(n.) a manager or overseer who flies into in a business, creates a lot of mess, and then leaves others to clean it up

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For the first time ever in our annual Word of the Year poll, perhaps the fact that Haggard Hawks is predominantly a Twitter-based social feed has influenced your decision. After the world’s so-called “online public square” was purchased and inexplicably rebranded to X by its new owner—alongside a raft of other unpopular changes that saw users abandon the platform in their thousands—more than two-fifths of you opted for seagull manager as the Haggard Hawks Word of the Year 2023. 

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For those of you who don’t know, seagull manager was a term coined by the author Ken Blanchard in 1985, who defined it as referring to the kind of bosses who “fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, then fly out.” (Ahem.) Since then, seagull manager—and, by extension, seagull management—has come to be used somewhat more loosely of any style of leadership that essentially involves creating more problems than were already evident, or else amplifying or worsening the current situation. (Wikipedia, for example, defines seagull management as “a management style wherein a manager only interacts with employees when suspecting that a problem has arisen.”)

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But Blanchard’s original idea appears to be the one that has most struck a chord with you this time around, making this our 2023 Word of the Year.