Are You Being A Rude Manager?

Do any of us really know what it means to be "rude"?
Do any of us really know what it means to be “rude”? Image Credit: Deornelas4

If I was to go and talk with the members of your team about how you come across at work, what do you think that they would tell me? Most importantly, do you think that any of them would tell me that you are rude person? As managers we are always trying to use our manager skills to get the most out of our team and I think that we all agree that we need to be able to connect with them in order to do this. If we are coming across to anyone as being rude, then are we doing something wrong? What is this rudeness thing and how can we use it?

Are You Polite At Work?

As managers a key part of what we try to get done every day is to use our manager training to convince people to do the things that we know that they should be doing. There are a number of different ways that we can go about doing this, but being rude is generally not one of the ways that we would pick. However, maybe we are wrong? Let’s face it: less polite is generally not something most of us consider a good thing, but perhaps using a global health catastrophe (Covid-19) to rethink your ideas around what exactly it means to be rude might not only help you lead a more daring life, but also help you get more done with less stress. Who wouldn’t want that?

It turns out that you can’t be too kind, but you can be too polite. If we’re going to be talking about how much politeness is too much, then we should probably define what you mean by the word polite. Let us agree that if we are going to move away from being polite it does not mean that we’re going to swear off saying please and thank you or start refusing to help little old ladies carry their groceries across the street.

Kindness and decency are always in style. What we need to do is to care a lot less about making other people comfortable at the expense of our own desires. No more saying yes to social invitations out of a sense of obligation or pursuing a particular life course because your parents or neighbors think you should. Think that you can do this?

Is It Time To Become More Rude?

There is reason to think a little more of the sort of “rudeness” that entails putting your own needs before others’ expectations is probably a good idea. Did you know that the most common end-of-life regret is too much time wasted trying to please others and ignoring the dictates of your own heart? So if that’s what we mean by being a little less polite, then more power to us. We need to understand that being less “polite” isn’t just about avoiding deathbed regrets. It can help us be more productive and happier at work day-to-day too.

Every manager would like to help their organizations get their meeting bloat under control so they can waste less time and achieve more. What we need to do is to re-define the word rude. If you have the courage to do so you need to walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it’s obvious you aren’t adding value. We need to understand that it’s not rude to leave. Instead, we need to understand that it’s rude to make someone stay and waste their time. However, don’t forget that you do have to stick around during team building activities!

Right now many of us think making others even slightly uncomfortable is rude. However, what if avoiding their slight discomfort makes you uncomfortable or unproductive yourself? What’s worse for you, causing a meeting organizer to reconsider their guest list or wasting an hour in abject boredom?

Keep in mind that life is short. How much more productive and happy could you be if you redefined rude so that wasting someone else’s time or insisting they adapt their style to suit your preconceptions was considered far ruder than saying no to a pointless meeting or allowing your personality to shine through at work? As managers we need to never stop appreciating and helping others and looking for ways to put them at ease. Perhaps for us maybe the post-pandemic world is the perfect opportunity to stop being quite so “polite.”


What All Of This Means For You

Managers are charged with the responsibility of finding ways to get the most out of our teams. In order to make this happen, we also have to be able to get the most out of ourselves. This can be hard to do if we find ourselves doing things for other people. What we need is a way to take back control of our time. Could becoming ruder be the right way to go about doing this?

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has caused many managers to take the time to rethink how we go about accomplishing tasks. We, of course, have to kind to the people that we work with. However, perhaps we don’t have to be as polite to them as we have been. What managers need to understand is that their desires are something that they have to account for before they take care of the needs of others. We may not want to make other uncomfortable when they are around us, but if not doing so impacts your productivity then you need to start to become ruder.

Managers really need to spend some time thinking about what really matters to them. Yes, we need to be supportive of our teams; however, we also have to understand that taking care of our needs has to come before the needs of everyone else. If we can reprioritize our actions and take care of ourselves first then we can boost our productivity and get more done. Becoming more rude may be just the thing that we need to do in order to get more done.


– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™


Question For You: How could a manager determine if they had become too rude?


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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As managers, we need to be very careful as we pick who our friends in the workplace are going to be. We need to be careful to be close, but not too close, to the members of our team. We also have to use our manager skills to pick friends from our peers in order to make it easier to get things done at the office. Where things can get a little bit tricky is when we try to decide if we want to be friends with our boss. There’s no manager training for this kind of decision. Will this help or hinder our career?