Who was the worst manager you had and why?
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Whoever said that Lenovo Way was an awful book.... what do you expect? A tell-all book? It’s already hard being women in top leadership positions. Imagine being women in top leadership positions AND THEN they are minorities. Sorry but why don’t you try to write you own book and see how well it does.
There once was a man from Italy
Who ran the company very sh–aly
He was so out of touch
And he ran out of luck
He said everything was fine
His reports got in line
He was close to HR
Then he took things too far
He was going to be a hero
Then he told us the bonus was zero
I had a director (former IBM'er from Mexico) who had absolutely no emotional intelligence whatsoever. Constantly pushed the team to the limit; thought it was funny team was working 60 and 70 hour weeks and that people were working and missing valuable time with family. He moved on to another management role at Lenovo and was replaced with an equally clueless Indian manager who would be promoted to director via the exact same methods.
The first guy was eventually fired because he didn't mesh with the new VP that was supposed to "shake things up", but this new executive and his ED crony are just two more overpaid external-hire id–ts that talk a lot about great things at a 100,000 foot level, but don't do a damn thing to help people get there. The first director eventually went back to IBM after a failed job search, since he had no real marketable skills to begin with other than pulling rank and pushing people around. Five people (mostly very good technical people) quit primarily over this director prior to his move to a different team.
The second (Indian) guy is still there. For whatever reason, he has a major problem with patents. He thought punishing people by giving them lower reviews would be a good deterrent to people trying to innovate, and, God forbid, make a little extra money since salary for veteran employees at Lenovo is woefully behind industry average. This same director assumed that one guy who had a Ph.D in Natural Language should be smart enough to do software development. When I pointed out the skills sets were very different, he rebuked the statement, claiming that a Ph.D basically means this guy can do anything. The Ph.D employee was nothing short of a genius innovator and would have helped drive Lenovo do really cool things, but, alas, that clashed with the director's tiny world view and he was set up to be laid off, screwing the employee out of about $40K in patent award money. This director had more people leave because of him (at least 8, including myself) and has learned to work the system better than the first director, which is why he's still there.
There are more managers just like these two and they are nothing short of a cancer on the company. It truly boggles the mind where Lenovo finds these clowns.
There is a guy in Canada promoted as a Director from a presales tech role, a high school drop out, loud mouth bully, few of his direct reports left the company because they could not stand him and most of the ones remaining was laid off, this guy should have been laid off instead of being promoted.
Worst manager I had was one that kept telling as not worry about lay-off rumors. He said our group was strategic direction for the company. Next thing we know 50% of the group is resourced!
Anyone here from the former research group? That environment was toxic af.
YY made me cry cry
Most are more than willing to shaft their employees in the next layoff so they can get their bonus. The worst are at the executive level and lie with every breath.
Whoever wrote the book "The Lenovo Way" has got to be a terrible Lenovo manager. That was the absolute worst book I ever tried to read. I could only make it about 2 pages before feeling quite nauseous and almost lost my stomach. The phoniness of that book helps to instill a phony culture.
Most of my 1st line Lenovo managers have been OK, but up at the executive "Lenovo-Way" levels they are clueless.
Over 80% of the managers I had when I worked at Lenovo were completely useless. No leadership to speak of at all. They typically fell into one of two categories:
1) Former IBMers who started in the 1970s or 1980s hoping to ride out a couple more years until retirement and didn't give a F about their team or the problems they faced
2) Corporate clowns (typically foreign-born and raised managers) that would position themselves to take credit for "leading" a strong tech team to success for the sake of "visibility", which is the only currency Lenovo management understands. With some well-positioned politics, they would climb that next rung on the corporate ladder to do an even worse job as a director, ED, or VP. Then rinse and repeat.
reorgs stand a good chance of bringing new but equally (or even more) clueless managers who then become fertile ground for "wormtongue" opportunists.
don’t post names, site admins will delete the entire thread
I think that overall the managers are ok. Doing the best they can. The challenge is when a second line manager is rebranded as an “Executive Director” and they start to forget about customers, market, and execution.