The budget cometh.

[Riding in Circles]

Yet more attempts to address the economy, with never any movement to address the real burden on the country, the public sector, why get one good manager for £60k a year when you can give the same job to five bad managers at £25k a year each and know it will be messed up, then spend countless amounts on trying to put it right.

 

[dan_bo]

That's the kind of chat that really cheers me up brother.

 

[NickM]

There is such a thing as a "good manager"?

That's odd. All the ones I've ever encountered were peanuts.

 

[Landslide]

...why get one good manager for £60k a year when you can give the same job to five bad managers at £25k a year each...

Mainly because if you've got managers at ~£25k then the staff they are managing will be earning ~£20k or (significantly) less. In the civil service, were equivalent staff to be managed by someone on ~£60k, this wage gap would equate to 4-6 job "grades".
No matter how good a manager you are, there's very little likelihood that you'll be able to keep a handle on affairs across such a wide range of roles and responsibilities.

 

[User482]

Yet more attempts to address the economy, with never any movement to address the real burden on the country, the public sector, why get one good manager for £60k a year when you can give the same job to five bad managers at £25k a year each and know it will be messed up, then spend countless amounts on trying to put it right.

And there was me thinking that the economy had been buggered up by the excesses of the private sector...which the public sector is busy bailing out.

 

[Riding in Circles]

Mainly because if you've got managers at ~£25k then the staff they are managing will be earning ~£20k or (significantly) less. In the civil service, were equivalent staff to be managed by someone on ~£60k, this wage gap would equate to 4-6 job "grades".
No matter how good a manager you are, there's very little likelihood that you'll be able to keep a handle on affairs across such a wide range of roles and responsibilities.

They should scrap the civil service and start again, all your post talks about is job creation, which is what the civil service is good at, what it is not good at is getting results because it seeks to employ quantity rather than quality.

 

[Landslide]

They should scrap the civil service and start again, all your post talks about is job creation, which is what the civil service is good at, what it is not good at is getting results because it seeks to employ quantity rather than quality.

You may make inferences from my post, but in no way have I stated there is job creation. Recent years in my part of it have been all about reducing staffing (largely through "natural wastage"), whilst consistently achieving improved KPIs etc.

Like it or not, there are hierarchies in pretty much any large business, and (IME) vast leaps between employees and their managers cause more problems than can be offset against any amount of fiscal savings that may be made by cutting out large layers of management.

To some extent, you might be right that the emphasis is on quantity rather than quality, but this tends to manifests itself in terms of (admittedly some very good) generalists rather than specialists.

 

[GilesM]

There is such a thing as a "good manager"?

That's odd. All the ones I've ever encountered were peanuts.

There's loads of good ones, you have obviously only worked in bad places, perhaps you should think of it like football, even a good manager will always be limited by the quality of the players.

 

[GaryA]

Admin please transfer this thread to P&L where it belongs


where I can post my 'dumb and dumber' piccy once again

 

[Riding in Circles]

Actually I'm having a bit of a rant after the local council messing up on a simple (according to them) application for some documentation which was supposed to take three days. It is now a month later and has cost me £750 in various fees which should never had been required, being lied to five times and now they look like they have totally messed it up, including issuing then loosing the documents. Their answer is that it looks like I will have to start the process again. Aaaaargh!