Unfortunately, as with everything in life there is a good side and a bad side to managing and leading your team.
Good managers get the most out of their teams by employing an array of skills, they take responsibility for their team’s actions and they know that the most valuable assets they have are the people that work for them.
On the other hand though, you get the bad manager. This manager does not care for the people they manage, does not take responsibility for the team and basically just manages by blaming people for the lack of their performance.
I call this the Bluetooth management effect, and this is typically what this management style is made up of:
These types of managers like to manage from their offices and you will only really see or hear from them in the mornings when they arrive for work and in the evenings when the leave to go home. In between they will manage their teams remotely without really getting involved in the day to day running of things.
Typically, these types of managers also don’t make any concrete decisions, and if there are any issues the first thing these managers will do is blame other people, and their team members are not immune to this either as this type of manager will blame anybody to ensure that they don’t look bad.
These managers like to waste time with a lot of meetings with no clear outcome and like to surround themselves with people that they can either use to do their work for them or to get ideas or improvements from in order to make them their own.
These types of Bluetooth jockeys will also typically control communication to upper levels of management to ensure that they cannot be highlighted for the lack of management skills they have and will use their team members to boost their own agendas and careers.
You can also identify these managers by the way they would typically handle issues within projects or their team and by the remote manner in which they tackle problematic situations, where they would either send a vague mail instructing everybody and their horse to take action, but with no clear plan indicating the next steps and who would be responsible for what, leaving the team more confused now than when they started. Or schedule a meeting where the same disconnected behaviour is then portrayed, leaving the teams more demotivated.
Now make no mistake, even though these Bluetooth managers are extremely bad at what they do, they are extremely good at hiding in organisations, they can survive for years on other people’s ideas, and by manipulating team members and situations to meet their end goals.
There is unfortunately no silver bullet to handle these types of managers, but to be mindful and alert to their behaviour.
Like a fire needs oxygen to burn so does a Bluetooth manager need other people to boost him or herself, once you take that away by avoiding them all together as much as you can they will be unable to use you for their own gain.
As a business owner or Snr manager, be on the lookout for these Bluetooth managers within your company and team and change the behaviour of those managers before they cause permanent damage to your organisations or teams.
– Get exclusive content on best practices, tools, and trends straight to your inbox. Don’t miss out – sign up now and lead your projects to success!