Maybe I was just too young to notice when I started out but I felt like my managers were intelligent and knowledgeable. But I feel like each new manager I get is more and more clueless yet more confident. It seems that their confidence is perceived as leadership but I am finding it harder and harder to respect clueless managers. Has it always been this way or is it really getting worse?
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EM has completed its transition from competent management that earned their positions to graduates of the Sponsorship/Diversity accelerated ladder.
Showing competency is now the surest way to get stuck on the technical ladder to nowhere with your job description as “make the sponsored/diversity managers look good as they spend their 2 years each taking credit for your work”.
OP is very correct, management has degraded in a catastrophic way in the last two decades. I’ve worked with scores of people and some, not many, had true psychological problems and should never have been hired in the first place, for any position. Without exception, they all became managers. Tells you something about the nature of the system, which confuses pathological arrogance and aggresivity with leadership.
At Exxon they’re are all cow dung. From VP to managers to lowly supervisors.
Cow dung!
Well, imagine if you have no real skills or technical knowledge that could be in demand anywhere else. Applies to many supervisors and managers. They have to everything they can to look good in front of their bosses to get them RSUs. Even if that means they make you create their powerpoint slides.
@fqw+1h47blHD is so right.
This is the thing I’ve noticed about managers at XOM vs other outfits. I have several friends who are in Management roles at other major O&G operators in Houston (one was even EVP of North America Exploration & Production at one shop until recently). To a person, they all told me they use their corporate derived power to empower their employees to do their jobs as efficiently and effectively as possible to ensure success for the LOB. At XOM, it seems that managers use their position to take as much as possible from their employees so as to look that much better to their bosses.
Just an observation.
For the supervisory and management roles, ExxonMobil culture selects the worst in terms talent, creativity, independence of thoughts and basic human attributes. These people have to cling to their jobs as they will not find respectable employment any where else— Hence the psychopathic brown nosing from these lowly humans.
Spot on.
Managers and leaders do not need to have deep technical knowledge but they need to be humble enough to listen to their technical people. Lose the ego and discern the BS.
Used to be that managers had deep technical knowledge in the area they were managing plus breadth across the business. Now they are neither deep nor broad. Most are so clueless they don't even know what they don't know. It's not their fault. For the most part, they are smart and hard working. Just completely unprepared for their management role. Very demotivating for the technical staff. Company should back to the old ways of career development.
I think there is an age component in recognizing this. As a new employee, I didn’t know more than my managers….so they still appeared knowledgeable. By 10 years, I had learned enough that I could spot the b.s.
I don’t need my manager to know more than me. But I need them to acknowledge their lack of understanding and take advice from the experts on their team. Their job should then be to enable the experts. I also need them to fix very obvious people-problems that are within their span of control.
Instead, I see our managers pretending they know more than they do, and making big decisions with other managers behind closed doors. Then, when the awful decision is rolled out, the team experts spend 3x as much effort trying to walk-back these decisions without damaging egos…leaving little time to actually work. Furthermore, the real problems management can control are often ignored because 1) they are not glamorous enough or 2) they require hard people discussions, and many of our managers avoid real person-to-person interaction.
I still see managers commended/promoted for some project or above-base initiative that was supporting the uppers, while their team fell into absolute disarray. It is sad.
Spot on! Getting worse every day.