Am I a Bad Manager? 10 Signs Your Leadership Needs Work

Almost everyone has at least one story about a bad manager. In fact, you probably have someone in mind right now. Yet effective leadership is key in any successful business and as Simon Sinek puts it, “Good leaders are as vital as good parents”. The good news is, if you’re asking yourself “am I a bad manager”, you’re halfway there. Read on to spot 10 signs of a bad manager and find out what you can do about them:

• Recognizing a good manager
• 4 ways bad managers fail to communicate effectively
• 3 signs a manager is bad at building engagement
• 3 leadership skills you need to master

What a good manager looks like

Before we dive into areas for improvement, let’s take a moment to consider what you’re aiming for. Great leaders:

• drive strong employee engagement, exceptional performance and excellent workplace wellbeing from the top down
• offer opportunities, mentoring and coaching to their teams to support development and growth
• develop strong relationships, built on trust between them and their employees
• create a safe environment where employees can be themselves and share any concerns (about work or home)
• provide discipline, where needed

A lack of quality leadership can be a killer for business success, yet you can learn to be a great manager. Identifying your own flaws, especially if you’re new to leadership positions, can be difficult, so here are 10 signs of a bad manager which you should look out for.

Once you’ve worked out what’s tripping you up, speak to your own manager or HR team for support or training to develop those missing skills.

4 signs bad managers are not communicating effectively

1.  Two-way feedback is non-existent

Employees want to feel heard and valued. If you’re asking yourself “am I a bad manager?”, think about how your conversations go with your team. Do they let you know if they need something different from you or is it always you telling them what they’ve done wrong?

Great managers communicate with their teams regularly. They:

• use check-ins and performance reviews to help an employee develop, offering guidance on challenges, and encouraging them to learn new skills
• encourage regular feedback to go both ways so employees can flag barriers and raise any concerns they have with their manager’s leadership style
• seek to change to their behavior and ask their team if it’s making a positive difference

The first step is talking to your team, so start by asking how things are going and how you can support them.

2. A bad manager lacks consistency

Do you:

• Always apply the same standards or do you change project to project?
• Set clear expectations for your team around what they need to deliver?

Employees must be able to rely on their managers, but bad managers make that hard to do. They want detail on one project and a summary on the next, so employees don’t know where they stand. You have people who an excellent job one day and fail miserably the next, yet have no idea why.

The main reason is poor communication. You’re setting vague goals and are unclear about expectations. So employees are on edge while they guess what they need to do, and are unable to perform well in the meantime.

Help them succeed. Introduce consistency to everything you do – how you carry out your responsibilities, how you communicate with others, and how you treat your staff.

3. Your employees aren’t encouraged by you

People value recognition. How they like to be recognized may differ, but they appreciate feedback and praise for doing a great job. When you’re a bad manager, you offer little or no encouragement that people are heading in the right direction. Yet the right words can be worth more than gold. Literally.

Managerial praise is often more effective than financial incentives at boosting employee engagement. So if your team’s struggling to perform, ask yourself when was the last time you encouraged them? Reflect on what happens when you recognize a job well done.

And, for your more ambitious team members, actively support their personal goals. Offer guidance and help them develop skills which matter to them. It’s a great way to show you care about their career development, and a sign you’re moving away from the ‘bad manager’ club.

4. Bad managers have higher attrition

“A person doesn’t leave a job, they leave a manager,” or so the saying goes. In fact, a TotalJobs survey of UK employees found roughly half left jobs due to their managers. So, have a think:

• Do you face empty desks every morning?
• Do you find it hard to keep people in your team?
• Do people leave without another job to go to?

If the answer’s yes, you probably already know the answer to “Am I a bad manager?” But there are things you can do. Not everyone leaves due to a bad manager, but better communication provides the answer to a lot of the problems.

Talk to your team, check in with them on a regular basis. And understand how they’re feeling. It might not stop people from leaving initially, but at least you’ll be clearer on the issues. And run the all-important exit interview, if they do go, to learn where you or the business has gone wrong.

3 signs a manager is damaging employee engagement

Communication is obviously a big issue when it comes to management, but employee engagement is equally important. You want your teams to be committed to the business, their role, and their team. So let’s look at the next three signs in our top ten of bad manager behaviors.

5. Micromanaging is a default sign of a bad manager

It’s vital for businesses to check in with their employees, but you can have too much of a good thing. Whether you’re working in-person or remotely, there’s almost nothing which will stifle productivity like a micro-manager checking your every move.

You know you’re a micro-manager if you:

• Ask for frequent updates so often it’s hard for anyone to actually get the work done
• Insist on being involved in every detail, even when your team could make many of the decisions
• Constantly schedule team update calls so you can ‘make sure people are working’
• Don’t trust your team to do anything if you aren’t watching them
• Feel the need to bring people back to the office, even if they get lots done at home

All this impacts engagement. Why? Employees feel like you don’t trust them. And let’s be honest, they’re right, so work with your HR team to adjust your style, build stronger relationships with your team, and allow you to step back a little (or a lot).

6. Bad managers play favorites

There’s nothing wrong with liking the people you work with. In fact, it’s pretty much the ideal state. But, as a manager, it’s important to separate personal preference from professional decision-making.

Favoritism is a classic sign of a bad manager. You give the most interesting assignments or first pick to book time off to your favorites, and it’s guaranteed to damage engagement. Other employees feel unappreciated or unrecognized, and unabashed favoritism can seriously limit the amount of discretionary effort people are willing to give.

Instead, look to build an inclusive workplace which helps you get the best from your team. Ensure you:

• Focus on building relationships with all your team. Recognize their strengths and start to play to them with project allocation
• Apply fairness to booking time off. Have a system so the same people don’t always get priority
• Develop a sense of social wellbeing. Look at how you can create stronger connections between team members through social events and activities which involve everyone.

7. You’re terrible at delegation

In fairness, “am I a bad manager?” might be a bit harsh here. Many people get promoted to a management position after performing well in a specific role. And it can be a difficult to shift your mindset. But management positions tend to come with broader responsibilities, and that means letting go.

Of course, everyone appreciates managers who can still serve customers, schmooze clients, or perform surgery on an impacted bowel. But most of the time, you need to let your employees handle that side of things. Bad managers constantly do their employees’ jobs for them, and trust from their side erodes, fast.

So, help employees to give you their best work by following these simple steps:

• set them a small task. Ask them to complete it with minimal involvement from you. But be clear, they can get help if they need it.
• when they complete the task, reflect on what they’ve done. Recognize the things they’ve done well, and provide constructive feedback for any changes needed next time around.
• each time they succeed, delegate a larger task to them and repeat the cycle

Eventually, you’ll be able to step away from most of their work, and focus on the tasks you really need to be doing.

3 leadership skills bad managers need to master

8. Poor employee wellbeing is a sign of a bad manager

Most people care about their teams, if only a little bit, but bad managers are typically interested in the task being done, not the people doing it.

As a manager, you have a duty of care to your employees. Workplace stress can be difficult to deal with, even when you have a supportive boss asking the right questions. Imagine how much worse it is if your manager actively disregards your physical health or ignores your mental wellbeing.

So where do you start? Focusing on employee wellbeing can increase resilience. It can also reduce the number of sick days taken, and boost productivity. And it all starts with a conversation.

Introduce regular check ins with your team to find out how they’re doing and, importantly, where you can help.

9. Great managers embrace flexibility, bad managers limit it

This links back to employee wellbeing and micromanagement, because many bad managers think treating people like machines and tracking their every move is the way to get more from them. It isn’t.

Developing an inflexible team who can only do a fixed role is a sign there’s a bad manager leading them. Your focus should be on adapting to the challenges of the workplace. And your employees should be able to adapt as well. So you need to get better at working with flexibility and supporting your team to do the same. Here are three ways to start:

• Support employees with medical appointments. Allow them the time off to attend, even if they’re in the middle of the day. And check in afterwards to see if there’s any support they need from you.
• Encourage flexible working. From remote working to flexible hours, find something which works well for the individual and the business. Employees perform better when they can manage work and home lives, so explore options which allow you to get the best from them.
• Develop their skills. The best managers help employees to grow in their roles and be ready for the next thing, so explore their interests and move them towards that.

10. You must lead by example

Bad managers adopt the “do as I say, not as I do” mentality, and it’s guaranteed to help you lose the respect of your staff. Instead,

• Share stories of when you had to learn something new and perhaps it didn’t go well first time
• Talk about new initiatives and explore ways everyone can get involved to make them successful
• Open up about challenges you’ve had with your mental health, managing work and home life, or anything else which your team might relate to

Managers are supposed to help and guide their teams, and sometimes that means admitting you got it wrong. Bad managers pretend they’ve never made a mistake, act like they did it on their own, and don’t show any weakness to the outside world. Great managers, conversely, use that vulnerability as a strength to build connections and demonstrate learning, so others can do the same.

What’s your next step?

Being a manager is hard, and the first thing to recognize is you don’t have to have all the answers; you just need to do your best.

If you’ve been asking yourself “am I a bad manager?” and you see yourself in some (or all) of the signs above, it’s time to get help to improve your skills. You’ll only stay a bad manager if you do nothing to change your behavior. So, review the list, apply some of the first step suggestions, and look at other ways to develop your skills.