58 Examples of Management Problems

John Spacey, September 25, 2021

Management problems are issues and obstacles that are beyond a manager's direct control to solve. Managers typically clear issues and design-out future issues as part of their role. Management problems are things that managers can't easily address because they have broad scope such as a tight labor market or personal scope such as an employee who is disengaged. The following are common examples of management problems.

Absent employees	Administrative overhead and red tape that cause low productivity and delays
An environment of secrecy, subterfuge or sabotage	Breakdown of customer relationships
Broken processes	Business disruptions e.g. disasters
Complex process or project dependencies	Conflict between team members / stakeholders
Critical know-how or information has been lost i.e. knowledge loss	Customers or internal clients with unrealistic expectations
Disengaged employees	Disorganization at the executive level
Employee turnover	Employees bypass process & procedures
Employees fail to adapt to change to their profession and role	Employees that are hostile to management
Employees that lack self-direction, initiative or competence	Failure of partners to deliver to commitments
Failures of infrastructure, facilities and other critical resources	High cost / time commitment required to change technology and processes
Inadequate internal controls	Inefficient organizational structure
Inflated stakeholder expectations	Insubordination
Insufficient budget to accomplish objectives	Lack authority and support to clear issues
Lack of organizational mission, vision and strategy	Legacy systems that represent bottlenecks
Low performing employees	Low professionalism
Low quality requirements from stakeholders	Low team morale
Low work quality from employees, internal teams or partners	Measuring business processes
Miscommunication	Mismatch between processes and systems
Operations issues & risk	Other teams fail to deliver to commitments
Overproduction of documentation that seldom gets used i.e. knowledge waste	Poor data quality
Poor support from stakeholders such as project sponsors	Poor team communication
Procurement & supply disruptions	Project issues & risk
Projects that run overbudget / overschedule	Public relations issues
Quality assurance / control failures	Recruiting and retaining talent
Regulations & compliance issues	Resistance to change
Strategy and planning in an environment of uncertainty and change	System failures
Systems are redundant and incomprehensible	Team uncooperative & hostile towards each other
Uncooperative / hostile counterparts in organization	Unproductive employees
Unstable executive strategy, direction and support	Unstable requirements -- plans changing too often to complete work

Inflated stakeholder expectations relates to stakeholders assuming that you will deliver things without your actual commitment.

The scope of management problems can include governments, societies, markets, organizations, technologies, infrastructure, stakeholders, peers, partners, suppliers and employees. Where a problem is within a manager's direct control to solve it is an issue or challenge.

58 Examples of Management Problems

Management

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