Supervisor / Manager

Make no decisions yourself. Either let others decide or involve the whole group, ensuring you can’t be held responsible for the outcome or its consequences.

Once you have a detailed, foolproof plan, stick to it rigidly, no matter how the circumstances change. Under no circumstances should you work iteratively or try experiments and pilots. Those might reveal that your plan isn’t perfect, forcing you to adjust it—and that would be a real waste of time.

For maximum efficiency in decision-making, ensure your steering committee is composed exclusively of yes-men.

To highlight your team’s visibility and importance, send as many team members as possible to every decision-making meeting. This has the added bonus of maximizing your team’s time utilization—they’ll always be busy.

Always remain positive and optimistic, even when the numbers and data clearly indicate otherwise. This way, you’ll keep your employees motivated until the very last moment and deliver the maximum surprise to your stakeholders.

To champion heroics, aim for the hockey stick shape in your burn-up charts. This way, you and your team can showcase how you heroically accomplish an infinite amount of work at the last moment. It also increases your chances of being named Team of the Year.

Seize every opportunity to present your project as red, only to skillfully turn it green at the right moment—proving that you and your team have what it takes to be real heroes. If that’s not feasible, the reverse strategy works just as well: keep your project green until the very end. This shields you from disruptive management attention and lets you step away just before it becomes glaringly, irreversibly red and crashes spectacularly.

Block the use of proven solutions and instead force your employees to develop their own. This not only showcases your innovative spirit but also ensures your team remains occupied for an extended period.

Promote innovation in your company by banning the use of new tools due to security concerns. This way, you effectively force your colleagues to develop their own solutions - nothing drives creativity like reinventing the wheel under pressure.

Only hire employees who are, ideally, copies of yourself - just a few degrees less competent. That way, they pose no threat to your position and you can safely assume they won’t challenge your opinions.

Prefer hiring people who already know everything—and make sure they have that "know-it-all" attitude, too. This saves you the hassle of investing in their development. Performance reviews become completely unnecessary, freeing up your valuable time.

Hire highly specialized employees who are experts in one narrow area—and only want to work in that area. This minimizes the risk of internal transfers and saves you the trouble of backfilling their roles.

Use as many vague buzzwords as possible in your job postings, with a strong focus on SEO optimization. The goal is to generate the largest applicant pool imaginable—after all, the number of applicants is a key KPI when evaluating leadership performance - and the success of your empoyer branding initiatives.

Rather than going through the hassle of actually assessing a candidate’s qualifications, just focus on the number of years they've worked. Academic titles are another easily measurable indicator. Both make it much simpler to slot the person into the appropriate salary band - efficient and conveniently superficial.

To avoid being blamed for having too many open positions, make sure that once someone is hired, they’re never let go due to lack of competence or performance - especially not during the probation period, because that would clearly make you the one who hired the wrong person. And if you did make a mistake? Just promote the employee and transfer them to another department - so any future performance issues can be pinned on someone else.

To minimize the hassle of people management, avoid regular 1:1s—or better yet, cancel them at short notice due to more “important” commitments. This sends a clear message: everything else comes before your employees. A great way to cultivate humility in your team. And if an employee’s performance isn’t up to par, leave it to someone else to break the news. That way, your own relationship with them stays perfectly untarnished.

Keep your employees’ goals as vague as possible. This gives you the flexibility to interpret them however you like and evaluate performance accordingly. It’s crucial to keep the actual intent behind the goals unclear—this ensures employees stay focused on hitting the KPI numbers without being distracted by the real purpose behind them. At the same time, you demonstrate financial prudence: since true goal achievement remains open to interpretation, you can easily avoid performance-based bonuses and salary increases.

If you notice misconduct from an individual employee, under no circumstances should you give direct feedback. After all, if one person is doing it, others probably are too. Instead, issue a new rule that applies to everyone—to prevent the behavior from spreading. When drafting the rule, make sure it contradicts existing policies. That way, you’ll always have something to hold against your employees when needed.

When it comes to communicating important decisions, avoid spamming employees with info emails, blog posts, or anything of the sort. Rely solely on the hierarchical cascade to pass things down. These decisions should also never be documented anywhere. If someone missed the meeting where it was discussed—well, that’s on them. After all, it’s a great incentive for employees to show up to every meeting, regardless of whether they’re on vacation, sick, or with a client.

To justify a promotion to the next level, simply cite the employee’s long tenure and the fact that they’ve asked for it repeatedly. Other criteria are usually too subjective and only spark unnecessary debate. And whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of checking whether there’s actually a suitable open position that needs filling at the higher level. If you wait for that, you’ll never promote anyone. Pro tip: just create new positions as needed. It also shows off your proactive mindset and strategic thinking.

To support your career ambitions, feel free to shamelessly reuse the content and ideas of others—just rephrase them slightly and present them under a flashy new name as your own groundbreaking innovation. Using bold buzzwords, catchy acronyms, arbitrary statistics, and lots of visuals will help your presentation gain maximum traction with management.

When someone comes to you with a problem, just solve it yourself—preferably with a sigh and a visibly annoyed expression. Avoid giving any helpful explanations. This way, your colleague learns nothing new and won’t develop beyond you. Plus, it’s quicker, earns you respect, and ensures you remain indispensable—not just to that one person, but to the whole team. Your legendary status as the office hero will spread in no time.

A company’s success is, of course, measured by its numbers. And if those numbers don’t quite look the way they should, don’t waste time digging into root causes like poor quality, customer dissatisfaction, or lack of efficiency. Instead, reach for the trusted tool of financial engineering: twist, shift, and massage the figures until they shine—at least for now—regardless of what’s actually going on. The real problems? Simply push them into the next fiscal year, where they’ll either become someone else’s issue or, with a bit of luck, can be creatively rebranded once again.