Is Office Rule-Making Bad Management?

This is an interesting post about how office rule-making is both a symptom of bad management and is often itself bad management. In effect, the author is saying that if a firm adopts rules like the nine he highlights here, it doesn’t have managers at all. Managers are people who are supposed to exercise discretion in directing and organizing work. Rule-making is often an attempt to avoid the responsibility of exercising managerial discretion. >>>

LINK: 9 Idiotic Office Rules That Drive Everyone Insane (by Travis Bradberry in LinkedIn)

As my company has grown, so has our difficulty maintaining standards. There have been many instances where someone crossed a line, and we were tempted to respond with a new rule that applied to everyone.

But that’s where most companies blow it.

In just about every instance, upon closer inspection, we realized that establishing a new rule would be a passive and morale-killing way to address the problem. The vast majority of the time, the problem needs to be handled one-on-one by the employee’s manager.

What do you think?

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