Years ago, I wrote about a FastCompany article, Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers.
Even though it was written in the context of a for-profit company, I wrote most of the rules are universal and pretty much common sense – “afraid to make a mistake, keeping too many problems secret from employees, afraid confronting a problem will hurt people’s feelings, focus on picayune details to hide general incompetence, heavy use of consultants and problem with deadlines.”
Of course, one of the big ones for the not-for-profit sector is long hours.
Long hours: In my experience, bad managers work very long hours. They think this is a brand of heroism but it is probably the single biggest hallmark of incompetence. To work effectively, you must prioritize and you must pace yourself. The manager who boasts of late nights, early mornings and no time off cannot manage himself so you’d better not let him manage anyone else.
Though this may just as easily reflect poor prioritization of resources, funding and over commitment to doing more with less by the organization leadership.
The one habit that caught my eye then and still does today -Inability to hire former employees.
The idea here is that if a person has been working in a line of work for a long period of time and hasn’t mentored/collaborated with someone who would be interested in working with them again, you need to beware.
Even though most non-profits are concerned about having the funding to hire one person, never mind fantasize about poaching workers from other companies, this seems like an interesting hiring criteria.
Those doing interviews and hiring generally concentrate on calling supervisors of job candidates, but rarely talk to subordinates. It may be prudent not to.
Supervisors may be concerned about lawsuits if they say something negative and the person doesn’t get a job. Subordinates may fear retribution if their supervisor even suspects they said something that scuttled a job prospect.
Still, a question to a supervisor or even candidate along the lines of “is there anyone with whom you have worked in the last five years that would be interested in changing jobs if it meant continuing to work with you in some capacity,” might provide some interesting results.
On the performance and technical side of the arts it is fairly common for people to bring those they have worked for previously along with them, but I can’t think of too many instances in my experience where that has happened in administration, marketing, development, etc.