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I was up too early just now pursuing some business journalism (ha) before a workout, and came to this paragraph in a Harvard Business Review article:
The article, on the ways in which managers sabotage hiring, is similar to most BS on HBR — it’s generic and doesn’t really give many action items to improve the middling middle management ranks, but because it was written by a BIPOC professor of “empathetic management” at Oxford or some place, who will no doubt later go and become the Chief of Empathy at LinkedIn, it’s OK and we just accept it. We shouldn’t, though. We all know micromanagers exist, but a bigger problem might be absentee managers.
There are a lot of different types of bad bosses in the world — here’s one list and here’s another — but we spend a lot of our time and attention on either (a) the bullying kind or (b) the micromanaging kind. In reality we should be talking about all of these idiots more, because 82% of managers end up being the wrong hire, which is an astronomical fucking failure rate that would never be tolerated in other parts of the business, and because bad management is legitimately leading people to earlier deaths. These are important discussions.
