I wonder why that is. My experience has generally been the opposite. Every manager I have ever had has been, at worst, pretty OK — and most have been really fantastic.
In nearly all of my workplaces, it's the upper echelon that has typically been painfully incompetent (poor financial strategy, too much micromanaging in areas they don't understand, etc.), and I've been mystified how they managed to hire and retain such talented middle managers. I'm sure it is survival bias, though, because a company can only scrape by with bad upper management if middle management is unusually good.
Thankfully, my current and previous job were both at companies where the C-suite actually know how to do their jobs well. Even though I've some had fantastic managers at otherwise poorly-run companies, that's not enough to keep morale high. No matter how much your manager supports you and encourages you, it feels like you're wasting your life when you feed your most productive working years into a company you don't believe in.
One reason could be the type of industry one may be in; banks: loads of chair-warmers, mainstream tech: probably better because the scope of hiding in hierarchy may be less (not sure, just speculating).
In nearly all of my workplaces, it's the upper echelon that has typically been painfully incompetent (poor financial strategy, too much micromanaging in areas they don't understand, etc.), and I've been mystified how they managed to hire and retain such talented middle managers. I'm sure it is survival bias, though, because a company can only scrape by with bad upper management if middle management is unusually good.
Thankfully, my current and previous job were both at companies where the C-suite actually know how to do their jobs well. Even though I've some had fantastic managers at otherwise poorly-run companies, that's not enough to keep morale high. No matter how much your manager supports you and encourages you, it feels like you're wasting your life when you feed your most productive working years into a company you don't believe in.