seagull manager

(SEE.gul MAN.uh.jur)

n.

A manager who only interacts with employees to criticize their work or when a problem arises.

— seagull management n.

Example Citation:

"The president is acting like a seagull, swooping in, making a lot of noise and flying out. When operating in this mode, executives focus on finding people to criticize but never balance their efforts with finding an equal number of employees to praise.

Counteract this tendency by spending time trying to catch employees in the act of doing something right, and praise them accordingly. This will improve morale for all your workers. If you focus only on being a seagull manager, your employees will cringe at the sight of you, will do only the minimum effort to get by and will tell all their friends to avoid your business."

— Scott Clark, "The Miracle of Morale-Building," Arizona Business Gazette

Earliest Citation:

However, it was our native US marketing wheel who told me about 'seagull managers' — externally recruited senior execs who drift into a firm for a short while, disrupt everything and then get headhunted off somewhere else, clutching their meretricious resumes and well-thumbed copies of The Minute Manager.

— Michael Madison, "The Sharp End," Marketing, May 26, 1988

Notes:

Here's the original — and slightly bowdlerized — definition by Gareth Branwyn in Wired 4.09's Jargon Watch column: "A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, poops all over everything, then leaves."

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