Csdrhrt

In the department I work for, no responsibilities are clearly stated by managers nor enforced by them. This is causing relationship problems with colleagues. I am asking if there are either better ways to communicate the issue to the managers themselves (or the CEO) or better methods to handle the consequences with my colleagues.

Better details:

The focus of the issue are my direct manager and the head of department (his boss). They do not have a clear separation of responsibilities between themselves. Anyone at the department never really knows which of the two he/she is supposed to be talked with for any given issue. They're both retired public employees.

Also, they do not assign specific tasks for specific people, and even if implicitly they do (i.e. a task is broadly stated, and a specific person is pointed out), said person is never asked about the outcome or conclusion of the task. Many people here are fairly motivated, and we receive a certain workload from other departments and customers (managers rarely intermediate such requests).

Typical things that happen around:

1. A task is broadly proposed. Nobody ever delivers or gets blamed (publicly or in private) for it.




2. People propose lame ideas, expecting others to execute them. In worse cases a meeting with managers is scheduled to decide to go for said idea. Nobody gets actually tasked (not even the proposer of said idea).




3. A specific person is spontaneously mentioned during a meeting he/she is not attending, as the person who should "take responsibility" for solving a given issue (because he/she is more proficient with the required tool or whatever reason). The managers do not ever go talk to said person directly. I'm not even sure they expect other people in the meeting to tell this person they're "tasked" with something.




4. Colleagues have their own ideas of how things should be done concerning my work, they'll sometimes approach the managers with those ideas. I'm never put on the loop about it. Neither in the sense of "good ideia, talk to the responsible person" nor in the sense of "call him and let's discuss together".




5. It did happen a few times that someone came to me and said something in the lines of "I've talked to the manager/director and he thinks it's best if you do A and B...". The manager/director never talks to me about it.

None of this is personal. Some people have better relationships with the bosses and talk more freely with them, but everyone in the department suffers from these issues at some level.

Things I've already done:

1. I've told my manager directly I believe is disrespectful not to be informed directly of my tasks.


2. I've told him I also believe it's disrespectful of mine to ask for complex tasks from colleagues, specially if my request is never to be seconded.


3. I've once scheduled a private meeting and asked that a certain tasks that was assigned during a person's absence should be directly and specifically informed by him to said person. (He did talk publicly to that person, but mostly told him to "help" me, without further instructions).


4. I've complained several times that they fail to arrange all necessary people to be present in the meeting. I've even argued that I've never ever saw him calling someone to join a meeting or conversation if that person's work was concerned.


5. I've complained several times that they fail to manage people's activities. They rarely know precisely what one person is doing nor check the quality of said person's work or its actual delivery.


6. I've explicitly complained about people lying about their progress (A colleague once said that the tests on software being developed had all been conducted and passed, but some cases were failing and the tests were not well designed. And that was more than 1 year before they were actually concluded with some cases waived, it wasn't a lie that would become truth over the course of a week or two.)

I try to talk to my colleagues to solve the issues I have with them on a case-by-case basis, but because the bosses rarely criticize anyone's deliveries, it just ends up damaging my relations with my colleagues (think of yourself as the guy trying to tell a classmate he should study for the test when he knows the teacher gives A's without actually correcting tests).

Needless to say, the company's deliveries aren't going so well. But we work on long internal projects while trying to get new big contracts, so it's not like a results report would show these issues taking their toll every few months.

Finally, I obviously believe that complaining too much to the managers just degrades the their opinion about me and hinder chances for career progression (which are not concrete for anyone by the way). It would be great if I could more effectively address some of those matters but look like a reasonable adult (in the eyes of said managers). I've recently considered talking directly to the CEO, but even then he would not believe all of the above at face value, nor due his diligence to check out the facts and address them.

This seems more like an issue with working collaboratively and team dynamics.

Colleagues have their own ideas of how things should be done concerning my work

You are saying the work is not assigned to specific people. Why does it bother you when a coworker proposes ideas about work that was assigned to the team?

I've complained several times that they fail to manage people's activities.

That is not a very nice thing to say. Also managing people's activities to what degree? People can self manage if there is a delivery goal and management is not necessarily downwards, it involves managing upwards and sideways on chain of command.

people lying about their progress

This can be prevented by either management starting to treat each employee as a potential liar and audit every single thing they do, or by people interfering with the rest of the team's work like you are complaining about.

You have an issue with the company's culture: the leadership and communication styles.

To change company culture you would need to be in a very senior position and even then you wouldn't have much chances of succeeding unless you were supported by at least some other senior people and a corresponding HR policy.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to assess companies' cultures during job interviews. You can try but the truth is if the people you talk to are good actors and want to misrepresent the environment, they will manage to do so.

Cut your losses and get out. Unless the job offers you some benefits that are important to you and which you won't find elsewhere. But even then, think over what influence this job is having on you and if you're unable to be happy there, find an alternative and leave.