Manager catch phrases

Nurses General Nursing

Published

We have a new manager at one of my jobs. Every interaction with her sounds like she's following a script learned at a leadership seminar. It feels very fake and insincere, and we all wish she'd go away.

She likes the phrase "I offer my sincere, professional apology" for instance. She sent an email with the minutes to the staff meeting, and offered the above phrase to preface her apology for sending it later than, I guess, she wanted to. She used it when she sent me an email with someone else's name. I heard her use the phrase in person as well. It's like dealing with an android or autobot.

She's full of lots of other canned catch phrases. There's lots of talk about team building, over the top praise, and followed by turds containing threats if we aren't compliant, then ending with some more sugary, team building cliches.

Have any of you experienced this? I'm not a fan of scripting. I'm sure there is value in learning leadership skills, but not if it turns you into an obvious phony.

"Thanks for all you do!", usually right after they announce parking restrictions, cancelled raises, or an overtime freeze.

I worked for a company years ago that was trying to improve employee morale by having the new CEO come to our location and have a PowerPoint presentation with random questions that we got to throw into a bag and he would answer them on the spot between presentation slides. One was why we were once again not receiving a merit raise. This was during the first phases of Obamacare talk and he of course stated that by not having raises they were able to decrease the raise in our healthcare coverage contributions. Irony would have it that the next slide was about how much we had exponentially grown as a company that year with a rather large profit increase. Tension was felt while he moved on with that one.

To be fair, they did decide to give us a very small increase a few weeks later and told us via email.

And then a few months later they closed down our location, moved out of state, and we were all laid off.

Specializes in ER Technician.

"Going forward..."

"Above and beyond"

"Strive for 5"

...but the ones I found the most annoying were at my previous employer, they had an acronym for EVERYTHING it was ridiculous.

Some examples:

- PRIDE

- AIDET

- PIT Team, even though the T in PIT stands for team, how redundant.

- and the most annoying one...WIGS aka Wildly Important Goals.

There is an "I" in TEAM. You just have to look hard enough... ;)

It's in the A hole!!! :D

Specializes in Hospital medicine; NP precepting; staff education.

- PIT Team, even though the T in PIT stands for team, how redundant.

To avoid redundancy call it the PI team. Plus, there's the inside joke that it's irrational.

10 points to all who get it.

Specializes in ICU; Telephone Triage Nurse.

Thank you all for the hard work you do. The patients are truly blessed to have you all on our team! (Said for absolutely no reason).

Some managers rock! Mine is a keeper! :cat:

"Thank you for all you do" means I haven't a clue what you do. "Is there anything else I can do for you, I have the time" - I HATE the "I have the time" thing, because I really don't have time but I will MAKE time."

Specializes in Medsurg/ICU, Mental Health, Home Health.
AIDET

Nooooo......

Sorry, having flashbacks...

I live in farm country - tearing down silos is a LOT of work - you have to get all the feed out of the silos, then begin tearing them down. It also depends on if you plan to reuse any of the moving parts within the silo, etc. You don't tear down silos willy-nilly. I always wonder if any of the "suits" making up these phrases have any experience with the actual origins of the catch phrases (such as silos.) But my most hated is the "work smarter not harder." Sorry suits - if it takes 20 min to change a bed, I don't care HOW smart you are, that's how long it takes. If it takes "x" amount of time to verify a bag of blood for a transfusion, do you REALLY want me to cut corners and rush it just to save a few minutes, or maybe not verify it at all - that would save a LOT of time until a mistake is made and a transfusion reaction occurs! And don't get me started on the "scripts"......

Specializes in Hospice, corrections, psychiatry, rehab, LTC.
And then a few months later they closed down our location, moved out of state, and we were all laid off.

In early 2000, I was employed by Charter Behavioral Health Systems. Charter had received some bad publicity in a 60 Minutes report, and the company announced plans to close about half of their facilities. They flew administrators in from the corporate office in Atlanta to lie to us to keep people from quitting. They told us that any facilities that were for sale would not be closed, and my facility was for sale. A psychiatrist in California planned to buy us plus three Charter facilities in California and make a small regional mental health chain out of the four centers. Little did we know that Charter corporate had in effect killed the sale by insisting that the new owner assume liability for any pending lawsuits against the centers in question. Three days after the suits had told us that our jobs were safe, they started pressuring our CEO to get the remaining patients discharged and lock the doors. The problem was that our last five patients were court commitments, and they couldn't just leave. I discharged the last patient who left (sent to a competitor to finish out her court commitment), boxed up the last chart and the meds, and secured everything. We went to the gym, shot baskets with the CEO for a while, clocked out and we were unemployed.

To show you the lengths to which the owners went to extract cash from the operation, originally Charter owned the buildings in which its facilities operated. The owners created a holding company called Crescent, from which Charter facilities then leased the buildings - so they were double dipping. It was not a sustainable business model, but it made a lot of money for a small handful of people at the expense of the rest of us.

Basically, as I understand it, it's the discrete separateness of units or groups within an organization.

The answer to all these questions is hidden in silos*. Every medium to large organisation contains silos. They may be areas of specialisation, discrete departments or simply cliques within the workplace or system.

So the idea is to BRIDGE these silos.

Got it.

Specializes in tele, med/surg, step down.

The best part is when staff cynically repeat them. "Is there anything I can do for you?" Would be a frequent from my prior manager that she was completely insincere about and never followed up with you on if you had a question.

A great one my manager used in emails "it is the expectation" that you attend this staff meeting, document blah blah.

Mind you these managers have now resigned and/or been terminated.

This outbreak reached my coast over a decade ago and has only gotten worse with time. It's the superbug sucking the life out of all surviving staff.

Worse? How depressing!!!

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