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Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

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Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#71

Post by chmod775 »

ryandvm wrote: post #23

I've distilled the following maxim from my workplace experience. There are two ways to achieve success in this world: * Be exceptionally skilled at something * Be unscrupulous Those traits certainly aren't mutually exclusive, but the counterexamples of folks that have achieved success without either of them seem to be few and far between. [Obviously we're excluding folks that are "gifted" success.]

The reason you don't usually see both at the same time is that you don't need to be unscrupulous (which can backfire) if you are exceptionally skilled.

Vice versa if you are unscrupulous there's a good chance you can get by without becoming skilled at anything... so you don't.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#72

Post by homonculus1 »

lonelappde wrote: post #47
snegu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, most days I am therapist/coach/mom, and while I think I'm actually pretty decent at it, it's not what I want to be doing. It's emotionally exhausting and rarely rewarding.

I'm curious if your male/father co-worker managers think of themselves (or are thought of) as "dads" at work, or if there are gender biases here.

Ugh, please spare us

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#73

Post by mumblemumble »

mdorazio wrote: post #10

I don’t agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a f…

I think this could be put even more simply:

You get promoted for making your superiors happy, not for making your reports happy.

What actually makes anyone happy is going to vary from organization to organization, from person to person, and from situation to situation. I've known managers whose job was 100% just to keep their subordinates happy, but that happened because keeping those roles filled was one of the company's major challenges.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#74

Post by PeterStuer »

derekp7 wrote: post #50
mdorazio wrote: post #10

I don’t agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a f…

This raises a question in my mind -- do any of these traits actually make the company more successful? Or more generally, are traits that are undesirable to subordinates, yet desirable to higher management, actually good for the company, and are traits that the subordinates value actually detrimental to the company? The reason I ask is that it would seem that natural selection would take over, and if a management sty…

In large companies the connection between personal performance and company results is incredibly weak.

At the lower rungs this is because of how little influence there is on the big picture. On the higher rungs this is because everything has been completely de-risked through outsourcing of responsibility, depersonalizing potential blame in case of failure while at the same time allowing full credit basking when things didn't fail.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#75

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #52
dcole2929 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel like you somehow managed to hit the nail on the head while also completely missing the point. Absolutely agree that often the things that get you promoted and the things that are considered compentency in a manager aren't necessarily the things that make a subordinate view someone as competent. But completely disagree on what those traits are. In my experience, management tends to view favorably things like deli…

I think a key error people often make is assuming that the line engineers are always right. If a decision pisses off the line engineers it must be idiotic! The manager must be a fool. Peter principle in action. This surely happens sometimes. But I’ve personally witnessed a lot of engineers (especially junior engineers) who don’t give a shit about customers or shipping products or building alignment or communicating p…

> This surely happens sometimes. But I’ve personally witnessed a lot of engineers (especially junior engineers) who don’t give a shit about customers or shipping products or building alignment or communicating planning and impact.

This attitude is what I've usually seen from management, and junior engineers are often the ones who fight against this attitude, before they get too jaded and leave. Management will dishonestly claim successful delivery with zero regard for the actual product, and then force the engineers into 24/7 oncall.

> Good managers should support their team’s growth and careers, which should hopefully eliminate some of the “my manager is an idiot” stuff but it can’t eliminate all of it.

That's great, but it's no substitute for actual understanding of the problems. Planning done by incompetent managers is nonsense since they don't understand the low level details of the problems. From what I've seen, promotions into management are usually related to being best buddies with others in upper management. Incompetent managers will then use all types of excuses to justify their position, "I'm focused on hiring and growth of the team", "It's hard to be responsible for people", "leadership skills matter!" etc. all the while hiring and promoting their fellow incompetent friends and having zero care for the actual product.

At least that's what I've seen at Amazon across multiple teams. Over here the incompetent management cliques will even hunt for the junior engineers brave enough to give the managers bad scores on the daily "connections" pop-up survey.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#76

Post by TopHand »

In many situations a manager inherits a team of individuals. He is then judged as a manager by how well he gets these individuals to co-operate and perform. If one of the individuals is totally incompetent, it reflects poorly on the managers employee evaluation if he is unable to bring this employee's performance up. His alternative is to get him promoted off the team. I have seen this on a number of occasions.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#77

Post by smitty1110 »

xibalba wrote: post #44
mdorazio wrote: post #10

I don’t agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a f…

> delivering new revenue AKA growing the company. This seems like an accomplishment that is very worthy of reward/promotion based on the requirements of ownership (shareholders) and senior management.

There are a lot of things that fall under "new revenue" that aren't healthy. I've seen managers lose money in expenses to put "new revenue" on their group's balance sheets, because they come out ahead due to capitalized expenses. Of course, it creates a vicious cycle to make more revenue each year to keep ahead of your expenses, and pretty soon you abandon strategic projects in the pursuit of quarterly tactical revenue.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#78

Post by pyrale »

derekp7 wrote: post #50
mdorazio wrote: post #10

I don’t agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a f…

This raises a question in my mind -- do any of these traits actually make the company more successful? Or more generally, are traits that are undesirable to subordinates, yet desirable to higher management, actually good for the company, and are traits that the subordinates value actually detrimental to the company? The reason I ask is that it would seem that natural selection would take over, and if a management sty…

The McDonnell/Boeing merger is a good example of why the natural selection logic is not a good model to think about human interactions.

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#79

Post by compiler-guy »

EA wrote: post #4

In my experience, incompetent managers often don't realize they are incompetent. They are confident and exhibit traits that do not harm others. Competent mangers often are aware of their flaws and capability gaps. They work too much and are often overly critical of themselves and their projects.

There is very little difference between management and engineers on that score.

Lack of self-awareness is everywhere. (Including with me.)

Re: Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

#80

Post by lnanek2 »

Usually it's competence at climbing the ladder rather than doing the work. I've seen people shoot up here who do super dishonest things like throw out all the engineers' estimates, make their top estimate down based on when they want to ship and would look best to senior management, then they just throw whatever engineer wasn't their friend under the bus when of course the deadline wasn't met. Meanwhile for their friends they'll move mountains to avoid including any negative feedback in their reviews, etc.. So rising in management here is all about optics and alliances. That guy keeps getting bigger and bigger departments put under him, and even acquisitions made to give him more heads, and he's super dishonest and terrible at the actual tech job stuff of doing things like making accurate estimates.
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