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I've recently switched teams in my role and my previous team leader was really relaxed and never around. It was bliss, we don't have a lot to do right now so he was pretty much happy as long as you logged in and out at the right times but this new one is clearly one of those that loves having everyone on zoom because they don't know how to amuse themselves, these people are thriving in the pandemic, they have a captive audience to have bland patter with. Just had to sit through 2 hours of icebreakers (been in the role for 8 months) and having to share "funny" stories from the past few months at work, there's only so many times you can fake laughter at someone left their mic on. Brutal. She's now saying we should do quizzes to pass the time, just let me go and play my PS5 f**k sake. 
Do these folk not like, have a job to do?
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4 minutes ago, WeAreElgin said:
4 hours ago, Stormzy said:
I've recently switched teams in my role and my previous team leader was really relaxed and never around. It was bliss, we don't have a lot to do right now so he was pretty much happy as long as you logged in and out at the right times but this new one is clearly one of those that loves having everyone on zoom because they don't know how to amuse themselves, these people are thriving in the pandemic, they have a captive audience to have bland patter with. Just had to sit through 2 hours of icebreakers (been in the role for 8 months) and having to share "funny" stories from the past few months at work, there's only so many times you can fake laughter at someone left their mic on. Brutal. She's now saying we should do quizzes to pass the time, just let me go and play my PS5 f**k sake. 

Do these folk not like, have a job to do?

They literally don't, it's track and trace, probably make 3 calls on average a day right now. Usually the bosses understand this and don't give a f**k what you're doing as long as you do the calls when they're there to be done but this new one had us playing Geoguesser, feels like primary school  😂

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Shift review in my work.
I've not got what I want and I want to cry. What I got isn't bad tbh I just feel like kicking a hole in a wall and throwing a tantrum. 

Reminds me of when I worked for Motherwell bridge, the maintenance guys worked set day, back, night shift and everyone was happy. Then a year after the apprentice was qualified he started asking about going night shift, as you got a healthy bonus for it.

Maintenance manager couldn’t really say no but before setting the rota he told the team supervisor he wanted to speak to the night shift guy the next morning at the end of his shift.

My mate told to be in very early the next morning and to bring the popcorn (not really) so I reported to work 6am next day and I haven’t saw the maintenance dept that busy ever. Jimmy comes down to see the boss and the door is shut but the window was slightly open and within 2 mins he was howling, full on snot and tears, then the cursing and swearing and then he stormed out, clocked out and went home.

I asked the guy I worked with is the bonus really that much but it turned out Jimmy had a full time, off the books, job during the day and his deal with the night shift works manager was that if he was needed someone would go up and wake him and then he could head back up the stairs. He was up to his eyes in debt because he had pretty much doubled the size of his house with extensions and had a new car every 6 months. Obviously thought the good times would never end.

Throughout the day he kept phoning in begging to be kept on nights, he even had the night shift manager come in to say he wanted Jimmy to stay on the night shift as it was no job for a young guy. Thankfully the boss stuck to his guns and the rotation started a few weeks later.

He quit a month later, the homers obviously paid better.
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I got a new team lead towards the end of last year who was brought in to help with a ridiculous workload. For some reason or other thought her only job was to mentor me and tell me what i should be doing. 

she wouldn't take on any work and in a team of just me and her it was terrible.

Worse still she'd attend some of my meetings which were 4 hours long. Despite the customer commenting on how happy they were with the work and me hosting a technical call, while taking notes and guiding the conversation off the cuff for 4 hours from 8am - 12pm, she would sit taking notes of all the times there was a question i couldn't answer or something i did wrong. She'd send a 4 paragraph diatribe to me and also my boss in the end making me look completely incompetent in the eyes of the "big boss".

Can't possibly describe how bad this was and it went on for 6 months. Each morning waking up to one of those emails. I did a word count on one, it was 3000 words long and she stayed up until 12am writing it. This was on top of dealing with Covid/Isolating.

My boss defended her to the hilt and said it was just her trying to help, when it was in reality a very calculated tactic to force me out because i once questioned her in a meeting.

She eventually met her maker when she used someone elses IT account to ask me what i thought of her over skype.

Edited by red23
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2 hours ago, red23 said:

I got a new team lead towards the end of last year who was brought in to help with a ridiculous workload. For some reason or other thought her only job was to mentor me and tell me what i should be doing. 

she wouldn't take on any work and in a team of just me and her it was terrible.

Worse still she'd attend some of my meetings which were 4 hours long. Despite the customer commenting on how happy they were with the work and me hosting a technical call, while taking notes and guiding the conversation off the cuff for 4 hours from 8am - 12pm, she would sit taking notes of all the times there was a question i couldn't answer or something i did wrong. She'd send a 4 paragraph diatribe to me and also my boss in the end making me look completely incompetent in the eyes of the "big boss".

Can't possibly describe how bad this was and it went on for 6 months. Each morning waking up to one of those emails. I did a word count on one, it was 3000 words long and she stayed up until 12am writing it. This was on top of dealing with Covid/Isolating.

My boss defended her to the hilt and said it was just her trying to help, when it was in reality a very calculated tactic to force me out because i once questioned her in a meeting.

She eventually met her maker when she used someone elses IT account to ask me what i thought of her over skype.

😮 

Feel like there's some good banter answers you could have given, but I can't quite channel my inner Paul Merton at the minute. Bah.

Some kind of ambiguous answer that could be read a couple of different ways ("yeah, she's something else! think there's no-one else like her at the company. really a one of a kind type of person, you know?") or the futurama "Why yes, she's perfectly average... no, wait, I'd say she was totally and absolutely adequate at her job" would have been bretty good.

saying all that id probably have just gone "yeah she's alright" and moved onto other things tbf

edit: "Hm. Not sure, I have a sneaking suspicion I'm living rent free in her head though" might've been snappy enough and REALLY fucking pissed her off too, since you'd clearly be bang on the money with it

Edited by Thistle_do_nicely
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3 hours ago, red23 said:

I got a new team lead towards the end of last year who was brought in to help with a ridiculous workload. For some reason or other thought her only job was to mentor me and tell me what i should be doing. 

she wouldn't take on any work and in a team of just me and her it was terrible.

Worse still she'd attend some of my meetings which were 4 hours long. Despite the customer commenting on how happy they were with the work and me hosting a technical call, while taking notes and guiding the conversation off the cuff for 4 hours from 8am - 12pm, she would sit taking notes of all the times there was a question i couldn't answer or something i did wrong. She'd send a 4 paragraph diatribe to me and also my boss in the end making me look completely incompetent in the eyes of the "big boss".

Can't possibly describe how bad this was and it went on for 6 months. Each morning waking up to one of those emails. I did a word count on one, it was 3000 words long and she stayed up until 12am writing it. This was on top of dealing with Covid/Isolating.

My boss defended her to the hilt and said it was just her trying to help, when it was in reality a very calculated tactic to force me out because i once questioned her in a meeting.

She eventually met her maker when she used someone elses IT account to ask me what i thought of her over skype.

She sounds like a complete bitch but killing her was a tad over the top.

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Guest bernardblack
9 hours ago, red23 said:

I got a new team lead towards the end of last year who was brought in to help with a ridiculous workload. For some reason or other thought her only job was to mentor me and tell me what i should be doing. 

she wouldn't take on any work and in a team of just me and her it was terrible.

Worse still she'd attend some of my meetings which were 4 hours long. Despite the customer commenting on how happy they were with the work and me hosting a technical call, while taking notes and guiding the conversation off the cuff for 4 hours from 8am - 12pm, she would sit taking notes of all the times there was a question i couldn't answer or something i did wrong. She'd send a 4 paragraph diatribe to me and also my boss in the end making me look completely incompetent in the eyes of the "big boss".

Can't possibly describe how bad this was and it went on for 6 months. Each morning waking up to one of those emails. I did a word count on one, it was 3000 words long and she stayed up until 12am writing it. This was on top of dealing with Covid/Isolating.

My boss defended her to the hilt and said it was just her trying to help, when it was in reality a very calculated tactic to force me out because i once questioned her in a meeting.

She eventually met her maker when she used someone elses IT account to ask me what i thought of her over skype.

I’ve had this in a previous job before. The manager we had was sound but just too busy so he promotes on of our team, to team lead...fair enough.  
I’ve never seen such little power go straight to someone’s head, almost overnight. 
He would wander in late....take three hour lunches claiming he was “talking to development about product improvements” (nothing to do with his job)

He pretty much became a bully tbh....called you out for playing pool/darts on work time, even though it was on a lunch hour....that type of thing. You’d have a slightly bad month and it was threats of your job going (the business wasn’t that sort of place) 
Eventually, we got a new manager and his attitude/time keeping was called out and he got the sack, but that was a horrible few months. 

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A couple of examples there of the epitome of middle management.  Arseholes with nothing to do except micro manage and piss their staff off, which eventually ends in their own downfall. 

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21 hours ago, Cardinal Richelieu said:

Do elaborate. 

Was tasked with inducting a new start, took new starts credentials to pretend to be said person while messaging me, i clocked on and when i asked for her to call me she said she'd lost her headset.

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12 hours ago, bernardblack said:

I’ve had this in a previous job before. The manager we had was sound but just too busy so he promotes on of our team, to team lead...fair enough.  
I’ve never seen such little power go straight to someone’s head, almost overnight. 
He would wander in late....take three hour lunches claiming he was “talking to development about product improvements” (nothing to do with his job)

He pretty much became a bully tbh....called you out for playing pool/darts on work time, even though it was on a lunch hour....that type of thing. You’d have a slightly bad month and it was threats of your job going (the business wasn’t that sort of place) 
Eventually, we got a new manager and his attitude/time keeping was called out and he got the sack, but that was a horrible few months. 

Amazing how some folk can't handle the promotion. 

During calls if we disagreed with her she'd scream down the phone "I AM THE TEAM LEAD HERE!!!" in a similar way to Joffrey on game of thrones saying "I AM, THE KING!!!"

By the end of the first week she'd fallen out with 3 people and each time called me up crying before then setting her targets on me. I informed HR of this but they said i can't go canvasing other people to backup my story.

Edited by red23
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22 minutes ago, red23 said:

Amazing how some folk can't handle the promotion. 

During calls if we disagreed with her she'd scream down the phone "I AM THE TEAM LEAD HERE!!!" in a similar way to Joffrey on game of thrones saying "I AM, THE KING!!!"

By the end of the first week she'd fallen out with 3 people and each time called me up crying before then setting her targets on me. I informed HR of this but they said i can't go canvasing other people to backup my story.

I don't understand why people like this don't go home at night and just sit and think about what horrible c***s they are. Maybe they do and that's the point. 

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Guest bernardblack
1 hour ago, red23 said:

Amazing how some folk can't handle the promotion. 

During calls if we disagreed with her she'd scream down the phone "I AM THE TEAM LEAD HERE!!!" in a similar way to Joffrey on game of thrones saying "I AM, THE KING!!!"

By the end of the first week she'd fallen out with 3 people and each time called me up crying before then setting her targets on me. I informed HR of this but they said i can't go canvasing other people to backup my story.

It’s crazy. They must go home at night and think the business would collapse without them. 
On the other side, I’ve seen people step up into management roles for the very first time and look like they’ve been doing it all their careers. Improving teams and just generally being respectful. 

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2 hours ago, red23 said:

Amazing how some folk can't handle the promotion. 

During calls if we disagreed with her she'd scream down the phone "I AM THE TEAM LEAD HERE!!!" in a similar way to Joffrey on game of thrones saying "I AM, THE KING!!!"

By the end of the first week she'd fallen out with 3 people and each time called me up crying before then setting her targets on me. I informed HR of this but they said i can't go canvasing other people to backup my story.

If they told you this, it’s a complete lie btw. It’s exactly what they can, and should, be doing in the event of you raising a grievance/complaint about someone and giving specific examples involving other staff members.

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1 hour ago, Honest_Man#1 said:

If they told you this, it’s a complete lie btw. It’s exactly what they can, and should, be doing in the event of you raising a grievance/complaint about someone and giving specific examples involving other staff members.

This is what let me down the most and when i raised the issues she leveled all the exact same accusations back at me despite previously having a perfect working record for the past 3 years. I had approx 10 people to backup with their experiences and 2 customers had reported her. HR concluded without doing any investigation work and only talking to my boss (who hired her and was in line to look pretty bad for doing so)that we are "just as bad as each other and they will arrange mediation" which just about sent me in to a meltdown, which 8 months on i'm still not totally over, clearly 😂

Edited by red23
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11 hours ago, Honest_Man#1 said:

If they told you this, it’s a complete lie btw. It’s exactly what they can, and should, be doing in the event of you raising a grievance/complaint about someone and giving specific examples involving other staff members.

 

10 hours ago, red23 said:

This is what let me down the most and when i raised the issues she leveled all the exact same accusations back at me despite previously having a perfect working record for the past 3 years. I had approx 10 people to backup with their experiences and 2 customers had reported her. HR concluded without doing any investigation work and only talking to my boss (who hired her and was in line to look pretty bad for doing so)that we are "just as bad as each other and they will arrange mediation" which just about sent me in to a meltdown, which 8 months on i'm still not totally over, clearly 😂

 " but they said i can't go canvasing other people to backup my story".

Was the "I" you or HR in this situation?  If it was HR then the have got it wrong but if it was you then I agree with them.  

 

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3 minutes ago, hk blues said:

 

 " but they said i can't go canvasing other people to backup my story".

Was the "I" you or HR in this situation?  If it was HR then the have got it wrong but if it was you then I agree with them.  

 

I took it as HR, but realistically either way HR should be taking the grievance/complaint seriously and doing the interviews with the people he’s mentioned. If they’ve said he shouldn’t go speaking to these people then that’s right, but they should then go and do exactly that.

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Just now, Pato said:

Funny how these folk keep cropping up all over the place. A team I work with sometimes got one of these types promoted. She was very self centred before and would frequently just ignore whatever the old manager wanted her to do and did her own thing, coming up with project ideas and skipping the management chain to present them to senior managers, total brown noser. What was funniest is she'd be one of these people who gets struck down with a debilitating cold on Thursday evening and then will be miraculously cured by Tuesday morning, and she policed other people's absences to a totally different standard. Once I watched her refuse someone's request for some holiday time because they'd been off sick a few weeks earlier. Punted after a year and replaced with a completely chilled out guy who just let folk get on with their jobs. No need to guess how productivity went after those two spells.

I remember reading an article about the productivity problem in the UK - British productivity is low and has been since the 2008 recession.  One reason that some have given for this is poor education and training among the workforce.  People usually think that this covers technical or vocational training, updating role specific skills and it does in part but one thing I've found is that it's extremely rare for people who are managers to be trained in management.  I've been in employment for two decades and I honestly don't think that any of my managers were trained in how to effectively manage resources for productivity and certainly they weren't trained in 'soft skills', ie how to manage people, how to treat your staff.  I've had managers who were brilliant at it and others who were terrible - it was just luck.  Most people get promoted into management jobs and in a lot of organisations to get to a certain pay grade or level you have to manage staff.  Not everyone has the aptitude for that and even then people who might have it aren't trained. 

This in turn causes a lot of workplace bullying and poor behaviour because managers don't know how to treat people, how ot influence or motivate them, so they just use their authority like a blunt instrument.  I had a manager once who used to say things like "If you don't get this sorted you can meet me in the fucking car park at the end of your shift", other senior managers in that company (a large Edinburgh based three letter bank) would try and intimidate you, stare you out into doing what they wanted.  I knew I was going to leave at this point so I would just stare back and stick to my guns and they had no idea what to do.  If you tell someone to f**k off and they say 'no' what do you do?  Those guys were complete arseholes but they are the extreme end of the curve.

I can't find the figures but I believe that the rate of training for managers in France, for example, is much higher and just about every manager in large organisations has been trained there.  It's seen as a waste of time here, a doss.

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3 minutes ago, Honest_Man#1 said:

I took it as HR, but realistically either way HR should be taking the grievance/complaint seriously and doing the interviews with the people he’s mentioned. If they’ve said he shouldn’t go speaking to these people then that’s right, but they should then go and do exactly that.

I read it as red23.  He really shouldn't be doing any investigation etc himself, that's HR's job as you say.  

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30 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

I remember reading an article about the productivity problem in the UK - British productivity is low and has been since the 2008 recession.  One reason that some have given for this is poor education and training among the workforce.  People usually think that this covers technical or vocational training, updating role specific skills and it does in part but one thing I've found is that it's extremely rare for people who are managers to be trained in management.  I've been in employment for two decades and I honestly don't think that any of my managers were trained in how to effectively manage resources for productivity and certainly they weren't trained in 'soft skills', ie how to manage people, how to treat your staff.  I've had managers who were brilliant at it and others who were terrible - it was just luck.  Most people get promoted into management jobs and in a lot of organisations to get to a certain pay grade or level you have to manage staff.  Not everyone has the aptitude for that and even then people who might have it aren't trained. 

This in turn causes a lot of workplace bullying and poor behaviour because managers don't know how to treat people, how ot influence or motivate them, so they just use their authority like a blunt instrument.  I had a manager once who used to say things like "If you don't get this sorted you can meet me in the fucking car park at the end of your shift", other senior managers in that company (a large Edinburgh based three letter bank) would try and intimidate you, stare you out into doing what they wanted.  I knew I was going to leave at this point so I would just stare back and stick to my guns and they had no idea what to do.  If you tell someone to f**k off and they say 'no' what do you do?  Those guys were complete arseholes but they are the extreme end of the curve.

I can't find the figures but I believe that the rate of training for managers in France, for example, is much higher and just about every manager in large organisations has been trained there.  It's seen as a waste of time here, a doss.

I'm sort of in that situation.  Went for a job a couple of years ago that meant i'd move from the engineering grades onto the management grades.  My job itself remained pretty much the same, a little bit more responsibility and higher pay.

The downside to this is that because I'm a manager with no staff, when my boss went off on maternity leave, I had to cover her for the year.  I didn't get any extra for doing it.  If i'd still been on the engineering grade i'd have got an allowance.

My approach to managing people was to let them get on with it as they all know what they were supposed to be doing and only get involved if something cropped up.  Leave was approved in all cases unless there was too many folk off (which I think only happened once and everyone was cool with it).

I certainly wasn't going to throw my weight around knowing that when she came back to work, i'd be back to being just one of the team.

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