Middle Management
Some of the directors and senior managers are not competent (many are though).
The incompetent ones are the obvious elephants in the room, but upper management doesn't seem to reprimand appropriately, and prefers to sweep it under the rug with a guise of using the Culture of Accountability versus tackling the problem head on.
The incompetent middle management personality types fall into two main categories: they are either never around, or they are micro-managers who don't know what they are talking about and mask their ignorance and incompetence by questioning and talking condescendingly to functional study team members.
The micro-managers get so wrapped up in details of everything, but they're never around to know the details so they endlessly scrutinize all the work the study teams performs which inevitably stresses out the team members who deal with the details and study work on a daily basis. It would be one thing if they understood processes and had valid, constructive feedback and points to make, but they question and scrutinize for the sake of hiding their own lack of knowledge and to feed their superiority complexes at the end of the day so they can go home feeling accomplished for doing something other than complaining and pushing emails all day.
The micro-managers also have a double standard of what they require of functional study team staff compared to what they provide themselves. They require transparency but do not complete the flow by being transparent downward (even to their own staff); They harp other functional areas to complete dependencies sooner than expected to compensate for their own delays in timelines.
This ultimately crushes morale and turns staff off from even wanting to interactive with these individuals.
