In Defense of Flunktional Managers - I

Some of you may be shocked by the title of this blog post, but I actually have to defend flunktional managers just this one time. As much as we like to blame them for our unhappiness and lack of career development, they aren’t the root cause of the problem. That would be giving them way too much credit. Think about it - If you listen to people complain about their management at any of the major Shitshows, their stories are all the same. That’s why so many people read this blog, because we can all identify with it. Could it be that we all “lucked out” with the worst management on the planet? That’d be quite a coincidence, wouldn’t it?

But poor functional management is just part of a broken system, a result of poor corporate strategies that have manifested themselves into what is known today as the modern Shitshow. Sure, functional managers have to take some of the blame. After all, couldn’t some of them at least step up and try to make a positive change? But keep in mind who these people are: managers are introverted engineers who got promoted (based on their technical expertise) to positions of leadership (that require people skills). As a result, there are a lot of managers with bad personalities, no leadership skills, and lacking any creativity or initiative to enact change. Now they’re supposed to know how manage people and develop career plans?

That’s where Corporate Leadership comes in. You see, these guys are responsible for the barrage of propaganda that tells us about how important our people are to the success of our Company, how we must develop employees and reward them, and how we must create an atmosphere of trust and collaboration. There is just one problem: there is no strategy to do any of it. Believe me, it’s true. I’ve done some digging and have come up with nothing. They just throw out a bunch of buzzwords, then expect each manager to figure everything out on their own. Oh wait, they do offer some links on the corporate website with recommended books to read on ‘Management’. I guess that’s the strategy.

Because problems go much higher than middle management, I throw rocks.