How not to manage

It's Monday morning after what can be described as a bad week at work. So bad that the weekend wasn't quite enough to recover from it, although I did get lots of chores done. In explanation I should probably say that I usually love my work, and I've had the fantastic opportunity of having had lots of good experiences with lots of people who are fantastic people to work for and to work with. Currently though, I'm on this one case which I can only say would not be so such a bad case if not for the people on it.

I'm sure the people on it are perfectly nice people, and in real life I'd probably like them, but I'm learning a lot on how NOT to manage from them. For instance, while in an investment bank it might be okay to make people work 90 hour weeks forever, in my company you don't expect your teams to work 50-60 hour weeks for 2 months straight when the expectation is 40 hour weeks. You also do not yell at your analysts, or the other managers for doing work on other cases because analysts generally know how to allocate their time between what is urgent.

I guess I'm also learning a lot on what it means to be middle management and what to do and not do. The one thing I have learnt, is that it is demoralizing to workers if middle management is negative. As middle management, never criticize the managers openly, and never express negativity about the feasibility of meeting deadlines or your own workload because it is demoralizing to the workers who consequently feel they have to take on everything.

I need to be off this case. I can't believe I have at least two more months of this to look forward to. JB says that if you hate work for more than a month you should quit, but there are and will be other cases so that doesn't always make sense.