I have to admit that I personally haven’t had any horrible experience with micromanagement here, but I had a colleague who decided to leave this company just for that reason because he couldn’t stand that pressure anymore. Sometimes I follow this forum, so I saw here that people who have worked in several large companies complain that such a toxic way of management is most present at HON.
5 replies (most recent on top)
How about this for draconian measures:
Our manager told our group that our site was about to require what another nearby Honeywell facility was requiring.
They required that when one left their desk for any period of time, even to use the copier, that one must leave a post-it note on your monitor screen logging the time HH:MM (hours/minutes) that one left your desk, and then leave that note at your desk until the end of the day in case someone reported that you had left your desk during the day for more than a minute, in case an timesheet auditor (or maybe Dave Cote) had come by and logged one's absence.
The funniest thing is in the same time period, the company spent a lot of money to create two rooms with a TV tuned to Fox new, large restaurant refrigerators, K-Cup coffeemakers, comfortable lounge seating called the " Collaboration Stations".
It became apparent that these rooms, one upstairs, one downstairs, were to impress fresh-hires that the place might be all exciting and vibrant as working at Google, Facebook, Apple Main Campus, etc. Good luck to them if they bought it.
In reality, many times when having a coffee on my own time, not charging to the company ( I worked extra time at the end of the day, a manger would drop by a tell us we should go back to our desks with our coffees.
In our group, bathroom visit absence-from-desk Post-It notes became in local parlance "Log Logging" if one was in the bathroom and had to sit in a stall.
Luckily this ridiculousness was not actually implemented at our site.
Thanks to the Heavens that we didn't have to raise our hands, like kindergarten, and be verbally excuse when nature called.
Unbelievable. Just a dream job in all, unfortunately not a good dream.
However, we were warned it might be imposed at any time.
I agree , ever since the shift to people management there is zero project oversight. Life is good.
Production is a different story where people continue to demand impossible thing and settle for somewhat under mediocre results.
The worst micromanager I know was a director who left my group to get a VP gig on the engineering side of production.
He was nothing but an empire builder looking to grab credit where possible and assign blame when not. A true believer for MM. he was never as happy as when someone suggested an outsourcing possibility. Never once did I hear him say that his team could design or build something better than an outside company. He would fire people up with big ideas and blame them when they were never accomplished.
My manager couldn’t prioritize a single task. All tasks had the same priority no matter the importance, necessity or audience. Missing a trivial item was as bad as missing a major milestone. On top of that, I was training him on how to do the work.
Cap'n Ahab at Aero in Kansas is an abusive micromanager. The good managers and supervisors have moved on, both inside and outside the company. The few remaining in management have adopted the autocratic management style from above. This includes HSE and HR. So many have left that they are back to hiring contractors. To compound this, many Renton and Wichita people will leave as their contracts expire.
I see all these posts lately about bad managers, but honestly Honeywell doesnt have managers anymore. People managers are not there to teach you or provide technical guidance. When you have 30 direct reports, all your time is focused on managing yield, demand, vacations, etc.
If you want good managers that employees have positive relationships with, then you need 1 manager per 10 employees. And that managers needs to have a staff engineer level of competency in that discipline. Only ar honeywell can a Sr engineer, with less than 10 years of experience, be promoted to a manager's role.