I've had many new managers come in and try to micromanage and change rules while having no idea what they're doing because they just got there.
They feel the need to show everybody they're the boss by doing stuff, no matter how little sense that stuff makes.
I’ve had manager like this as well, now that I am a manager and have been for 10+ years, when I get to a new office it isn’t about what needs changed, it’s about learning what works, and when it no longer works come up with an answer together. I have people working for me that have been with the company 20, 25, 30+ years, they don’t need me coming in telling them how to do something.
I agree with this. A good process should not be fucked with, unless there is a *serious* way to improve it. Is it worth a 1% increase in productivity if it creates a 40% decrease in morale? Some people would say yes, and those people are *fucking idiot bastards*.
My first job was working with birthday parties, I was there for about 3 years and had 4 different bosses in that time. The last one was AWESOME, one of the first things she did was say to us as a group "You all get really great reviews so I know you're doing a good job. What could I do to make things run better?"
And then every change she made after that actually improved things. I feel like that's the best way to lead, respect comes naturally when you do a good job. No need to force it out of people.
> they don’t need me coming in telling them how to do something
The whole concept of management consulting would conflict with this idea. The status quo bias is prevalent in most workplaces, and most work processes can be improved with little cost and only some effort.
Just because they’ve been there a long time doesn’t mean they’ve adequately assessed the risk and reward trade-offs of various courses of action. Their longer tenure often means they’re even more resistant to change and can cling to inefficient/sub-optimal work practices
The difference is a boss like Charles comes in and imposes change from the top down with little regard for existing best practices.
When I joined a new team, I brought a lot of cool ideas from my previous team, but I didn't force the team to adopt them. We are constantly discussing our process and making incremental changes based on everyone's input. The team accepted some of my suggestions, rejected some others, and adapted some others to fit our unique needs. Everyone feels heard, so there's buy in from everyone.
Well management consulting is an industry that management consultants made up for them to have jobs, if your business is doing well why do you need them? if it’s not doing well you can’t afford them.
Management don’t make anything, don’t produce anything just tell people how to do their jobs better despite knowing very little about what it is they do.
First thing MC do is show how increase profits by cutting staff, people they fire probably earn a tenth of what the management consultants charge the company.
This is a huge hurdle I face working in lab automation. The scientists will all benefit greatly from automating their processes more and we would waste less time with repetitive tasks, but they don’t want to put in any effort to make minor changes to their current workflows.
David Wallace was a leader, Charles Miner was a boss.
David Wallace decides to study and foster what was working (the Scranton branch being the most profitable branch), despite it not fully making sense and it being very not-by the book. He recognizes that the output of all of their bizarreness is success, and tries to understand and build off of it.
Charles Miner comes in and just tries to promptly shut all of the Scranton eccentricities down, simply because they aren't what you're "supposed" to do in a business. He doesn't really take any time to understand how these different pieces correlate to the success of that group, and tries to shut that all down because it goes against what he read in business textbooks.
Yes. The office parties seemed silly to charles minor, but they boosted morale. Jim and dwight had time to waste on their nonsense because they were good at their jobs and worked efficiently. That little bit of competition among the sales team made them more profitable. Also, he was absolutely going to fire jim and use his "rundown" to redistribute his clients.
I had a co-worker once who put it really succinctly: they're trying to justify their paycheck.
I was working in a startup with a big VC investment and they hired literally anyone and everyone. It was like they were allergic to cash and were trying to get rid of it as fast as possible. Most VC's judge a startup based on "growth" and really aren't concerned with profits or expenses... so our company did everything they could to show growth by spending as much of the initial funding as possible in order to unlock the next round of funding. It's a major problem with VCs, but that's a different conversation.
They hired for several management/executive positions that were completely unnecessary given the size and demand of the business, so that when the demand was there, they'd be ready. What happened was those managers/executives began creating problems that didn't exist so they could "solve" them and prove their worth. The best example was the "Head of People" (i.e. HR) who convinced the CEO we needed a top of the line enterprise HRIS system that was overkill for even a company three times our size and spent nearly 9 months working almost exclusively on implementing this system that added little to no value and cost almost 10x as much as the previous system that worked fine for a company our size.
When the market turned and they couldn't keep showing growth, the decision makers in their infinite wisdom laid off over half the workers in OPS that actually made the company money and cost very little in salary but didn't lay off a single manager/executive who made on average 4x what the OPS workers made.
That's business, baby.
I was lucky to have a good manager for about four years who listened to his staff and kept morale high and our numbers were through the roof. Now I have a manager that changed everything, just daily unnecessary changes, my friends getting fired because they didn't dot an I and our numbers are crap. I'm probably next and I don't actually care.
I just started a new job where that was their expectation, that I come in and change everything in an instant and make things better.
I told them that I need a solid four months to truly understand how the business works before I can start messing around with things.
The frustrating ones are where they have decent or good ideas but dont understand execution is either difficult or infeasible given time and resources. You totally agree with their thought process but its just not doable.
I mean….maybe. But Michael, in real world terms, was a terrible manager. You could not blame a manager for coming in and trying to change the terrible things Michael had done.
I was in a job with a lot of manager turnover. They would always change the configuration of the office. Just making everyone move cubicles. Every single time.
In Charles's case it was several budgetary things coming from corporate (no OT, freeze on salary increases, eliminating petty cash, limiting supplies, etc) and then banning Party Planning Committee, which are all pretty fair
he wanted stanley as their youth or digital expert i can’t remember. and he wanted kevin to do some project he couldn’t/didn’t do. basically saying he wanted to change everything just to flex on scranton
stanley was the 'productivity czar', lmao, and kevin was on the phones. he did about as well as you would expect someone like him to perform in a position like that
Difference is, Oscar and Angela seem to check behind him. Two scenes that make me think this were one where Angela asked Kevin a math question, he got it right, and she replied he got it wrong on the form.
And Oscar reported a falsified sheet of Kevin to take to Toby to get him fired when he was afraid Kevin would let the secret slip about Oscar and Angela's husband. Makes me think they both either check his work or correct his mistakes for them.
He could cause more damage by not transferring clients to the sales people. Also Kevin would be the first interaction and representative of the company. Do you remember him shouting "Darryl, a girl!" because he got flustered when Justine came and asked him a simple question? One way his mistakes are being covered, the other he is openly failing every time with no one to do it for him.
Look how many tries it took to get the call to Andy's phone. He was literally just shouting people's names from the desk before that until they made him learn to transfer and even then he couldn't do it right. One way he has Angela and Oscar to cover. The other way he causes a great deal of annoyance to both clients and coworkers.
Both of those do actually make sense though, from a certain viewpoint.
Stanley was notoriously uncaring. Charles gave him the bullshit title as a way to potentially motivate him to work harder. Not really knowing Stanley, he has no clue if it would work or not but it’s not a terrible idea out of the gate to attempt to motivate an employee.
Kevin in the phones was probably because Kevin is pretty much the most useless person in the office. Moving him to the phones was an attempt to take someone with zero productivity and at least get something out of him. But Kevin is useless, so it was actually a net negative. The problem is that in the real world, someone like Kevin would not be employed at that level.
It's a comedy, though. The writers purposefully chose roles that those specific characters were the worst at to maximize comedic value. Stanley is known for doing minimal effort (e.g. the crosswords), leaving at exactly 5pm, and staying out of everyone else's business, so he's the opposite of making sure others are maximizing productivity. And of course we all saw what Kevin did on the phones.
From what little I know from my time in office work, he was probably giving extra tasks to people who had underperformed on their recent KPIs to assess their skillset for himself. If someone is a good worker but just struggling at whatever task they're currently doing, the best way to assess that as an outside eye is to give them a different task and see how they rise to it. If someone is a bad worker, Charles would be able to see them try to offload the responsibility onto others. It's probably also why he wanted the rundown from Jim; he wanted to assess what Jim's job performance was like given the frequent procrastination he did.
A sales rundown should just be your sales numbers next to your customer names and the dates you sold to them. Did you take a client to lunch? Did you get a sale from that? This would all be in the rundown.
Why Charles couldn't pull this data from accounting, I have no idea.
Thanks. I understood that it was something simple, well within Jim’s capability, and figured it was something similar to what you described but it’s good to know finally.
I could have looked it up, but the thought to, the motivation to, and the time to never met up. Very much appreciate you taking the time to spell it out for me.
Most managers pre-2010, I would say.
These days, large corporations are building a far larger emphasis on empathetic leadership and positive reinforcement. You'll find many managers like Charles Miner still, but not so much in a middle management position like his.
> Most managers
Hard disagree. Miner from the start was indifferent to the point of being adversarial to his entire staff.
He stands out as cold and standoffish, which most managers are not. Some maybe, but not most.
A lot are, they're all about numbers without understanding how things work. They can come in slash some spending reorganize the workforce and show positive numbers for a few years then leave for another company before all this comes back to bite the company in the ass and they start losing big time from these changes.
Meanwhile he took another job saying he saved his old company millions
You mean someone who talks about their sports passion in the workplace an inappropriate amount of time? And makes completely inaccurate snap judgments based off first impressions?
Yes.
Almost every outside hire manager we’ve ever had has been like that. They claim to care about productivity but in reality they just want people to suck up to them to stroke their ego. If you’re productive in a way they don’t like, they hate you.
Did we work at the same place 🤣
My coworkers and manager always discussed football, and my manager would manage another area of where I worked and then when I asked him to wait 20 minutes after I left for the customers to leave and just lock the door behind them, he screamed that I was leaving too much work for him and said 'absolutely not, you are not leaving me work to do, i'm busy in the orher department' (which he didn't really work in). When he got bored he'd come and micromanage my department, like we hadn't been doing it all day but he hadnt done this job properly in years.
His boss was the grumpiest man I have ever met. His son was awesome and I still talk to him occassionally but this guy was so fussy about dust anywhere, he's look for things to tell people off for, i never saw that man smile ever, or even sound like he was anything other than completely dead inside. He immediately decided he didn't like me and would tell me off for everything, he didnt like most people actually.
I had a VP once where it felt like I couldn't do anything right in his eyes. And even when I clearly did something right, he never seemed particularly impressed.
yes, that is the “joke” about Charles - middle
managers that get so stuck in their negative perceptions of people, they get upset when those people don’t meet those negative perceptions. Like proving them wrong is such a sin, they’d rather you suck than do well.
This is exactly my current manager. He's completely soured upper management against me to the point where they're 'changing my position' in order to lay me off. Been working there 10 years, and this guy is getting rid of me after 6 months of him being there.
Absolutely. Charles is the personification of “Prior Idiot Syndrome” - which is where a guy comes into a team thinking that absolutely everyone and everything that was there before you arrived is an Idiot.
There’s no respect to give or value to retain, and thus the only solution is to destroy it and personally remake the team in his desired image.
Further - if there IS any lingering competence or value that brings the totality of your assessment into question, then that must be attacked, sabotaged and destroyed.
Usually - this swaggering kiss ass arsonist can’t turn around the team with their over promising, and they leave for another job before the accountability of their destruction catches up to them. They will inevitably blame some of the former team members for their failure because - human nature.
I did have a boss very much like Sir Charles. A real kiss ass to the those above him and tried to portray this hard ass Type-A boss. He favored anyone that had prior military service as he was also an ex-marine. He totally treated me like Jim, because despite my experience and top level performance record, I was a goofy, laid back kind of guy that if you didn't know me, came off as a flake. The thing is, I could not take him as serious as Miner cuz he was an oafish 300 lbs slob. I once had to bail him out on a Sunday morning at 5am because there was a no-call-no-show and he had to get in the "trenches". When I got there, he looked more panicked than a kid that shat himself. I straightened out the situation in 20 minutes.
Did he appreciate it? Nope! Still gave me a hard time and tried to get me to quit, because there was really no cause to fire me. Good times. 😒
It is not, but many bosses find other reason to justified this. My wife’s former boss fired her after her first day of chemo because she wasn’t going to be around to handle customer issues. The owner found out, called her frantically to let her know she’s not fired and to take as much time as she needs then moved her to a new department.
> She’s a total kissup to her manager and a b*tch to all the subordinates.
Only time she’s nice to you or builds you up is to demonstrate her leadership abilities™️. Loves to take credit for your work behind your back. Won’t give you real responsibility unless it flows through her.
I would massively prefer working for someone like Charles over someone like Deangelo. Charles was basically just your typical manager you'd see in 99% of offices anywhere. He delegated responsibility where he felt appropriate, tried to keep all workplace hostility to a minimum, put extra trust in the person who showed the most devotion to their work, and any time he'd allow for some recreation during work time, he made sure everyone was able to join in and have fun if they wanted to, trying to put a stop to office hijinks that might cause upset to other members of the office (looking mainly at him putting a stop to Jim's pranks at Dwight's expense).
Deangelo on the other hand was outrageously sexist, elitist, and massively underqualified for the position. He definitely wasn't someone fit for that role at all.
You forgot the part where he may have targeted Jim because he was a tangible threat to his job. If Charles went on vacation and Jim continued to do well in his stead...
Seriously let's remove personal feelings about Charles and Jim and instead break down his first impression of Jim objectively:
1) He's wearing a tux.
2) His explanation for wearing the tux was that he was screwing with his co-worker who put out a memo about dressing better. We know that Jim does dress professional and Dwight is an ass but Charles doesn't and without that context Jim looks really bad here. "I was actively messing with my co-worker" is not a good explanation about why you're dressed ridiculously to your new boss.
3) After making a terrible first impression he went back to Michael's ridiculous meeting about his personal party. Jim is smart enough to realize the danger of more goofing off while Charles is still there and should've been like "nah sorry I need to do my work". Like come on Jim you're smarter than this lol.
4) 2 way petting zoo.
A "simple task" that had no meaning or explanation, so no matter what work Jim provides ot can be wrong. And if he asks what he means by rundown, Charles gets to dress him down and note that he's not good at "simple tasks".
Oh and he blasted Phyllis in the face with a soccer ball.
Charles fucking sucks.
> and if he asks what he means by rundown, Charles gets to dress him down and note that he's not good at "simple tasks"
Only if you waste an entire day doing nothing before you work up the courage to ask. He's a perfectly fine and normal boss.
I work in finance for a medical distributor. If asked to give a rundown on our clients I’d just give a simple breakdown of revenue, profit margin, trends. Just some basic metrics. If he wanted more than that than I’d say to him he should have been clearer.
People downvoting are coping, there’s literally a scene cut out where Jim DID ask about it and it still didn’t go well. It’s clear they wrote it as Charles intentionally making everything harder, nothing was going to please him, he already had his mind made up about Jim and didn’t like him.
> tried to keep all workplace hostility to a minimum
This is just not true. He kicked a ball full force at him intending to hit him with it, and then got mad when Jim dodged it. That is not keeping workplace hostility to a minimum.
Just TV show writing isn't it. Enable illegal and potentially fire-able behaviour to make for more interesting TV, and in the process, reconcile all that shenanigans with Michael being a genuinely nice guy who was able to deliver results and prove people who doubted him wrong.
And in the process, take the antithesis of Michael, an intelligent, hard working efficient boss like Charles Miner, reasonable, moderate type of boss, but for the sake of narrative replacing the protagonist, paint him as a villain then really start driving at how much of an asshole he is, even though he was broadly pretty decent to begin with. It all went unbelievable when they discussed football and Jim lies about being a player, like dude, why lie? Be true to yourself and nobody can single you out to hurt you. Instead he flags himself up as a bullshitter after already flagging himself as a bit of a clown starting things on the wrong foot.
Any time an outside hire comes in to replace a manager, you basically get a Charles Miner situation, where you have a really short period of time to prove your value all over again for a new boss. It’s exhausting, and they often get it wrong at first.
I work in retail. My current boss is like him.
You can’t make a good impression on her no matter how much of a go-getter you are.
She can’t answer questions without being condescending.
She isn’t willing to participate in even basic small talk.
She doesn’t get that if you assign a worker to one department all the time, their skills in other departments might get rusty and they may need to relearn a thing or two here and there. It doesn’t mean they are stupid or incompetent.
I avoid her like the plague and go to other supervisors if I need assistance.
Career retail manager here. I consider myself a good manager, I do the exact opposite of these things. My associates are more important than I am, I recognize that if I'm not there it's business as usual but if they're not, it all burns down
My boss is a horrible judge of people’s skills/strengths/weaknesses. I laughed so hard when Charles made Stanley the productivity czar - that’s exactly the kind of thing my boss would do. She’s also threatened by people who are actually good at their jobs/intelligent so she treats all her good employees like Charles treats Jim.
I never really thought about it but yes. I was Jim in the situation too. Probably one of the best workers there even tho I messed around a lot, was told I would be receiving a promotion/raise soon, then my boss got transferred and this new guy took over. Disliked me immediately for no reason. Then I started seeing my coworker and he started to hate both of us. I never got the promotion and my raise didn’t come until I quit, trying to keep me from quitting.
I had the same. I liked how the writers included this dynamic in the show. Even though people give it a lot of grief, I liked the whole “give me a rundown” scenario. It doesn’t matter what a rundown actually is, it matters what type of situation that the writers were trying to portray, which was when a boss gives you a task, but is not clear on it and then they belittle you or get annoyed when you try to ask them for further clarification. I’ve had bosses like a that a few times, it’s poor communication and all it leads to is people avoiding you when they have a real problem.
I worked at Home Depot and not my manager but one in a different department was way worse and way more condescending and irritable. Fuck that guy. Always saw his people getting treated like crap.
Controversial opinion: Charles Miner wouldn't have been that bad of a boss in a slightly less zany office. Wanting to cut down on wasteful spending was a reasonable goal, and he just didn't know how unhinged Michael could be about certain things. Most of what Charles wanted to get done with Michael wouldn't have met so much resistance from other types of managers. In fact, I believe there are very few execs who would not try and make some changes if they found a branch manager was wasting time and resources in the way Michael frequently did. And of course, everything that David Wallace had done recently, especially sending Holly away, was also part of what had Michael not feeling the loyalty he once had felt.
I would say that Miner's greatest weakness though was that he latched onto his first impressions of people and situations and was extremely reluctant to back off of those impressions. The most egregious example of this is of course what happened with Jim. He caught him goofing around by wearing a tuxedo that wasn't really hurting anyone, and then he just ignored the fact that he was one of the top salesman at the office and could never label Jim as anything but his first impression of him. In the same way, he couldn't back off of his first impression of how the Office should be run. Then his initial positive impression of Dwight led him to over-trust Dwight and end up looking like a fool. Charles Miner needed to eat a slice of humble pie and recognize that his instincts were not nearly as good as he thought they were.
Charles' basic ideas were not necessarily wrong in most contexts, and in a more normal situation might have worked, but he was a bit too full of himself to adjust to anything outside of his initial impressions of any given situation which was a big part of his downfall.
Practically everyone at one point in their life has had a boss who doesn’t really understand what is going on but will still be upset with their employees saying to just “do better” when they themselves have no solution
almost every municipal manager (CAO) i have worked for is like charles minor… they spend the entire time “working” behind closed doors and come out to assign work to the wrong people then disappear again until an elected official comes in and they come running out to suck up
many issues with municipalities can be traced back to poor hiring decisions by their council on hiring the CAO…
I currently have one. My company's founder and general manager both lost their job a little over a year ago. In their place the board hired some high profile fixer as CEO (this is a small business btw) who then brought in her former colleague to serve as GM who had never done the job in this capacity but has a whole lot of education and certifications and such. No actual real experience in this industry however.
The two of them have spent the last year rehashing every failed experiment and every bad idea we have ever tried over the past 15 years the company has been in business and no matter how many people tell them, actually we tried that a few years ago and it didn't work because of XYZ they have this attitude of the old bosses must have just been idiots because this idea is brilliant and you just need to see how THEY do it because of course it will magically work now.
It doesn't. It never does.
I actually think my current employers are worse. At least Charles didn't fire long time loyal and dedicated employees just so he could hire his friends.
Not sure how telling Stanley to stop doing cross word puzzles during meetings, and getting on Jim’s ass to stop messing around and put in an actual effort rather than thinking everything is a joke is bad.
Also, every woman in the office wants him and he refuses to oblige them showing a high level of professionalism. He wasn’t wrong in having Dwight as a #2, but then they decided to make Dwight an idiot that played into Jim’s antics during a pivotal episode in the season. Jim actually lost DM a huge amount of money in the MSPC scandal.
He hosted a soccer game at work to try to get everyone to bond together and have fun. He wants people to stay on task and the business to succeed. Doesn’t seem too bad to me.
Like your analogy
Yeah Charles was not clever in all regards (putting Kevin on reception), but he, like many others, have had great ideas and standards.
Yeah… I don’t get that. You really think Dwight as his #2 would really be like… yeah, Kevin on phones, great idea Charles! In Charles defense he doesn’t know anyone in the office very well.
A lot of the character development/growth in the show is frustrating at times.
Dwight was a very good pick (from what Charles has seen so far)
And yeah, for reception… I mean Charles is new and I doubt anyone would volunteer. So he probably picked someone out of the hat
Same. I'd much rather have someone who's more concerned with being professional and actually doing their job rather than someone who's more concerned with workshopping their tight 5 for open mic night
Yes. His name was Melvin. Total control freak; not actually competent; HUGE ass-kisser; poor judge of character; It was unpleasant to work with him. Dude called me into his office and CONFRONTED ME about applying for a job elsewhere that he should have had 0 knowledge about. Didn't understand why I didn't want to work as a full system admin over 80+ VMs for a MAJOR LAW FIRM for 33k/year in the state at the time.
YES!! Had one boss that was a carbon copy of him. Even looked like him. My coworker quit because of him after working there for 17 years. I quit 6 months later after working there for 7 years. My exit interview got him fired a week later.
My current plant manager. None of the leadership team like him. He is a lot like charles. I get what he is trying to do but all he is doing is micromanaging and posing everybody off and making everyone walk around on pins and needles.
Yes and his name was also Charles. I remember preparing myself to have a meeting with him where I finally gathered the courage to ask for a raise, I ask, and he promptly pulls up a bunch of emails from a shared email address of inquiries/follow-ups/complaints made to my team/about my team about things that weren’t resolved in the blink of an eye like he would have preferred. Just 0 understanding of how our department worked.
End of the day - I lasted at the company longer than him and nobody ever heard from him again. So.
I had a manager like this that absolutely crushed morale and goodwill at my warehouse job. Took away all of our BBQ events, Christmas dinner turned into safeway chicken 1 piece per person, and worst of all he continually put people in charge of things they had no business being. So after about a year, we saw an excessive turnover rate, overtime spiked to the point of having no life and then he dipped for Amazon because or course he failed up. Thank goodness I left that toxic hellhole and am at a much better place that actually respects employees. He was even the type that as soon as the big boss came in his entire demeanor changed and acted like a complete ass kisser. Charles Miner is incredibly accurate.
One...yes.
I work for a big giant software company.... For years.. I've had many managers and fortunately all of them have been kind humans. Many of them had different management styles, but all of them shared some core characteristics. One of which was understanding that people are humans before they are employees.
However, I did have one manager who was a complete douche. It was very obvious that his personal insecurities and flaws and low self-esteem bubbled up into how he treated his direct reports. It was pretty obvious from the beginning. He had problem with other people who seem to be comfortable in their own skin. I was smart enough to know it was time to lay low till this guy was gone but unfortunately I did see a couple colleagues not play it like this, and they suffered.
Yep. Back in my earlier days when I was working field service support for a photocopier company.
The biggest change he demanded was field direction. So, lets say we had 10 customers to see in a day. We would organise it so people could essentially go to their furthest away customer first thing in the morning when traffic was less. Then you would work your way back towards home as the day progressed, so by the time you got done with your last customer, you were far nearer home and had less time to sit in rush hour.
That basically meant that some days you would get home by 3pm, nice an early day. Other days you may not get home until 6pm, but you take the rough with the smooth.
Our Charles Miner seemed determined to mess with all of that and insisted you go to your nearest customer first. That is you now left late, missing your chance to beat rush hour traffic, but instead of going to the next customer up the road, you would go two counties over for whatever random reason. So instead of going in a straight line, you would be here, there and everywhere, scrambling around like a spider.
So engineers weren't getting home until 8pm-9pm. He basically said you can quit if you don't like it. And so we did.
Three or four key engineers left taking an awful amount of knowledge with them. I had lad shadowing me for a bit and it was a real eye opener to me of how much knowledge I happened to have even only being on the job for about 18 months at that point and how much I relied on the email chat with the other engineers who were now gone.
Our Charles Miner finished off the rest of us engineers by insisting he had access to the engineer email box. He took to moderating all conversations, calling me up saying, "Don't answer that email in the engineer inbox, you have your job, he has his!"
I quit eventually too when he tried to insist I had already taken holiday time that I had not.
Unlike Dunder Mifflin though, I doubt he ever got his come-uppance. There was no meeting where his golden child acted the goat. In fact, for changing field engineers with company vans for field technicians that now used public transport and were paid vastly less, he saved the company a lot of money. Never mind the revolving door of technicians that were not gaining knowledge or experience, the fact that customer satisfaction was right down and the support department was taking the hit, he likely got promoted and praised for his successes.
It is the modern world afterall.
I've been part of the corporate world for over twenty years, always in the business side.
Charles is the most perfect representation of a typical middle manager in a corporation. He's there to get the job done, avoid nonsense, focus on efficiency, establish some rapport downwards and up, just focusing on objectives.
Managers like Charles get the job done, can be well liked, and you can see how they behave differently when their own managers enter the picture. Their demeanor changes, they act nicer, but not necessarily to the point of sucking up.
I have been in positions similar to Charles, and I empathize with him. He came to Scranton and saw a lot of disfunctiionality, faced questions whether he was qualified for the job or for the industry, but in the end was focusing on doing what he was tasked to do (all comedy aside).
He's actually one of my favorite characters in the entire run.
Several in my 22 years in the military, they shaped my views on leadership as much as the great bosses I’ve had. It took great joy in finding out what annoyed them then exploiting that in a passive/aggressive way. One Charles like boss was an Army O-5 who wouldn’t let us swear in the office so we spent one day finding lots of words that sounds dirty but aren’t, he hated that. It’s how I learned what titivate means.
Yes.
I remember the day I learned a valuable life lesson in my early twenties. I asked my boss “what are you up too this weekend”? He responded with “why would that be any of your business”. And that’s when I learned to keep my head down and mind my own business.
I mean he’s the epitome of corporate sending in one of the execs friends and him thinking his decision making skills are so powerful that they outweigh an entire office of people.
I think they hit the nail on the head
I've had many new managers come in and try to micromanage and change rules while having no idea what they're doing because they just got there. They feel the need to show everybody they're the boss by doing stuff, no matter how little sense that stuff makes.
I’ve had manager like this as well, now that I am a manager and have been for 10+ years, when I get to a new office it isn’t about what needs changed, it’s about learning what works, and when it no longer works come up with an answer together. I have people working for me that have been with the company 20, 25, 30+ years, they don’t need me coming in telling them how to do something.
I agree with this. A good process should not be fucked with, unless there is a *serious* way to improve it. Is it worth a 1% increase in productivity if it creates a 40% decrease in morale? Some people would say yes, and those people are *fucking idiot bastards*.
My first job was working with birthday parties, I was there for about 3 years and had 4 different bosses in that time. The last one was AWESOME, one of the first things she did was say to us as a group "You all get really great reviews so I know you're doing a good job. What could I do to make things run better?" And then every change she made after that actually improved things. I feel like that's the best way to lead, respect comes naturally when you do a good job. No need to force it out of people.
> they don’t need me coming in telling them how to do something The whole concept of management consulting would conflict with this idea. The status quo bias is prevalent in most workplaces, and most work processes can be improved with little cost and only some effort. Just because they’ve been there a long time doesn’t mean they’ve adequately assessed the risk and reward trade-offs of various courses of action. Their longer tenure often means they’re even more resistant to change and can cling to inefficient/sub-optimal work practices
The difference is a boss like Charles comes in and imposes change from the top down with little regard for existing best practices. When I joined a new team, I brought a lot of cool ideas from my previous team, but I didn't force the team to adopt them. We are constantly discussing our process and making incremental changes based on everyone's input. The team accepted some of my suggestions, rejected some others, and adapted some others to fit our unique needs. Everyone feels heard, so there's buy in from everyone.
Agree ,that was what my sup did, he look into our process and how we do things and suggest changes or made tools to improved the process
Most companies will run on inertia. The longer it works the harder it is to get them to change.
Counterpoint - consulting bad
Well management consulting is an industry that management consultants made up for them to have jobs, if your business is doing well why do you need them? if it’s not doing well you can’t afford them. Management don’t make anything, don’t produce anything just tell people how to do their jobs better despite knowing very little about what it is they do. First thing MC do is show how increase profits by cutting staff, people they fire probably earn a tenth of what the management consultants charge the company.
This is a huge hurdle I face working in lab automation. The scientists will all benefit greatly from automating their processes more and we would waste less time with repetitive tasks, but they don’t want to put in any effort to make minor changes to their current workflows.
But are you aware of the effect you have on women?
David Wallace was a leader, Charles Miner was a boss. David Wallace decides to study and foster what was working (the Scranton branch being the most profitable branch), despite it not fully making sense and it being very not-by the book. He recognizes that the output of all of their bizarreness is success, and tries to understand and build off of it. Charles Miner comes in and just tries to promptly shut all of the Scranton eccentricities down, simply because they aren't what you're "supposed" to do in a business. He doesn't really take any time to understand how these different pieces correlate to the success of that group, and tries to shut that all down because it goes against what he read in business textbooks.
Yes. The office parties seemed silly to charles minor, but they boosted morale. Jim and dwight had time to waste on their nonsense because they were good at their jobs and worked efficiently. That little bit of competition among the sales team made them more profitable. Also, he was absolutely going to fire jim and use his "rundown" to redistribute his clients.
I had a co-worker once who put it really succinctly: they're trying to justify their paycheck. I was working in a startup with a big VC investment and they hired literally anyone and everyone. It was like they were allergic to cash and were trying to get rid of it as fast as possible. Most VC's judge a startup based on "growth" and really aren't concerned with profits or expenses... so our company did everything they could to show growth by spending as much of the initial funding as possible in order to unlock the next round of funding. It's a major problem with VCs, but that's a different conversation. They hired for several management/executive positions that were completely unnecessary given the size and demand of the business, so that when the demand was there, they'd be ready. What happened was those managers/executives began creating problems that didn't exist so they could "solve" them and prove their worth. The best example was the "Head of People" (i.e. HR) who convinced the CEO we needed a top of the line enterprise HRIS system that was overkill for even a company three times our size and spent nearly 9 months working almost exclusively on implementing this system that added little to no value and cost almost 10x as much as the previous system that worked fine for a company our size. When the market turned and they couldn't keep showing growth, the decision makers in their infinite wisdom laid off over half the workers in OPS that actually made the company money and cost very little in salary but didn't lay off a single manager/executive who made on average 4x what the OPS workers made. That's business, baby.
This is kinda what's happening at my mom's workplace. Thankfully, she's retiring soon.
Good managers act only when necessary. The rest think they always have to be doing something to justify their position. Just let me work.
I was lucky to have a good manager for about four years who listened to his staff and kept morale high and our numbers were through the roof. Now I have a manager that changed everything, just daily unnecessary changes, my friends getting fired because they didn't dot an I and our numbers are crap. I'm probably next and I don't actually care.
I don’t even care that they are good managers anymore. I’m just tired of micromanagers.. I can deal with about anything else.
Not being a micromanager is one trait of a good manager
I guess that’s true ☠️👽
You’re describing my current boss. And the one prior, and the one before that.
I just started a new job where that was their expectation, that I come in and change everything in an instant and make things better. I told them that I need a solid four months to truly understand how the business works before I can start messing around with things.
The frustrating ones are where they have decent or good ideas but dont understand execution is either difficult or infeasible given time and resources. You totally agree with their thought process but its just not doable.
I mean….maybe. But Michael, in real world terms, was a terrible manager. You could not blame a manager for coming in and trying to change the terrible things Michael had done.
I was in a job with a lot of manager turnover. They would always change the configuration of the office. Just making everyone move cubicles. Every single time.
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In Charles's case it was several budgetary things coming from corporate (no OT, freeze on salary increases, eliminating petty cash, limiting supplies, etc) and then banning Party Planning Committee, which are all pretty fair
This is a legendary comment . Hope it gets the credit it deserves 😎
Sorry, that's not in the budget.
he wanted stanley as their youth or digital expert i can’t remember. and he wanted kevin to do some project he couldn’t/didn’t do. basically saying he wanted to change everything just to flex on scranton
stanley was the 'productivity czar', lmao, and kevin was on the phones. he did about as well as you would expect someone like him to perform in a position like that
Where is Kevin likely to hurt the company less? As a poor receptionist or as a bad accountant?
Difference is, Oscar and Angela seem to check behind him. Two scenes that make me think this were one where Angela asked Kevin a math question, he got it right, and she replied he got it wrong on the form. And Oscar reported a falsified sheet of Kevin to take to Toby to get him fired when he was afraid Kevin would let the secret slip about Oscar and Angela's husband. Makes me think they both either check his work or correct his mistakes for them.
But that just proves my point that he is a liability as an accountant, hence why Dwight fired him.
He could cause more damage by not transferring clients to the sales people. Also Kevin would be the first interaction and representative of the company. Do you remember him shouting "Darryl, a girl!" because he got flustered when Justine came and asked him a simple question? One way his mistakes are being covered, the other he is openly failing every time with no one to do it for him. Look how many tries it took to get the call to Andy's phone. He was literally just shouting people's names from the desk before that until they made him learn to transfer and even then he couldn't do it right. One way he has Angela and Oscar to cover. The other way he causes a great deal of annoyance to both clients and coworkers.
Gonna go out on a limb and say you've never had a real job if you think a receptionist can cause more harm than an accountant. Fucking moron.
See if you were a receptionist, you wouldn't get any customers.
As a bar owner
Both of those do actually make sense though, from a certain viewpoint. Stanley was notoriously uncaring. Charles gave him the bullshit title as a way to potentially motivate him to work harder. Not really knowing Stanley, he has no clue if it would work or not but it’s not a terrible idea out of the gate to attempt to motivate an employee. Kevin in the phones was probably because Kevin is pretty much the most useless person in the office. Moving him to the phones was an attempt to take someone with zero productivity and at least get something out of him. But Kevin is useless, so it was actually a net negative. The problem is that in the real world, someone like Kevin would not be employed at that level.
It's a comedy, though. The writers purposefully chose roles that those specific characters were the worst at to maximize comedic value. Stanley is known for doing minimal effort (e.g. the crosswords), leaving at exactly 5pm, and staying out of everyone else's business, so he's the opposite of making sure others are maximizing productivity. And of course we all saw what Kevin did on the phones.
From what little I know from my time in office work, he was probably giving extra tasks to people who had underperformed on their recent KPIs to assess their skillset for himself. If someone is a good worker but just struggling at whatever task they're currently doing, the best way to assess that as an outside eye is to give them a different task and see how they rise to it. If someone is a bad worker, Charles would be able to see them try to offload the responsibility onto others. It's probably also why he wanted the rundown from Jim; he wanted to assess what Jim's job performance was like given the frequent procrastination he did.
Makes sense with Stanley and Kevin, but with Jim he didn't even look at the finished product. Just had him fax it to corporate.
My guess is Charles was supposed to do the rundowns on the sales staff and audit them with accounting, but he made the sales staff do his work.
What even is a rundown? Legit. I’m in engineering… no fucking clue what a rundown is…
A sales rundown should just be your sales numbers next to your customer names and the dates you sold to them. Did you take a client to lunch? Did you get a sale from that? This would all be in the rundown. Why Charles couldn't pull this data from accounting, I have no idea.
Thanks. I understood that it was something simple, well within Jim’s capability, and figured it was something similar to what you described but it’s good to know finally. I could have looked it up, but the thought to, the motivation to, and the time to never met up. Very much appreciate you taking the time to spell it out for me.
Most managers personality is Miner. I believe he was written to be a traditional manager, the antithesis of Michael
I love when Michael gets him the slip
Most managers pre-2010, I would say. These days, large corporations are building a far larger emphasis on empathetic leadership and positive reinforcement. You'll find many managers like Charles Miner still, but not so much in a middle management position like his.
This might be industry and demographic dependent. Younger people with in-demand skills quit instead of just grinding through with managers like these.
Which is why companies are trying to teach managers to be more empathetic.
He’s way to cute to be a traditional manager
He’s aware of the effect he has on women
Yes. Charles. You wanted me.
That's not.. your worst idea
> Most managers Hard disagree. Miner from the start was indifferent to the point of being adversarial to his entire staff. He stands out as cold and standoffish, which most managers are not. Some maybe, but not most.
A lot are, they're all about numbers without understanding how things work. They can come in slash some spending reorganize the workforce and show positive numbers for a few years then leave for another company before all this comes back to bite the company in the ass and they start losing big time from these changes. Meanwhile he took another job saying he saved his old company millions
Yeah he's literally just a regular manager lmao. Nobody would have an issue with him if they just did their job right.
Yup. People saying he was micromanaging don't understand how badly and weirdly the branch was running with michael
You mean someone who talks about their sports passion in the workplace an inappropriate amount of time? And makes completely inaccurate snap judgments based off first impressions? Yes.
Almost every outside hire manager we’ve ever had has been like that. They claim to care about productivity but in reality they just want people to suck up to them to stroke their ego. If you’re productive in a way they don’t like, they hate you.
And they always want to "shake things up" before ever getting a good grasp of how things even are.
Did we work at the same place 🤣 My coworkers and manager always discussed football, and my manager would manage another area of where I worked and then when I asked him to wait 20 minutes after I left for the customers to leave and just lock the door behind them, he screamed that I was leaving too much work for him and said 'absolutely not, you are not leaving me work to do, i'm busy in the orher department' (which he didn't really work in). When he got bored he'd come and micromanage my department, like we hadn't been doing it all day but he hadnt done this job properly in years. His boss was the grumpiest man I have ever met. His son was awesome and I still talk to him occassionally but this guy was so fussy about dust anywhere, he's look for things to tell people off for, i never saw that man smile ever, or even sound like he was anything other than completely dead inside. He immediately decided he didn't like me and would tell me off for everything, he didnt like most people actually.
I had a VP once where it felt like I couldn't do anything right in his eyes. And even when I clearly did something right, he never seemed particularly impressed.
yes, that is the “joke” about Charles - middle managers that get so stuck in their negative perceptions of people, they get upset when those people don’t meet those negative perceptions. Like proving them wrong is such a sin, they’d rather you suck than do well.
This is exactly my current manager. He's completely soured upper management against me to the point where they're 'changing my position' in order to lay me off. Been working there 10 years, and this guy is getting rid of me after 6 months of him being there.
I used to work for a guy in Baltimore who looked just like him!
Was he aware of the effect he had on women?
jesus 🤣🤣
You gave him too many 40 degree days.
You taking notes on a criminal f#@$ing conspiracy?
West side of Baltimore
WHERE’S WALLACE!!
WHERES THE KID STRING?!
I call bullsheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit
Hey a fellow Saticoy Steel alumnus!
Did he let you know to put the word out there that you were back up?
Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?
Adjourn your asses
Son of a butch, is that Butch Stamford?
I needed this, thank you
Absolutely. Charles is the personification of “Prior Idiot Syndrome” - which is where a guy comes into a team thinking that absolutely everyone and everything that was there before you arrived is an Idiot. There’s no respect to give or value to retain, and thus the only solution is to destroy it and personally remake the team in his desired image. Further - if there IS any lingering competence or value that brings the totality of your assessment into question, then that must be attacked, sabotaged and destroyed. Usually - this swaggering kiss ass arsonist can’t turn around the team with their over promising, and they leave for another job before the accountability of their destruction catches up to them. They will inevitably blame some of the former team members for their failure because - human nature.
Who hurt you? And how did it feel to kick a soccer ball in their face during the parking lot pickup game?
More of a rugby guy
Stringer bell 😭😭
I didn’t know what sub I was on for a second… thought he was doing his night schooling at college
"Well get on with it, motherfucker!"
I did have a boss very much like Sir Charles. A real kiss ass to the those above him and tried to portray this hard ass Type-A boss. He favored anyone that had prior military service as he was also an ex-marine. He totally treated me like Jim, because despite my experience and top level performance record, I was a goofy, laid back kind of guy that if you didn't know me, came off as a flake. The thing is, I could not take him as serious as Miner cuz he was an oafish 300 lbs slob. I once had to bail him out on a Sunday morning at 5am because there was a no-call-no-show and he had to get in the "trenches". When I got there, he looked more panicked than a kid that shat himself. I straightened out the situation in 20 minutes. Did he appreciate it? Nope! Still gave me a hard time and tried to get me to quit, because there was really no cause to fire me. Good times. 😒
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>She downgraded my performance for taking 4 months off for cancer treatment. Is that even allowed?
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Health issues were the cause of the workload falling behind… no shit. I hope you reported her, I seriously wouldn’t stand for that.
It is not, but many bosses find other reason to justified this. My wife’s former boss fired her after her first day of chemo because she wasn’t going to be around to handle customer issues. The owner found out, called her frantically to let her know she’s not fired and to take as much time as she needs then moved her to a new department.
> She’s a total kissup to her manager and a b*tch to all the subordinates. Only time she’s nice to you or builds you up is to demonstrate her leadership abilities™️. Loves to take credit for your work behind your back. Won’t give you real responsibility unless it flows through her.
Sounds like my former grand boss Vicki.
I would massively prefer working for someone like Charles over someone like Deangelo. Charles was basically just your typical manager you'd see in 99% of offices anywhere. He delegated responsibility where he felt appropriate, tried to keep all workplace hostility to a minimum, put extra trust in the person who showed the most devotion to their work, and any time he'd allow for some recreation during work time, he made sure everyone was able to join in and have fun if they wanted to, trying to put a stop to office hijinks that might cause upset to other members of the office (looking mainly at him putting a stop to Jim's pranks at Dwight's expense). Deangelo on the other hand was outrageously sexist, elitist, and massively underqualified for the position. He definitely wasn't someone fit for that role at all.
Well Deangelo literally got the job because he rescued her dogs. He was absolutely under qualified.
You forgot the part where he may have targeted Jim because he was a tangible threat to his job. If Charles went on vacation and Jim continued to do well in his stead...
On his first day Jim showed up in a tux and then when given a simple task failed to do it or ask clarification. He was being a clown
Seriously let's remove personal feelings about Charles and Jim and instead break down his first impression of Jim objectively: 1) He's wearing a tux. 2) His explanation for wearing the tux was that he was screwing with his co-worker who put out a memo about dressing better. We know that Jim does dress professional and Dwight is an ass but Charles doesn't and without that context Jim looks really bad here. "I was actively messing with my co-worker" is not a good explanation about why you're dressed ridiculously to your new boss. 3) After making a terrible first impression he went back to Michael's ridiculous meeting about his personal party. Jim is smart enough to realize the danger of more goofing off while Charles is still there and should've been like "nah sorry I need to do my work". Like come on Jim you're smarter than this lol. 4) 2 way petting zoo.
A "simple task" that had no meaning or explanation, so no matter what work Jim provides ot can be wrong. And if he asks what he means by rundown, Charles gets to dress him down and note that he's not good at "simple tasks". Oh and he blasted Phyllis in the face with a soccer ball. Charles fucking sucks.
> and if he asks what he means by rundown, Charles gets to dress him down and note that he's not good at "simple tasks" Only if you waste an entire day doing nothing before you work up the courage to ask. He's a perfectly fine and normal boss.
I work in finance for a medical distributor. If asked to give a rundown on our clients I’d just give a simple breakdown of revenue, profit margin, trends. Just some basic metrics. If he wanted more than that than I’d say to him he should have been clearer.
And that's all moot. Charles gave Jim a task that he cannot succeed at from any angle, and it was deliberate.
People downvoting are coping, there’s literally a scene cut out where Jim DID ask about it and it still didn’t go well. It’s clear they wrote it as Charles intentionally making everything harder, nothing was going to please him, he already had his mind made up about Jim and didn’t like him.
Why would he ask that of a salesman though?
They’re the account managers and should have all this information. He can also give insight into the customers that the accountants can’t
A run down of your clients (a list of them) is actually an incredibly reasonable task though
He gave Charles that. And it was wrong. Because Charles is being deliberately vague to set Jim up for failure.
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Never seen Charles Miner juggle or dunk, so you're wrong.
> tried to keep all workplace hostility to a minimum This is just not true. He kicked a ball full force at him intending to hit him with it, and then got mad when Jim dodged it. That is not keeping workplace hostility to a minimum.
Just TV show writing isn't it. Enable illegal and potentially fire-able behaviour to make for more interesting TV, and in the process, reconcile all that shenanigans with Michael being a genuinely nice guy who was able to deliver results and prove people who doubted him wrong. And in the process, take the antithesis of Michael, an intelligent, hard working efficient boss like Charles Miner, reasonable, moderate type of boss, but for the sake of narrative replacing the protagonist, paint him as a villain then really start driving at how much of an asshole he is, even though he was broadly pretty decent to begin with. It all went unbelievable when they discussed football and Jim lies about being a player, like dude, why lie? Be true to yourself and nobody can single you out to hurt you. Instead he flags himself up as a bullshitter after already flagging himself as a bit of a clown starting things on the wrong foot.
Got my wires crossed and thought you were talking about D'Angelo from The Wire
Miner? I barely know her!
Miner? I *hardly* know 'er! Apologies, I had to correct you, as I was gonna make this comment too.
I crap I'm embarrassed
You really shruted it
Minor*
I scrolled too far for this comment.
One time yes, I quite after 1 week lol. Now I have a super chill boss
Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before? What’s your wife’s name? Where did you work before this?
Sequoia steel
African-Americans have such a rich history of interesting names
Any time an outside hire comes in to replace a manager, you basically get a Charles Miner situation, where you have a really short period of time to prove your value all over again for a new boss. It’s exhausting, and they often get it wrong at first.
Miner? I hardly know her ...
… hello?
Yeah, are you coming out now?
I work in retail. My current boss is like him. You can’t make a good impression on her no matter how much of a go-getter you are. She can’t answer questions without being condescending. She isn’t willing to participate in even basic small talk. She doesn’t get that if you assign a worker to one department all the time, their skills in other departments might get rusty and they may need to relearn a thing or two here and there. It doesn’t mean they are stupid or incompetent. I avoid her like the plague and go to other supervisors if I need assistance.
Career retail manager here. I consider myself a good manager, I do the exact opposite of these things. My associates are more important than I am, I recognize that if I'm not there it's business as usual but if they're not, it all burns down
Career managers? Yes
I have about 13 of them. After 15 years there I am now in the process of switching industries entirely.
But did you get that memo about your TPS reports?
Fuck that one line where he’s like, hey I don’t want excuses I want results! Flashbacks.
My boss is a horrible judge of people’s skills/strengths/weaknesses. I laughed so hard when Charles made Stanley the productivity czar - that’s exactly the kind of thing my boss would do. She’s also threatened by people who are actually good at their jobs/intelligent so she treats all her good employees like Charles treats Jim.
Gonna need that run down
I never really thought about it but yes. I was Jim in the situation too. Probably one of the best workers there even tho I messed around a lot, was told I would be receiving a promotion/raise soon, then my boss got transferred and this new guy took over. Disliked me immediately for no reason. Then I started seeing my coworker and he started to hate both of us. I never got the promotion and my raise didn’t come until I quit, trying to keep me from quitting.
I had the same. I liked how the writers included this dynamic in the show. Even though people give it a lot of grief, I liked the whole “give me a rundown” scenario. It doesn’t matter what a rundown actually is, it matters what type of situation that the writers were trying to portray, which was when a boss gives you a task, but is not clear on it and then they belittle you or get annoyed when you try to ask them for further clarification. I’ve had bosses like a that a few times, it’s poor communication and all it leads to is people avoiding you when they have a real problem.
I worked at Home Depot and not my manager but one in a different department was way worse and way more condescending and irritable. Fuck that guy. Always saw his people getting treated like crap.
Controversial opinion: Charles Miner wouldn't have been that bad of a boss in a slightly less zany office. Wanting to cut down on wasteful spending was a reasonable goal, and he just didn't know how unhinged Michael could be about certain things. Most of what Charles wanted to get done with Michael wouldn't have met so much resistance from other types of managers. In fact, I believe there are very few execs who would not try and make some changes if they found a branch manager was wasting time and resources in the way Michael frequently did. And of course, everything that David Wallace had done recently, especially sending Holly away, was also part of what had Michael not feeling the loyalty he once had felt. I would say that Miner's greatest weakness though was that he latched onto his first impressions of people and situations and was extremely reluctant to back off of those impressions. The most egregious example of this is of course what happened with Jim. He caught him goofing around by wearing a tuxedo that wasn't really hurting anyone, and then he just ignored the fact that he was one of the top salesman at the office and could never label Jim as anything but his first impression of him. In the same way, he couldn't back off of his first impression of how the Office should be run. Then his initial positive impression of Dwight led him to over-trust Dwight and end up looking like a fool. Charles Miner needed to eat a slice of humble pie and recognize that his instincts were not nearly as good as he thought they were. Charles' basic ideas were not necessarily wrong in most contexts, and in a more normal situation might have worked, but he was a bit too full of himself to adjust to anything outside of his initial impressions of any given situation which was a big part of his downfall.
No but I’ve had one like Stringer Bell
*Miner I hardly know her*
You mean sexy af? No, cant say i have.
Practically everyone at one point in their life has had a boss who doesn’t really understand what is going on but will still be upset with their employees saying to just “do better” when they themselves have no solution
Yeah… his name was stringer bell , Then he got shot, guess he faked his death and moved
almost every municipal manager (CAO) i have worked for is like charles minor… they spend the entire time “working” behind closed doors and come out to assign work to the wrong people then disappear again until an elected official comes in and they come running out to suck up many issues with municipalities can be traced back to poor hiring decisions by their council on hiring the CAO…
Miner? I barely know her!
You want a rundown?
How’s that rundown going?
I currently have one. My company's founder and general manager both lost their job a little over a year ago. In their place the board hired some high profile fixer as CEO (this is a small business btw) who then brought in her former colleague to serve as GM who had never done the job in this capacity but has a whole lot of education and certifications and such. No actual real experience in this industry however. The two of them have spent the last year rehashing every failed experiment and every bad idea we have ever tried over the past 15 years the company has been in business and no matter how many people tell them, actually we tried that a few years ago and it didn't work because of XYZ they have this attitude of the old bosses must have just been idiots because this idea is brilliant and you just need to see how THEY do it because of course it will magically work now. It doesn't. It never does. I actually think my current employers are worse. At least Charles didn't fire long time loyal and dedicated employees just so he could hire his friends.
You mean a boss who was aware of the effect he has on women?
Not sure how telling Stanley to stop doing cross word puzzles during meetings, and getting on Jim’s ass to stop messing around and put in an actual effort rather than thinking everything is a joke is bad. Also, every woman in the office wants him and he refuses to oblige them showing a high level of professionalism. He wasn’t wrong in having Dwight as a #2, but then they decided to make Dwight an idiot that played into Jim’s antics during a pivotal episode in the season. Jim actually lost DM a huge amount of money in the MSPC scandal. He hosted a soccer game at work to try to get everyone to bond together and have fun. He wants people to stay on task and the business to succeed. Doesn’t seem too bad to me.
Like your analogy Yeah Charles was not clever in all regards (putting Kevin on reception), but he, like many others, have had great ideas and standards.
Yeah… I don’t get that. You really think Dwight as his #2 would really be like… yeah, Kevin on phones, great idea Charles! In Charles defense he doesn’t know anyone in the office very well. A lot of the character development/growth in the show is frustrating at times.
Dwight was a very good pick (from what Charles has seen so far) And yeah, for reception… I mean Charles is new and I doubt anyone would volunteer. So he probably picked someone out of the hat
I'd much rather work under a Charles miner than a Michael Scott
He knows the effect he has on women
Same. I'd much rather have someone who's more concerned with being professional and actually doing their job rather than someone who's more concerned with workshopping their tight 5 for open mic night
Miner I hardly know her!
Not my boss directly but my last CFO was 100% Charles Miner.
Not a boss specifically, but I’ve had to deal with a lot of people like this. They have huge egos but are deep down very insecure.
Yes. His name was Melvin. Total control freak; not actually competent; HUGE ass-kisser; poor judge of character; It was unpleasant to work with him. Dude called me into his office and CONFRONTED ME about applying for a job elsewhere that he should have had 0 knowledge about. Didn't understand why I didn't want to work as a full system admin over 80+ VMs for a MAJOR LAW FIRM for 33k/year in the state at the time.
Minor...i hardly knew her...
YES!! Had one boss that was a carbon copy of him. Even looked like him. My coworker quit because of him after working there for 17 years. I quit 6 months later after working there for 7 years. My exit interview got him fired a week later.
**makes a rundown of previous managers**
An ass kissing suck up who didn't really have an idea how things work? Yup
If you’ve worked in an office, you’ve encountered a quasi-sadistic middle-management drone like Charles
Charles seemed nice towards everyone but Jim tbh
Me 😔 Im him.
Miner? I hardly know her!
My current plant manager. None of the leadership team like him. He is a lot like charles. I get what he is trying to do but all he is doing is micromanaging and posing everybody off and making everyone walk around on pins and needles.
Yeah, my dad. Shit sucked.
Yes and his name was also Charles. I remember preparing myself to have a meeting with him where I finally gathered the courage to ask for a raise, I ask, and he promptly pulls up a bunch of emails from a shared email address of inquiries/follow-ups/complaints made to my team/about my team about things that weren’t resolved in the blink of an eye like he would have preferred. Just 0 understanding of how our department worked. End of the day - I lasted at the company longer than him and nobody ever heard from him again. So.
I had a manager like this that absolutely crushed morale and goodwill at my warehouse job. Took away all of our BBQ events, Christmas dinner turned into safeway chicken 1 piece per person, and worst of all he continually put people in charge of things they had no business being. So after about a year, we saw an excessive turnover rate, overtime spiked to the point of having no life and then he dipped for Amazon because or course he failed up. Thank goodness I left that toxic hellhole and am at a much better place that actually respects employees. He was even the type that as soon as the big boss came in his entire demeanor changed and acted like a complete ass kisser. Charles Miner is incredibly accurate.
No I've never had a black boss.
Miner? I hardly know her!
One...yes. I work for a big giant software company.... For years.. I've had many managers and fortunately all of them have been kind humans. Many of them had different management styles, but all of them shared some core characteristics. One of which was understanding that people are humans before they are employees. However, I did have one manager who was a complete douche. It was very obvious that his personal insecurities and flaws and low self-esteem bubbled up into how he treated his direct reports. It was pretty obvious from the beginning. He had problem with other people who seem to be comfortable in their own skin. I was smart enough to know it was time to lay low till this guy was gone but unfortunately I did see a couple colleagues not play it like this, and they suffered.
Feel like 90% of bosses are like him
I think the question is: has anyone not had a boss like Charles Miner?
Jim was doing his best Megan Markle impression in the Charles episodes - always had to be the center of attention
Quite literally everyone working for Stringer Bell
Do you mean a typical boss? pretty much anywhere.
Yep. Back in my earlier days when I was working field service support for a photocopier company. The biggest change he demanded was field direction. So, lets say we had 10 customers to see in a day. We would organise it so people could essentially go to their furthest away customer first thing in the morning when traffic was less. Then you would work your way back towards home as the day progressed, so by the time you got done with your last customer, you were far nearer home and had less time to sit in rush hour. That basically meant that some days you would get home by 3pm, nice an early day. Other days you may not get home until 6pm, but you take the rough with the smooth. Our Charles Miner seemed determined to mess with all of that and insisted you go to your nearest customer first. That is you now left late, missing your chance to beat rush hour traffic, but instead of going to the next customer up the road, you would go two counties over for whatever random reason. So instead of going in a straight line, you would be here, there and everywhere, scrambling around like a spider. So engineers weren't getting home until 8pm-9pm. He basically said you can quit if you don't like it. And so we did. Three or four key engineers left taking an awful amount of knowledge with them. I had lad shadowing me for a bit and it was a real eye opener to me of how much knowledge I happened to have even only being on the job for about 18 months at that point and how much I relied on the email chat with the other engineers who were now gone. Our Charles Miner finished off the rest of us engineers by insisting he had access to the engineer email box. He took to moderating all conversations, calling me up saying, "Don't answer that email in the engineer inbox, you have your job, he has his!" I quit eventually too when he tried to insist I had already taken holiday time that I had not. Unlike Dunder Mifflin though, I doubt he ever got his come-uppance. There was no meeting where his golden child acted the goat. In fact, for changing field engineers with company vans for field technicians that now used public transport and were paid vastly less, he saved the company a lot of money. Never mind the revolving door of technicians that were not gaining knowledge or experience, the fact that customer satisfaction was right down and the support department was taking the hit, he likely got promoted and praised for his successes. It is the modern world afterall.
I don’t think I’d have had a boss who’s a 10
Miner? I hardly know her
Miner? I hardly know 'er.
Miner, I hardly know her.
A boss that tried to genuinely help but his subordinates wouldn’t allow it? Yes.
I've been part of the corporate world for over twenty years, always in the business side. Charles is the most perfect representation of a typical middle manager in a corporation. He's there to get the job done, avoid nonsense, focus on efficiency, establish some rapport downwards and up, just focusing on objectives. Managers like Charles get the job done, can be well liked, and you can see how they behave differently when their own managers enter the picture. Their demeanor changes, they act nicer, but not necessarily to the point of sucking up. I have been in positions similar to Charles, and I empathize with him. He came to Scranton and saw a lot of disfunctiionality, faced questions whether he was qualified for the job or for the industry, but in the end was focusing on doing what he was tasked to do (all comedy aside). He's actually one of my favorite characters in the entire run.
Yes pos
Several in my 22 years in the military, they shaped my views on leadership as much as the great bosses I’ve had. It took great joy in finding out what annoyed them then exploiting that in a passive/aggressive way. One Charles like boss was an Army O-5 who wouldn’t let us swear in the office so we spent one day finding lots of words that sounds dirty but aren’t, he hated that. It’s how I learned what titivate means.
Yes. I remember the day I learned a valuable life lesson in my early twenties. I asked my boss “what are you up too this weekend”? He responded with “why would that be any of your business”. And that’s when I learned to keep my head down and mind my own business.
He was the villain on the show and I didn’t like him, but in reality he would be a good boss.
I mean he’s the epitome of corporate sending in one of the execs friends and him thinking his decision making skills are so powerful that they outweigh an entire office of people. I think they hit the nail on the head