Should my boss be mentoring me?

[rog007]

Yipper said:

Sounds like a classic undertrained British boss... who in turn is undertraining his staff... It is a vicious circle that rarely breaks.

Sounds like a classic boss-worker breakdown. Those kind of situations almost never recover. Everyone seethes and ends up quietly hating each other. The only way you will advance is to quit the firm your boss and seek a higher role elsewhere.

[hidetheelephants]

Trabi601 said:

xjay1337 said:

Guy is a .

Either go above him for assistance or ask him to clearly set out some targets / goals and make sure you smash them.

Easy.

That's terrible advice.

The target and goal setting appears to be in place - so going above him and whinging that he's not 'mentoring' you will just get everyone's back up and consign the OP to a dead end role.

He manages a fking warehouse, it's not planning a mission to colonise Mars; other than hitting or exceeding targets set presumably by senior management what is he supposed to do?

MrBaker said:

I am a Warehouse Manager, and I work directly for the Ops Manager. We had a disagreement a while ago during my annual appraisal, where he said he thought I was underperforming (despite my department meeting or exceeding set targets all year). This was based on my lack of process improvement ideas.

I pointed out that all of my studying has been self funded, and that the company has only given me 2 days "training"(moving into management course) since starting out as a General Operative at the company 9 years ago. I have been a the manager for 5 years and studying for 3 of them.

I suggested that as my manager, he should be mentoring me and teaching me new things. He disagreed and said for the salary I'm on I should figure it out for myself.

I understand that we all need to continue to invest in ourselves to stay relevant in our roles, but I cant help but think his response is just lazy management?!

Thoughts?

Unless there are explicit written targets for you to aim for other than the highlighted bit your manager is a sack of st.

[Hoofy]

MrBaker said:

This was based on my lack of process improvement ideas.

Just a thought - what if the process is fine/optimal?

[MrsMiggins]

It seems to me that you've been promoted based on your previous performance, but the business hasn't really taken the time to develop you as a leader since then. Operational targets aren't the be all and end all; success as a leader is also about developing your team and making things a bit better every day.

Any manager who isn't already working continuous improvement needs to start. Use it as a tool to develop your team - they should be helping to identify areas where improvement is required and CI should be a basic part of their job. How many times do you hear broken processes excused because "we've always done it that way"? Being a manager is often about doing more with less; CI makes that possible.

Your boss still sounds like a tosser though. If you only find out that he's unhappy during your appraisal then he's let you 'do it wrong' all year. What kind of manager is that?

I've worked supply chain, warehouse management and continuous improvement roles for 25 years. PM me if you want any help.

[MrsMiggins]

Hoofy said:

Just a thought - what if the process is fine/optimal?

In my experience perfection doesn't exist in a warehouse environment.

[Steve Campbell]

Sounds like your boss is an idiot. A good leader should be a coach for their own team and a mentor for a few outside their own team in my opinion.

[ChasW]

Steve Campbell said:

Sounds like your boss is an idiot. A good leader should be a coach for their own team and a mentor for a few outside their own team in my opinion.

Well put. Sounds like an old fashioned luddite manager. I had loads early in my career. About mid-point I worked for an enlightened IT company where a manager's success was achieved through the team. This encouraged a coaching style of management as well as observation of performance and contributions of others around the team.

The annual appraisal process is dying now. Many high profile companies have dumped the concept for more of a continuous assessment approach. I did not manage to do this in my last company but I did achieve the de-coupling of salary reviews withe performance reviews. I got sick of hearing from weak managers that all their employees were olympic standard perfomers and deserving of big rises.

[Ms R.Saucy]

bhstewie said:

Is your boss a technical manager or a people manager?

For example I work in IT and there are some things where my boss knows less than I do so if I stood at their door saying "It's your job to show me this" they couldn't even if they wanted to.

I suspect that this seperation of roles is only really relevant in technically skilled jobs like IT, Engineering or Healthcare , although i can think of other jobs where it is applicable ( e.g. hospitality - a GM in a Hotel isn;t going to be an expert, chef, sommelier, conceirge, office person, all at the same time - they might be an expert in one of those areas ... )