I have often wondered which type of toxic manager is worst. Aggressive and narcissistic managers are kept on because they get things done or bring financial success. And yet, they have teams where morale is destroyed, mental health is deteriorated, work is complicated, energy is diverted from tasks on hand to deal with the toxicity, […]

The paradox of no-decision managers is that they are invisible to top management, but visible in the organisation to many people and certainly to HR departments working with them. So if you really want to know if you have one in your organisation all you have to do is ask HR. But it is not […]

The paradox of no-decision managers is that they are invisible to their bosses, but visible to the subordinates. They have their survival strategies in place and these need to be understood and dismantled to find them. Inexperienced no-decision managers are more likely to have less sophisticated survival strategies or even none at all, if they […]

While the dictionaries openly disagree on the definition of ‘decision’ and ‘decide’, (Note below) they are more subtle in their disagreement over the definition of the word ‘manager’. Here they simply ignore each other and compete to list the different types of manager that exist, making sure that no one dictionary copies another. Each dictionary […]

Aphonic acknowledgement Subordinates have to learn on their own that they can make decisions that should be made by their boss when he or she is a no-decision manager. It is never taught in business school. I call this situation, aphonic acknowledgement. Once they have decided to make the decisions of their boss, they have […]