What should a Manager NOT do

Dear Patrons (if any),

This post has no gyaan. As usual . All this has are some randomn musings that I decided to pen down.

My net work-experience now stands at 22 months 3 weeks. 22 months as a techie@Syntel and 3 weeks as a summer trainee.

If you ask me take-aways from the corporate life, all i know is this: ass-licking, back-biting, manipulations and smart work rather than hard work.

I worked closely with 3 managers at Syntel, interacted big time with the HR(quit twice before I officially quit) and am into 3 weeks of my summer training wherein I apparently have 3 reporting managers.

Having observed all of them and now armed with a wee bit of Management gyaan, I can relate their behaviour and mannerisms to all that a good Manager should never ever do.

Not in a particular order, some of them go like:

• Cutting yourself off from employees
• Taking your employee for granted
• Mistaking someone's politeness for his/her weakness
• Giving an already overburdened guy more work thinking he is anyways addicted to work.
• False promises
• Keeping an employee idle for lengths of time
• Shitty work
• Involving HR (this won't go down well with you hottie, but pardon me )
• Blatant favouritism

The more I interact with my engineering buddies and with other summer interns, I see their Managers posessing all these characteristics. It's funny how we spend a year trying to make it to the best b-schools, spend quite a bit of time studying hard there and when it comes to implementation; we forget the basic management principles.

I have always believed that text books should be banned literally at the MBA level. We learn much more by getting our hands dirty. Looks like thats what happens: all we fresh MBA's, armed with jargon and our "skill set" hit the corporate world hard-just to learn from the people around us and unlearn our 2 years. And we end up inspiring posts like these on what all should a Manager not do.

I am still waiting to find out the traits of a good manager. Looks like will have to wait till eternity...