, just like Dick. Micro-management sucks ass"<p>I think the third kind of manager is almost worse than Dick. Micromanagement makes getting anything done near impossible. I've taken to wearing headphones at the office and generally ignoring my manager due to him falling into the third category. The phrase "How are you doing over there?" makes my eye twitch these days.<p>It would be easier to stand up against Dick, assuming you have nothing to lose by losing the job. Usually the third category is the type to have his/her feelings hurt and resort to personal attacks should you question their management style.<p>Just my personal experience, I realize that's probably a sweeping generalization.

Good post.<p>The manager doesn't always have to fit that description totally to be a bad manager. As the post suggests, if people are saying "You should check with ____ before doing that," that probably indicates some micromanagement tendencies, which are just as demoralizing and counterproductive, even if the manager is otherwise well-loved as a person by some/all members of the team.<p>Also, if a team member tells you: "If you want to make that change, just do it, because if you check with ____, it'll take a while or might never happen," that is a sign of an overly-political manager.<p>Finally, I'd like to add the "smiley"/"fake" manager attitude. It's one thing to have a fun manager, but at some point you expect that your manager is trying to get work done. If they seem always happy and poking fun at things, it can be really annoying and make you second guess why they are trying to make everything seem so fun (probably because it sucks).

I'm not Dick. But I've occasionally had employees who would have done better if I were.<p>Anyone have any suggestions for how to manage a team where some employees need me to be Dick and some don't? The obvious solution is to replace the employees who need Dick's management, but that's not always feasible.

Managing like Dick is a easy trap to fall into for middle managers. They are given responsibility for delivering something, yet have limited authority. For example they need higher level authorization for their budget.<p>Also, they are dependent of their workers to make them look good. Usually they rose to a manager by doing a good job as an individual contributor, where their work was completely under their control. As a manager they need their team to get the work done. They can't do it alone anymore. It is not a simple thing to learn to give up that control, and convince others to work as hard as you had. Someone who has poor leadership skills and abilities is likely to compensate by micromanaging.

I agree that micromanagement (especially of employees whose job is creating things) is a really bad idea. If it's necessary, then you made a bad hiring choice and need to start looking again.<p>However, if a developer came in "high and wearing a chicken suit" I wouldn't care how much he got done. The chicken suit might be passable if it were casual Friday, but high - not acceptable. There should still be an element of professionalism and respect when you're working with other people, getting paid well, and clients are depending on you.

<i>Some personality types mesh perfectly well with Dick’s Machiavellian management style. Specifically, it seems to work on people who don’t feel very attached to their jobs. They have separate, thriving lives outside of work, and are fully able to leave all baggage at their desks before they go home. </i><p>- meshing with the Dick style of management<p>- being attached to your job<p>- having a thriving life outside of work<p>- being able to leave work baggage at work<p>I admit these aren't entirely unrelated. Being able to leave baggage at your desk mitigates the damage done by Dick. Having a thriving life outside of work helps you leave your baggage at work. If you don't have a thriving life outside work, you are more likely to be attached to your job.<p>However, in general these four things can vary independently. For example, I once had a Dick manager I hated, was apathetic about my job, was unable to leave work baggage at work, and had a personal life that varied from thriving to nonexistent during the time I worked for that manager.

Heh. This article reminds me of a book I read awhile back, called "The Management Secrets of T. John Dick":<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Management-Secrets-T-John-Dick/dp/0970874693" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Management-Secrets-T-John-Dick/dp/0970...</a><p>The book is fiction, and written from the point of view of the manager in question, but if you enjoy reading Dilbert, this book is a pretty good read.

<i>Specifically, it seems to work on people who don’t feel very attached to their jobs. They have separate, thriving lives outside of work, and are fully able to leave all baggage at their desks before they go home.</i><p>Is this a bad thing somehow? Shouldn't we all strive to have separate thriving lives outside of work and to leave the company baggage behind when we go home?

I think that's why a lot of people here have gone on to do their own thing rather than working for another Dick. Although I have to say, being your own boss can sometimes be worse than working for a Dick.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apples_and_oranges" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apples_and_oranges</a><p>I think apples should <i>lead</i> apples and oranges should <i>lead</i> oranges.