Reading 1/1:
Read the article and choose the best answer (A, B, C or D) for each question.
2345678
Overworked and uninspired - the misery of the middle manager
1. Recently thousands of workers in the US were asked if they fancied the idea of being promoted to the rank of manager. You might have thought they would mostly have said yes. After all,the US is supposed to be the land of opportunity, and the entirety of corporate life is founded on the principle that it is better to be on a higher rung of the ladder than on a lower one. Only they did not say yes at all. A mere third of the workers surveyed said being a manager appealed to them.
2. So why don't most people want to be managers? More than half of them explained they liked the job they had and therefore saw no reason to change it, which seems an excellent reason.
Given that the pyramid is at its widest at the bottom, it is good if lots of people are happy to continue in the same way. It is only a shame that we are so hooked on the idea of progress, we
place so little value on lives spent like this.
3. About a third of the sample said what put them off were the long hours and the responsibility that went with being a manager. A smaller minority did not want to put themselves up for promotion because they did not have the qualifications. This is the only bad reason given - it is a shame and a waste. There are lots of things that stop people from becoming great managers, but the lack of formal qualifications is hardly ever one of them.
Next Question
Next Reading
4. Implicit in all this is a truth that companies try to keep quiet about. Being a middle manager is the most thankless job ever invented. If anyone still clings to the fantasy that it is going to be nice to be a middle manager, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) study puts the record straight. It looked at companies that together employ 320,000 workers, and examined the profile of the least happy 5% of them.
5. The researchers expected to find that these 16.000 miserable workers were mostly downtrodden foot soldiers, misunderstood, cranky geniuses, or the hopelessly incompetent who could be sacked at any minute. Instead they found the typical profile of the terminally miserable was rather different. They were mostly middle performing, middle managers. They were the ones who were doing perfectly fine and had been working in the company for 5-10 years. These middle managers gave multiple reasons for their misery: they felt under-appreciated, overworked.
not listened to, stuck and full of a sense of meaninglessness. But most of all they complained that the people above them were not up to much.
6. The survey authors conclude that the problem is leadership. However, most of us are not going to get good leadership and, even if we did, it would not help those in the middle very much.Of the people I know who detest their jobs the most, all are stuck in this position. It is their job to implement bad decisions made by others. It is their not their fault. They can neither move up, nor move back down, and are more affected by office politics than anyone else.job to take responsibility for things that are
1) The researchers discovered that A. people who were not very good at their jobs were miserable.
ABC people doing well in middle management were the most unhappy.middle managers tended to stay in a job between 5-10 years.
