11. Make decisions that affect workers for which they have valuable input, but don't seek that input.
12. Make decisions that affect workers for which they have valuable input, seek that input, but ignore it and do what you want anyway.
13. Say one thing and do another. (Mission Statement = A, What We Really Do = B)
14. Have no idea what it actually takes to get things done.
15. Have no idea who people are and what they do.
16. Believe that management is "over" workers. (Fail to understand that until a worker actually builds something, management has nothing to manage and ownership has nothing to count.)
17. Treat workers as unequals.
18. Act like children.
19. Pay late.
20. Drive the business into the toilet.
21. Make work so difficult or pointless that you drive your best workers to Hacker News.
"13. Say one thing and do another. (Mission Statement = A, What We Really Do = B)"
This, a thousand times over.
Mission statements are uniquely infuriating when their values are in blatant contradiction to how the business is being operated. I'd rather a company not have a mission statement at all than have a hypocritically practiced one.
A hypocritical mission statement turns into a cruel joke, and it serves only to reinforce employees' disenchantment with the firm -- especially when it's being touted in the press, or waved in employees' faces.
Please keep in mind that you are judging an entire spectrum of people based on your experience in one high school among many thousands of high schools, across thousands of counties, and across fifty states.
That's like saying I met someone from a foreign country once, didn't like him, and therefore I know all people from that country are jerks.
I think I do understand your point, but I think that my statement has more emotional content for you than it does for me.
I've spent significant amounts of time in a few different cultures and through that I have developed deep appreciation for the various dimensions in which cultures differ and, like the famous story of the fish in the water, how it's inherently impossible to realise what is cultural and what is not until you enter a culture which exists on different point in these dimensions.
If you're familiar with Hofstede's work [1] he already provides us with five cultural dimensions he found most salient and useful in describing cultural differences.
I merely posited that, based on my experience and compared to Dutch culture, the US I saw was far on the far end of a dimension I would call "distance between the projected identity and real-world behaviour." This manifested it in all sorts of ways, from abstinence only education and large amounts of teen pregnancy, to being harsh on drug use but doing it much more than I was used to, to the more well known examples of exaggeration on resumes being the norm.
It is also not surprising that this is the dimension that was most salient to my mind, since Dutch culture is famous for being extremely parsimonious and straight-forward so the cultural distance on this dimensions is probably very large.
P.S. Hofstede is actually a Dutchman, so interestingly enough this perspective itself could very well be a Dutch cultural trait, perhaps caused by us being among the earliest cultures who conducted world-wide trade.
Re: #16, my experience with and in management positions is that we no longer think of managers as people who specialize in management and whose function is to help a pool of natural talent stay coordinated, focused, challenged and rewarded. We instead think of them as people who do 40+ hours a week of their own specialized, non-management work but who also have to do performance reviews. I try to take a mentor/servant/counselor approach with my team, but it's difficult to do and my own experience suggests that it's a fairly uncommon mentality.
It's nice to know where you are with people. If we're not really equals, please don't treat me as if we are. If the final decision is yours, and you only allow a certain measure of disagreement, please make that clear.
I'll be more likely to give feedback and ideas if I know where the lines are, and don't have to worry about offending someone who's half my friends and half my boss by stepping over something I've not been adequately warned about. ^_^
22. Don't listen when your workers show you a better way.
23. Continue to use one technology "because we've always done it that way"
24. Waste your workers time with bureaucracy.
12. is a tough one, and is the reason that businesses often choose 11.
The danger of soliciting input is that people often couple too much of their ego with their suggestions. You can't possibly go with every suggestion or incorporate all input (because let's face it - most of it is usually poorly thought out), so when you give everyone their say and then have to go a different direction from much of it, people get angry and resentful.
I worked with one chap who literally hung onto his discarded idea about a bit (seriously, a bit field in a database) for years, with it reappearing with a bitter sense of pride with every new database discussion.
I think if the team decides that an idea is not currently worth pursuing, rejecting it and explaining why to an employee is not the same as ignoring it. If the employee then continues trying that idea, they're clearly not following directions and that can be dealt with.
Exactly. There is a huge difference in the following two statements:
1. "I hear you about X but we are doing Y anyway."
2. "I hear you about X and understand you viewpoint, however we need to go with Y because..."
I'm okay with #2. #1 will drive me away. And it should. It's disrespectful and basically tells the other person that you have no regard for their opinion and that you only ask to satisfy a rule or expectation. If you are aren't going to have a discussion about why Y is the solution and were going to do it regardless of what anyone else said, then why bother even asking?
12. Make decisions that affect workers for which they have valuable input, seek that input, but ignore it and do what you want anyway.
13. Say one thing and do another. (Mission Statement = A, What We Really Do = B)
14. Have no idea what it actually takes to get things done.
15. Have no idea who people are and what they do.
16. Believe that management is "over" workers. (Fail to understand that until a worker actually builds something, management has nothing to manage and ownership has nothing to count.)
17. Treat workers as unequals.
18. Act like children.
19. Pay late.
20. Drive the business into the toilet.
21. Make work so difficult or pointless that you drive your best workers to Hacker News.