Engineered to Fail

By Michael Gow

Have you ever interacted with a manager or a leader at a company and wondered how in the world they ever rose to that position? Taken from years of observation and experience, Engineered to Fail looks at both good and bad management practices from the point of view of the employee. Told in an engaging short story format, the author shares with you some of the best stories he has collected about abysmal management and leadership practices, and the impact those managers and leaders have had on a company's culture, morale, and productivity. It's a book that most employees will be shaking their head in agreement with, good managers and leaders cringing at the behavior of their colleagues, and bad managers and leaders being blissfully unaware.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Gow
• Release date: Sep 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310035654

Michael Gow

Michael Gow has been a professional corporate trainer for over 20 years. Along with training, he is a business and personal coach, sings in his church choir (at least that is what he calls it), and active with youth activities. He also participates in the efforts to find forever homes for retired racing greyhounds, and is always seen in the company of at least one of them he had brought home with the promise that he will be finding a good home for them, only to make that home his own.

Book preview

Engineered to Fail

Copyright 2015 Michael Gow

Published by Michael Gow at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Section One: Broken Engagement

Broken Engagement

My Employee’s Morale Stinks? It’s All Their Fault!

The Beatings Will Stop When Morale Improves

How to Stuff a Ballot Box

The Arbiter of Engagement

Section Two: Our Poor Relations

Our Poor Relations

How Do We Thank You? Here’s a Pink Slip.

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try to Get Them to Fail Again

Rank Unfairness

They Made Her Feel Like Dancing

Section Three: Managers Say the Darndest Things

Managers Say the Darndest Things

The Password Is…

I’m Ready for My Management, Mr. DeMille

The Law and Annie McGraw

A Matter of Mattering

Section Four: Doing It Right

More Than Money

HowmIDoin’?

Epilogue: What Makes a Good Manager?

About the Author

Connect with Michael Gow

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge some of the great managers in my life. Thank you Cheryl, Charlotte, and Donna for your help, guidance, and fantastic management.

Thanks also to all the miserable managers I have had in my life. I can honestly say that without you and your examples, this book would not be possible.

My thanks also to my editor Linda, who helped guide me through the whole process of what it takes to write and publish a book. Without her help, this book would not be possible.

Introduction

This book began in a restaurant in Irvine, California. Not exactly ‘Casablanca’, but we can’t all have Paris. I was meeting a friend for dinner. Though we were on two different coasts normally, I was there on a business trip and could not wait to see her. Our connection at work was that we reported to the same manager for a while, and had an equally poor opinion of her. This self-same manager had fired my friend, so we had to find time away from her (former) office to meet.

We fell into our comfortable conversation almost immediately. Not surprisingly, that conversation quickly turned to the poor manager, and the issues we had with her. However, that can only occupy so much time, and we wanted to have a good meal, so I tried to steer the conversation to the future.

My colleague told me she was thinking of an advanced degree in Organizational Psychology. An odd choice, I mentioned, and asked what drew her to that interest. She told me that it was her former, and my current, manager, which drew her to that conclusion. This was getting interesting. I asked her why, and her answer led me to the realization that this book needed to be written.

Why, she explained, after 40 years of research showing what worked and didn't work in management practices, why are there still people like her former and my current manager? The woman taught management classes at one time, and keeps up on the literature, so why does she ignore so much of it so often? Was she so clueless about why her employees were always rating her poorly on surveys, and not engaged at all in their work, or did she just not care?

This advanced degree, my former co-worker hoped, would give her the opportunity to understand this type of behavior better. With that degree, she would also have the tools to coach bad managers into becoming good managers, and coach good managers into becoming fantastic ones.

Then and there this particular book was born.

Like most people, I have worked in good and bad workplaces. Like most, I have had managers who I would follow into fire, and others who should never have direct authority over another human being for the rest of their lives. I have worked with HR departments who take good management very seriously, and HR departments who only care about pleasing the highest ranking person in the dispute. I learned early on that there is very little an ordinary employee can do with bad managers, especially with the latter type of HR department. As my friend in the Irvine restaurant wisely pointed out, being a terrible manager is not illegal.

I have had my scuffles with bad managers, and I have learned some rather painful lessons. I have also had to become much more creative in dealing with them, as many employees have. From prior training as a school teacher, I had learned that documentation is an absolute necessity to dealing with chronically misbehaving students. This followed into the work world, where I was informed that documentation is vital to building a case against an employee. After one particularly bad incident with a particularly bad manager, I began to do just that. I documented everything.

That sounds a bit formal, doesn't it? Record everything. It isn't. Most of us do, in one way or another. If we tell a story about a bad manager over a dinner table, we have recorded it. If we write an incident up in a blog, we have recorded it. That is what I did for most of my career: mentally recorded incidents for future use. When spreadsheets and other electronic documents came along, I finally began entering these incidents, recorded the stories told to me, and saving them for something, though what I didn’t know.

I also knew one day,