Posted 20 February 2026 - 11:12 AM
I'm sure this isn't a unique scenario with bad managers, but here goes.
Our team's manager left at the beginning of February. This is a really positive thing because the team all had crisis talks with senior leadership back in October and what came out of that was, for the most part, that she was causing most of the problems in both our team and our wider office, and she was the principle reason three quarters of the team were looking to leave. She handed her notice in before they could really get into gear with doing anything about her.
What's not so much messing with my groove as nuking it from orbit is the mess we're now discovering. For context, ex-manager was technically brilliant and very knowledgeable in her field, but a terrible people manager. Very much one of those types of exceptional people who view everyone less brilliant than them as useless and was quite vocal about it. She also gatekept a lot of work claiming the team weren't up to it or experienced enough (whilst also doing nothing about that in terms of training and development) - it's all work that has now been passed around the team and we're operating fine.
The biggest part of the mess is discovering just how badly she was not supporting one of the junior team members. It came up in those crisis talks and me and others tried to help, suggested taking some of his training off her (whenever she complained about having too much training to do) and she shut it down at every turn. It appears that was probably an attempt at hiding just what a poor job she'd been doing. He's way behind where he should be and understandably not feeling brilliant about the job or himself. Just... the injustice of claiming the team weren't experienced enough and how she had too much training to do, whilst deliberately not doing it and trying to cover up the fact?
One of the biggest areas she refused to delegate was client management - so upkeep of processes and procedure documents, specific training etc. This management of one of the biggest clients in the team has come to me and a colleague jointly, and honestly we're having daily "WTF" conversations about the state of the procedure documents and various things. Ex-manager used to complain continually that people didn't use the procedure documents and just asked questions instead of trying to find answers themselves - no wonder, they're an absolute disgrace and full of contradictions that make them nigh on unusable for more junior staff in particular.
And this person got to leave like an absolute fucking hero. Linkedin posts full of what a "class act" she was, from people who knew all of this post the crisis talks. The mind honestly boggles.
New manager has done everything right, been very impressive so far and put things in place for the junior colleague and wider team, and is a very sensible experienced pair of hands, so things will definitely look up going forwards. It's just processing the absolute madness and injustice of it all is taking a minute!
- Wyrd bið ful aræd -
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QuickTidal, on 19 February 2026 - 01:21 PM, said:
