I had a manager who used to not only schedule meetings with subject lines of "Meeting", with no agenda, he'd send instant messages people at about 5pm, with the IM marked as high priority or urgent, with just their name ("Bill..."). He'd send that single line, and then not follow up for 45 minutes.
I ignored them, but co-workers would call me in a panic asking where he was, because I had a line of sight to his office. They often thought they were being fired, but it was invariably some trivial request.
What was worse, he'd start one of these "urgent" IMs to ask them something, get the answer himself, and then just forget about the IM. Meanwhile, anxious employees were sitting on pins and needles waiting for him to follow up on what they thought was actually high priority.
Because his meetings had no agenda, people stopped going to them when they had real work to do. This frustrated him tremendously when there really was a serious matter. The funniest thing was that he complained about the team's lack of communication. When you look in your calendar and see 22 meetings with him, with some being project launches, some being personnel reviews, some being technical discussions, and some being budget discussions, and every single one of them being labelled "meeting", with no more details, it's not the team that's got the communication problem.
I had a manager who used to not only schedule meetings with subject lines of "Meeting", with no agenda, he'd send instant messages people at about 5pm, with the IM marked as high priority or urgent, with just their name ("Bill..."). He'd send that single line, and then not follow up for 45 minutes.
I ignored them, but co-workers would call me in a panic asking where he was, because I had a line of sight to his office. They often thought they were being fired, but it was invariably some trivial request.
What was worse, he'd start one of these "urgent" IMs to ask them something, get the answer himself, and then just forget about the IM. Meanwhile, anxious employees were sitting on pins and needles waiting for him to follow up on what they thought was actually high priority.
Because his meetings had no agenda, people stopped going to them when they had real work to do. This frustrated him tremendously when there really was a serious matter. The funniest thing was that he complained about the team's lack of communication. When you look in your calendar and see 22 meetings with him, with some being project launches, some being personnel reviews, some being technical discussions, and some being budget discussions, and every single one of them being labelled "meeting", with no more details, it's not the team that's got the communication problem.
This is the office nightmare version of "we need to talk"