Why Do We Hire Competent People...and Then Treat Them Like They're Not?

Esther has an M.A. in Organizational Leadership, is the author of over 100 articles, and co-author of "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great" and "Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management". She’s a founder of the AYE Conference, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Agile Alliance. www.estherderby.com.

  Agile   Manufacturing   Talent Management  

"Millions of Bad Managers Are Killing America’s Growth."

That headline really caught my eye, so I skimmed the article. Here's the gist: Bad managers lead to poor employee engagement, and that costs companies money. Are you one of them? In this article, I’ll cover the tell-tale signs of a poor manager--and what you can do if you find out that’s you.

Tell-Tale Signs
It's true--there are people who should never be managers. Some people can't manage themselves, or don't really care about people. Sometimes the "best" technical people are promoted to management, but they can't relate to the non-stars, who may take a bit longer (but not too long) to write code or solve problems.

And I've seen managers whose management actions made me wonder what they were thinking. For example, I asked a group of managers to look at the decisions they made day to day and identify which ones they could turn over to the team. The managers identified three decisions they trusted the team to make: team name, team working agreements and how to spend the team lunch budget. That sounds bad, but I once met a manager who worried teams wouldn't pick inspiring names, so he gave them a list of comic book superhero names to choose from. (The teams were not inspired.)

When I visited one of my clients, I asked a programmer who had…

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