If you haven't checked out Ask A Manager yet, you should. You really, really should. Alison is amazing. Her blogs are always informative, insightful and interesting, and they really make it clear that there are some absolutely awful managers out there. While she also has good advice for jobseekers on there, some of her most hilarious postings come from the questions people send to her. If she considers it a dumb question, you'll likely get a somewhat snarky response, but that's part of the fun, too. I check it often and read avidly.
If there's anything that the wide array of information available online about management can tell you, it's that a lot of people simply don't have a clue. In my experience, a lot of managers who aren't any good at management simply have no clue that they suck, and some might know but refuse to admit it. Perhaps that's simply because I have mostly worked entry-level jobs, where frontline managers seem as a rule to be given little or no training in how to manage people.
Many of these companies seem to feel that teaching management skills is not a good investment. Strategic HR begs to differ! Anyone who has worked under one of these first-level frontline retail managers has likely seen someone way out of his or her depth. Some of them figure things out eventually, and some of them don't, but during the time that this process is happening, there's a loss of productivity for the manager, likely a loss of revenue for the store, and generally an increased turnover rate due to incompetent management. Why would you only train someone by the time that he or she is obviously failing? And I've seen this a lot; a new manager is hired/promoted/transferred, and not given any assistance during that process. Instead, he or she is left all alone until the numbers start coming back ugly or angry phone calls hit the regional manager's voicemail. All of a sudden, the regional is on site! being the training guru when it's probably too late because the entire staff hate the manager and the manager is this close to having a breakdown. Allocating more resources to training from the beginning should help to ensure a smoother transition from one manager to another, and reduce the amount of panic encountered by the new manager who is out of his or her depth and knows it. The store will run smoother, and sales will be higher. Management turnover would probably even go down!
It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. The company doesn't want to invest much money on training its managers, because they don't tend to stick around for long, but the less they invest in their managers, the quicker the managers leave the company. Not to mention the rest of the staff who are tired of working in a dysfunctional environment. I've been there, done that, and believe me, it isn't fun. At the same time, even the crappiest McJob can be made a whole lot better by a halfways competent manager. I've seen that too. Not every manager you invest money in is going to be great at it, but they'll all be better than if you don't invest a thing, and how can you tell the difference between a bad manager and a badly trained one unless you give them the training?
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