---
title: "Seven Mistakes That Lead to Management Failure"
description: "After 27 years of work, including 11 years of entrepreneurship, the author realized he had been a manager for 14 years without truly understanding the role. He shares seven common mistakes he made, from doing work himself instead of delegating, to neglecting motivation and performance reviews, offering lessons for effective management."
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published: "2014-06-20"
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# Seven Mistakes That Lead to Management Failure

> After 27 years of work, including 11 years of entrepreneurship, the author realized he had been a manager for 14 years without truly understanding the role. He shares seven common mistakes he made, from doing work himself instead of delegating, to neglecting motivation and performance reviews, offering lessons for effective management.

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I have worked for 27 years, 11 of which were spent starting a business. But from the first year of work, I became a supervisor, managing from a few people to dozens, then hundreds. However, I truly realized I was a supervisor and actually knew how to be one only in the last 13 years. In other words, I spent 14 years as a supervisor making mistakes, causing countless errors and detours!

I paid numerous tuition fees through mistakes, gradually learning to be a supervisor. Now I can clearly distinguish between a worker and a manager. My startup company, which was on the brink of collapse, slowly surfaced and improved. I know now that all this was because I didn't know how to be a supervisor or manage!

**Mistake 1: Doing everything yourself**
My first mistake was working hard myself, forgetting to let subordinates do the work.
I was a capable person. After becoming a supervisor, I misunderstood the principle of "leading by example," always taking the lead and continuing to work hard. I thought I was efficient: if I did 5 out of 10 tasks, leaving only 5 for others, everyone should be grateful. Additionally, some tasks were indeed not well done by others, and I thought it was better to do them myself than to fix their mistakes later. So I was as busy as a bee on a hot pan, but things still didn't get done well.

Until I realized that a supervisor's job is to make people do things, with the team's results as your results. I made up my mind: unless absolutely necessary, never do it myself. Then things changed. I concluded a rule that I now teach new supervisors: "Make others do things, don't do it yourself." A good supervisor is like a king: drinking tea, reading newspapers, governing a big country as if cooking a small fish, uniting everyone's efforts to complete the work.

**Mistake 2: Assuming everyone is self-motivated**
My second mistake was that I am a self-respecting person who hates being criticized. I therefore assumed others would be self-motivated and do everything well. I didn't scold or want to scold, at most I would hint indirectly. This is the origin of the earlier joke: I decided to talk to a subordinate about his problem, but before that, I said many affirming words, fearing he would feel uncomfortable. However, I downplayed the issue, and he thought I was praising him, while I still didn't know what to do.

The truth is: some are self-motivated, some lack self-discipline, and some have wrong ideas that need correction. My friendliness was seen by subordinates as an "indiscriminate nice guy" who couldn't tell right from wrong. The good guys worked themselves to death and harbored resentment, while the bad guys remained lucky and unchanged. The result was that bad money drove out good.

When I had this epiphany, things completely changed. I remember reading Er Yuehe's "Kangxi Emperor" and learning a phrase: "Thunder and rain, all are imperial grace." I knew that reward and punishment are both important tools for a supervisor. Now I am skilled at setting standards for subordinates, from subtle hints to serious statements, to angry reprimands—I can do it all.

**Mistake 3: Not knowing how to give encouragement**
My third mistake was not knowing or giving verbal encouragement. This was also related to my personality of not liking others to criticize me. I was overconfident and didn't care about others' approval. The problem was that I assumed others didn't need extra "verbal rewards," as long as salary evaluations were fair.

Once, a highly capable colleague told me that I had never affirmed his work, which shocked me because it wasn't true—he had many praiseworthy deeds, but I had never said a word.

From then on, I knew how important a supervisor's golden words are. "Love him, say it." Not only affirm good things, but also affirm progress even if it's not yet good enough, because people learn and grow quickly when motivated. Isn't that the core spirit of Carnegie training?

**Mistake 4: Ignoring performance reviews, hating them**
I didn't like being evaluated, especially when I was unfairly treated as a worker. So when I became a supervisor, I hated reviews and deliberately ignored them.

I believed in what I saw with my own eyes and tried to give relatively accurate evaluations to all workers. The problem was that when busy with work, I forgot many things I should do, especially when managing more than 20 people. My visual evaluation began to distort; I couldn't see many quiet, unassuming workers. At that point, an objective review method was needed.

Don't be overconfident in your intelligence; smart people especially fail to see the contributions of those who work hard but aren't smart.

**Mistake 5: Not being a good referee**
A good supervisor should enable subordinates to achieve "one plus one greater than two" efficiency, so team harmony is crucial. The first step to harmony is not to prevent internal disputes, but to set good rules so that conflicts can be constrained and stopped. The supervisor is the enforcer, the referee.

In my entrepreneurial process, I often used fewer people, so poor performance was often blamed on insufficient manpower. I rarely thought that poor internal team interaction caused low performance. And my inability to resolve disputes and be a referee was the key reason. "Reasonable or not, three hits with a pole; unreasonable, three hits with a pole"—I used to give both sides 50 lashes. When disputes occurred, I always hoped for harmony, not harshly blaming the wrong side, which was unfair to the right side. Naturally, internal rifts appeared, and how could team coordination work well?

Now my style is to handle things quickly and clearly distinguish right from wrong. When the referee needs to blow the whistle, I never hesitate!

**Mistake 6: Caring for subordinates, forgetting the boss**
Perhaps due to sympathy for the weak, in my early days as a supervisor, I always stood on the side of employees, identifying with their roles and positions, forgetting the boss and the organization. When there was a conflict of interest between the boss and subordinates, I usually defended employee interests. Especially in the early days of entrepreneurship, I even forgot I was the employer. If I couldn't give workers better treatment, I felt miserable. As a result, the company's operational burden became heavier.

This is a common mistake among supervisors: acting as a foreman, prioritizing workers' interests, and ignoring whether the organization's operational capacity can afford it. Later, I adjusted: a supervisor is a "representative of both sides," sometimes on the labor side, sometimes on the capital side. You must choose correctly in your heart to keep the balance between top and bottom. Neither "foreman" nor "boss's appendage" is the correct position.

**Mistake 7: Not realizing supervision is a profession, forgetting to learn humbly**
I made many other mistakes as a supervisor, but I'll summarize the last one as "thinking supervision is innate, not knowing to learn humbly." In fact, supervision is a profession that requires various professional skills, correct attitudes, bearing the success or failure of tasks, and affecting the fate of workers. However, most supervisors are promoted due to a specific professional skill, whether in finance or sales. But once promoted to supervisor, all difficulties arise. Unfortunately, companies lack supervisor training, and schools don't have "supervisor studies." Everyone learns through groping and trial and error.

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