- Slapheads: Malingerers
- Slapheads: Student Nurses
- Slapheads: lecturers (and a mentor)
- Slapheads: Healthcare Assistants
- Slapheads: Patients
- Slapheads: Consultants
- Slapheads: RMNs
- Slapheads: Managers
- Slapheads: Parents
- Slaphead RGNs
- Slapheads: GPs
- Slapheads: Professions Allied to Medicine
- Slapheads: Social Workers
- Slapheads – Meetings
- Slapheads: Mentors
This should be my last post in the Slapheads series. I believe we are hoping for another guest post or two. At long last we have got to the wonderful topic of managers.
I have been lucky in management. I would say only about three quarters if my managers have been total raving idiots. The rest stayed in their offices and let the worker bees get on with real work.
Now if that has not really annoyed any managers reading this nothing will.
Ranting Richard Head
Richard confuses managing people with shouting at them. Runs the Monday Morning meeting like it was 1984. Confuses respect with fear. Totally unaware that his staff neither fear nor respect him; only feel contempt.
Familiar Fiona
Whereas Richard feels he is someone superior to his staff Fiona goes the other way. She still sees herself as one of the girls and is frightened of offending others. If forced to implement an unpopular policy will spend half her time whining that she is being forced to do it by *her* management. What a bunch of slapheads *they* are. Fiona is a malingerers delight.
Management Mike
Mike is just a normal manager. Things makes him just a normal slaphead.
Over to you.
Patronising Paula
do I need to explain?
Unreasuring Rachel
Tries to reassure you your position is safe, but you know she knows it’s not and would rather she just told the truth than lying to try and reasure you.
Just Plain Fuc*kin Rude Rita
when you interview as a manager is one of the questions ‘if you walk into a room of your ‘inferiors’ would you a) say ‘hello’ or b) ignore them? and if you answer b you get the job?
Non-Clinical Cara
cara was a support worker last week and now she’s your manager and trying to tell YOU how to be a nurse.
Target Tina
thinks that ‘performance indicators’ are a good thing
Clipboard Clarissa – appears on the ward at the most inopportune moment to ask you to complete a very very very important questionnaire about the carpets in the Trust HQ lounge area. She has a target to get 90% response rate to this questionnaire, and will brook no opposition to completing it RIGHT NOW, even though you are trying to stop two six foot five patients on a dreadful crack comedown from beating each others brains out with a chair leg.
Paperwork Penelope
Turns up just as you’re busy trying to get the meds out, organise the special obs and arrange for a nurse escort to get a patient to an oh-so-vital CT scan in order to explain that you should have filled in Section 38(d) of Form 49A rather than Section 38(c) of Form 49A.
Hmm I’m a manager, in the IT industry. I would like to think that I actually do my job – I do actually care about the people working for me and try to keep them happy as much as possible. The role of the manager in IT is to handle all the non-techie shit so the techies can get on with doing the work.
Unfortunately, it’s common in IT to get a directive from on high saying “Project X must be completed by next Tuesday” when it’s painfully obvious that it can’t. It’s very stressful to mediate between your team and your superiors to argue that this isn’t possible and refuse to go along with it. My view though is that stress is the reason for that extra money you get as a manager. The problem is lots of managers don’t see it that way and simply shovel the shit on down the line to their team, who have impossible demands put on them, and refuse to listen to reason. People who do this should all be summarily fired.
wow, I was really expecting a lot more vitriol on here…
I really thought we would have about three thousand bile filled comments by now.
What about
Hatchet Henry
Since my perspective is as a patient, I haven’t a huge amount of experience with managers on the wards, except for rumors of their fancy cars. But I have been on a hospital’s advisory board with some, who tend to be:
Agreeable Annie
When you make suggestions for how things could be better, knowing full well that isn’t how they currently are, Annie likes to say, “oh but that’s *totally* how we do things now, you just haven’t been a patient for a while, so that must have changed since then.” Sometimes she’ll agree with you and take your side against those yucky other people, “yeah, we don’t really like how those people used to run that ward, but don’t worry because they are gone now. We don’t do things the way they did.” (I was on a ward in this hospital that was essentially run independently and had different rules and stuff, so this is what they say whenever I give an example from that ward, as though things were totally different on the other wards. I was on two of those other wards, things were no different, I just have a clearer example of some things from that rogue ward.)
Hi all from a newbie….
My considered evidence-based opinion of managers (excluding myself in my earlier career, naturellement!)following years of painstaking research is that they possess some – or all – of the following adjectives as character traits …..
venal, patronising, passive-aggressive, inadequate, ignorant, biased, self-aggrandising, mealy-mouthed, two-faced, hierarchical, obsequious, uninspiring, uncaring, defensive, unimaginative, dictatorial, cowardly and hidebound overachieving nobodies who wouldn’t be trusted to obey the laws of gravity in private industry, yet elevate themselves to god-like status should they be given the tiniest modicum of power over the life, well-being and happiness of staff and patients to compensate for their self-loathing, failed marriages, kids who despise them, lack of friends and, in many cases, inferior sexual organs.
apologies in advance if this is too pusillanimous
Rich
Sleazy Simon
By and large a fairly average manager, except when dealing with female staff. Staff who are half way attractive will get … *ahem* an easy ride. Has a regrettable tendency to get drunk on staff nights out and discuss how his wife does not understand him.
lol!
lol.
Indeed
Busy Bea
Can’t answer your questions right now as she’s currently working on… erm… something. Something usually involves poster board and a lot of differently coloured marker pens. Something usually ends up in the bin about a week later, when Busy Bea has moved onto something else, thereby neatly side-stepping her need to answer your queries.
Payroll Patricia
Has completely cocked up your mileage and unsocial hours payments. When you ring for the seventh time to ask what has happened to them, she will keep you on hold for half an hour, during which time you start to idly wonder if she’s buggered off to the pub to spend your disappeared dosh.
Invisible Ivan
Nobody knows what Ivan looks like, or where he is, or what he does. What they do know however is that he doesn’t seem to do much managing.
Olympian Olu
Has ascended to the dizzy heights of Trust HQ, where he has a strategic post in QA, IT, HR or something else with initials (you’re never quite sure). Up there, the boswellox is of such a high-grade that it has made him incapable of coherent speech. Instead, he can be heard burbling loudly about KPIs, stakeholder engagement, 360 degree appraisal, SWOT, TWOT and BOLOX.
I would love to contribute to a slapheads post on social workers and/or occupational therapists, but I only have a slaphead or two of each variety. Should I write that up and leave it as an unfinished post in mental nurse admin, for someone else to add to?
Sure, go ahead. I’ve been meaning to do a Slapheads post on professions allied to medicine, so I can merge yours with mine.
The middle management fattie:
Actually takes a barely concealed smug pride in leaving imprints of his sensible shoe soles on the foreheads of colleagues on his rapid ascent up the chain of command. Originally attracted to nursing by the appeal of uniform and power imbalance over patients, but quickly discovered the path to middle management an obvious career move for one so talented and driven.
Has ability to deliver with gusto reheated/ rebranded, half thought out notions of progressive interventions from above, coupled with the inherent skill of creatively manipulating expense accounts for his own ends whist lambasting clinical staff for claiming for a weak cup of PG whilst out with a patient.
For character traits, please refer to Asylum Speaker above (especially the small genitals part!)
Sneeringly in private conversation refers to those below him as the ‘little people’ and thinks Charlie Sheen was a chump in Wall St for saving his dad’s company, because those people’s lives were worth so much less than Charlie Sheen’s [1]? Fancies himself as a bit of a Nietschian ubermensch, who doesn’t get sufficient recognition of his greatness from colleagues?
We have those in IT too. And in catering.
[1]I dated one of these for 5 days when he was in the embryonic stage – failing a History degree due to being a lazy arsehole. It was a long 5 days. He really said the above.
Destructive Denise
Whatever you do is wrong. If you haven’t done anything on your own initiative recently, she’ll take sudden offence at, say, a sign that’s been there for the past four years. Wrong, wrong, wrong, get rid of it. Needless to say, when you do something right, she’s nowhere to be found. Eerie silence is the best you can hope for from this one.
I used to work with (or for, for all I ever knew) Invisible Ivan. I could never comprehend what he was supposed to do, but he was never appeared to even have a job. I only ever saw him dreamily drifting around with a clipboard/piece of paper. His poor wife worked on my ward as an EN (this was an awfully long time ago) and I used to pester her endlessly to explain what in hell he was supposed to do all day. She never could give me an answer and eventually lost the power of speech when she saw me. Odd that. Cos I was on shifts the number of times I saw him in Sainsbury’s at weird times between his 9 til 5 became so hilarious it was embarrassing. Naturally I made a point of greeting him there. Watching him shuffling his feet and trying to escape… High point of my life.
Details Dougie – has a tendency to fixate on something minor and irrelevant and either shout at the staff about it or threaten to write them up with an official warning. Does not appear to give a shit about the fact that everything else is going well. The detail will typically be something like an objection to the way people are sitting in their chairs in the nurses’ office. (I had a boss like this who objected to me sitting facing my monitor square on, saying this was a sign that I jumped straight into everything and didn’t think things through. Me explaining that I always sit this close to my monitor as my mouse arm needs to be supported or an old injury gives me trouble fell on deaf ears).
Another variety of Dougie will zero in on one employee at a time who will be systematically bullied in this manner until they are off sick, quit, or both, at which point a new victim is found.
Lolcats Lorna
Probably a subtype of one of the above. Spends all day checking her vitally important emails.
…and checking icanhascheezburger.com for new pictures? Calling over the rest of the staff when she sees a particularly amusing one?
You’ve met her? Or are you her?
Well, not the avoiding work by sending email part (although as an IT bod sending email is a large part of my job), but I love lolcats and always have one as my wallpaper on my PC at work. I change it every 2 weeks or so and sometimes get my team to pick the one they think funniest.
“venal, patronising, passive-aggressive, inadequate, ignorant, biased, self-aggrandising, mealy-mouthed, two-faced, hierarchical, obsequious, uninspiring, uncaring, defensive, unimaginative, dictatorial, cowardly and hidebound overachieving nobodies who wouldn’t be trusted to obey the laws of gravity in private industry, yet elevate themselves to god-like status should they be given the tiniest modicum of power over the life, well-being and happiness of staff and patients to compensate for their self-loathing, failed marriages, kids who despise them, lack of friends and, in many cases, inferior sexual organs.”
thank fu*k I’m not alone in my suffering.
I would never try and get into management for fear of becoming one of the above, like PC in the sitcom Ideal devastated that he has been put up for promotion and celebrating when he didn’t get it!
This isn’t exactly a slaphead manager story, just something I just read which I wanted to share. It reminded me a bit of that famous old experiment in America!
“After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies claiming they were not mad but had been picked up by the driver. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.”
I have actually seen a hospital transport pick up the wrong person for a visit to the psychiatric ward. \odd thing is they were quite happy with it.
can you do mental health social workers next please?
As far as I know we are still waiting for a guest post on Allied Professionals there may be a mental health social worker in there.
I do have an inkling of a plan to collect together the slapheads series and produce a PDF ebook in time for Christmas. I think it would need illustrations though.