The Most Common Type of Incompetent Leader
hbr.org
hbr.org
Pretty embarrassed about our current state of leadership skills. In my current organization, we call this syndrome "bring me a rock". Like, I bring a rock, and she says "it's too big, or too brown, or whatever". Instead of outright saying, "I need a medium, smooth, grey, rock". I can deliver if you're explicit.
When I could have offered up lower lying fruit if exact cost was identified as the driver up front. The questions weren't easy to translate into actual intent at first. Leadership styles profoundly affect efficiency.
Like if your manager said, I'm trying to reduce our costs by 10% so that I can get a big incentive bonus personally...
If a manager says "I need to reduce costs by 10%", the specific desired business outcome is clear. Reminding your subordinates that your pay and continued employment is tied to you completely the tasks and requests of the people you answer to doesn't seem needed. This isn't about "some organizations", it's just about efficiency.
Usually the current costs are the cost of business, and if there is an externality ie economic downturn, some crisis, big lost deals, then there may be renewed pressure at which point this has already been communicated by the leadership to the org and everyone is on the same page.
Trying to reduce costs out of the blue is not usual, it suggests some individual thinks there is some inefficiency after studying the issue, or its a management consultant recently hired to explore that, but usually the people being requested for information would be briefed and know exactly the reason and why.
In many cases middle managers think they know what needs to be cut or what programs are a waste without all of the facts of the organization. I saw this a lot in government.
For example some organization was on the books for the primary reason of being the focal point for a contract vehicle but was in a holding period waiting protest or something and not doing much for a year or two - so it looked ripe to cut - when in fact it was more of a "lady in waiting" for the broader organization.
If your grand-manager tells your manager "ok, today your job is to cut $X from this team's budget", then she'd better do that. She might know full well you have the time and capacity to do it yourself, but if she passed it down the chain someone might notice she wasn't doing anything.
Which, obviously, is equally dysfunctional. But it can explain why someone who isn't generally a micro-manager is churning up extra work.
This sounds like an example of the AZ problem[1].
Hope you find the website helpful! :)
Do you know if it belongs to a category of problems, in the same manner that e.g. the "either-or" belongs to the category of logical fallacies and confirmation bias belongs to cognitive biases? I always find those types of categories useful in building mental models.
You kind of put me on the spot here, I'm not sure. I'd have to think about it for a while, but my gut feeling is that, yeah, it probably falls in the overarching category of "not knowing/realizing that you don't know something" -- so the failure point is epistemic.
If this was a code review, the end of the month code in this example should get flagged for its complexity, when it can be replaced with the single conditional "if tomorrow.day == 1".
It's entirely fine to question the specification/request here, and ask why the end of the month. Not because the code that detects the end of the month can be written in a complex fashion, as it was here. Rather it doesn't seem to meet the requirements: The Account Manager doesn't realize that by processing on the last day of the month, rather than after the last day of the month, is going to miss out on some portion of the last day of "accumulated fees" for the month (depending on the rest of the implementation). The Account Manager has requested an implementation detail that doesn't meet the requirements, and now rework is required.
But it's not a code review. It's a frivolous and simple example to show the underlying impact of not understanding the context of a hypothetical feature request. I have a feeling that in typical engineer fashion, you're missing the forest for the trees. Trust me, I've been there :)
Yes, it is a contrived example, that's my point. But it's not the programmer that didn't understand the feature request, it's the entire organization. A questionable decision earlier made by the Account Manager led to an overly complex, questionable implementation that will lead to more code and more bugs. Trust me, I've been there.
JFYI, and in case you want to add a reference to the chocolate covered banana:
http://web.archive.org/web/20160523201519/http://homepage.nt...
http://web.archive.org/web/20160329162624/http://homepage.nt...
that I have been citing a lot, together with the Yes/No and the Standard Litany:
http://web.archive.org/web/20160527013035/http://homepage.nt...
http://web.archive.org/web/20160604095422/http://homepage.nt...
Will definitely source these, how come the original site is down? Edit: found one that's up: https://jdebp.eu/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...
http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollard/
Before being:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/
all the FGA's are nice, (besides - the technical ones - extremely accurate) if you loved the chocolate covered banana one, you will surely appreciate the "legacy" correct definition:
https://jdebp.eu/FGA/legacy-is-not-a-pejorative.html
and don't miss the note about the secret 7:
Makes me think of stores about Steve Jobs, and how there would be a virtually endless runaround of him claiming not enough this, too much that.
Then something changed. Having a softer touch became more important than results. This weird sort of litigation-phobic (pardon my inarticulate explanation) approach to all things took hold. Managers stopped giving clear feedback. They stopped assigning work, merely suggesting it. It’s completely bizarre. Especially when you’ve been in the military and seen real decentralized and self organizing leadership work.
These days as a consultant I go in and basically fill a leadership vacuum at each of my clients. I tell them this too. They shrug and keep shuffling and saying things that mean nothing. So weird. I don’t understand the corporate world.
I consult for the Canadian government from time to time and I see plenty of great managers there. The main difference? Most people there for more than 2 or 3 years are there for life. They get to see the results of prolonged good leadership and they get to learn from leaders that they trust.
With tech you have random 27 year olds as C-levels at eight or nine digit valued companies (that was me some years back) and there's no way that you have the skill or experience or even respect for the position to do it well.
Another student of Carl Rogers was Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of ELIZA.
There is no formula and there are endless variables. Most larger organizations suspend management in a vacuum of lack of knowledge of decision making above them, which leads to a lack of trust from the people they are 'managing'.
Add in politics and feifdoms, and the safest route to longevity for big corp mid managers is to camouflage themselves within the organization, not making any decisions unless and until it's clear which way the wind's blowing.
Bravery around innovation and pushing better practices all too often results in punishment or worse, with most emphasis being on magically doing more with less while increasing revenue.
Smaller business entities are far more human and real, and good 'leadership' in these environments is more sensitive to humans, effective innovation and growth ...
Their business model is to make people into leaders in exchange for a big sum money...
This article identifies the basic problem again: there is no way to manage like this without at the very least a good working knowledge of the jobs you're managing. If you can't simply take over for an employee, you shouldn't be allowed to manage them. And you can't : you can't tell when you're being bullshitted, and worse, you can't tell when a psychopath is really fucking with the organisation (maybe he's right and these other guys, who just happen to be in competition with him, are really the ones that are bad ?).
A good leader needs to engage and provide feedback on the work done. Well, yes. A "manager", an MBA from any business school has no ability to do that. They just can't. That isn't what they trained for, unless you mean keeping cash registers in a store or perhaps basic logistics (advanced logistics requires knowing the math behind things like linear programming, so you can modify it for your exact situation AND being pretty good at writing predictive models).
This is also the most common problem, and of course why management theory keeps "believing" that management is a job like others (and therefore doesn't require knowledge of other jobs). There's no money in telling a manager that they need actual, real knowledge, something that would take years to acquire.
And you can't change that perception because the people who would have to do that are the ones who would never measure up.
Anecdotally, at the same company I had one manager who was completely hands off and free of any actionable feedback or advice. While it felt empowering to chart my own destiny, I also wouldn't have any insight into where my weaknesses were or if what I'm feeling about the project at that time was normal. Are others feeling the same way?
Then when I transferred to a different manager they were very engaging, and would follow up with me outside of our 1 on 1s whenever there was a reason to check back in. The very first question I was asked, "how do you like to be recognized?" It certainly threw me off guard because I never really thought about it directly before. Also, they would give me hard feedback and help me course correct from their different vantage point in the moment, not later during a performance review.
Needless to say, the first manager I consistently got a meets all rating, which was fine, but it was demotivating and I would have probably left, while the second, I did way better and fell in love with my job.
Unfortunately, leadership is not something that younger (<30) generations of people are learning to embrace, or even understand. There is such a narcissistic bent going on in the modern, Western world, that this should be no surprise - but it is really shocking to be faced with a CTO who absolutely has no idea how to foment team spirit, how to motivate his juniors, how to get people to enjoy doing the often-times-mundane-inane, boring, work that has to be done in modern times.
Perhaps it has always been that way, perhaps I - as a ~50 year old - am getting very jaded/off-my-lawn type, but I think there were definitely differences in the generations of managers that went through the hoops in the 80's, compared to all the new-school cargo-cult startup circus hijinks that pass as 'business' these days.
I truly believe that if you can't do the job of the people below you: you're not qualified to lead them. If you can't motivate people to work harder to solve the issues that they're stumbling on: you don't deserve leadership. If you can't get your team together to coordinate their activities in a way that makes Russian ballet seem like a circus full of bears - you need to get out of the way and get someone in who can handle the machine-like precision needed to coordinate an organization and start making real headway to building the business.
Alas, a lot of the startup-/venture- cult movements that are currently enjoying mainstream status don't really focus on this angle. We've become a selfish, materialistic, narcissistic species - at least in the tech world - which doesn't really pull much off except individual reward above all else. The desire to be 'new and not like our parents' is really getting in the way of civilization-building.
At least, having just suffered immensely at the hands of an absolutely incompetent, dufus manager, whose company has far too much money to waste on the build-vs-buy equation of startup building .. I just feel like we're devolving, yo.
Basically, in start-ups, the main goal and driving force is the desire to get rich, and this is how "success" is defined. Whereas for managers in bigger companies, especially more traditional ones, success is very much related with people, and especially workforce cuts are considered as a failure - of the company and of managers, regardless of the financial outcome for the shareholders.
This lead to a shift in focus from continuation of the corporation to a focus on shareholder dividends.
Then later the raider mentality turned into the VC mentality, in both cases focusing on a boom-or-bust approach.
In the industrial society large power distances and strong authority made things work but also created problems.
In the post-industrial society old ways simply don't work. As a result there has been understandable and healthy backlash and distrust against authority since the 60's. Where this correction went wrong was treating authority as innately bad thing that must never be recognized.
If a person has a healthy relationship with authority, they can both take leadership role or give it to others easily without sacrificing their dignity or feeling less or more than others. They understand the limit of authority but give it a good change to work.
Absentee leader culture comes from people who don't think they should be leading or that they don't' have the right to do so. They think themselves as managers and not as leaders.
I disagree that if you can't do the job of the people 'below' you, you're not qualified to lead them. When I first lead a team, I worked with people that were a lot more competent in specific areas than I ever will be. In turn, I could still learn from my 'managers', but in different areas than where I have my skills. So everybody learns from one another.
I do agree that motivation is very important. I had to think of theory X or Y. Do you distrust (X) or trust (Y) people to do their work well? These believes tend to be self-fulfilling, but can still be useful in different situations. Distrust tends to lead to a lot of control and micromanagement, which imho for knowledge workers does not work. Trust has advantages and for me leads to a better working culture, but can also lead to the issues described in the article.
I learned a lot from an online version of Harvard's Psychology 1508: The Psychology of Leadership given by Tal Ben-Shahar. If you can find it somewhere (there are some classes on youtube), highly recommended!
+
> Distrust tends to lead to a lot of control and micromanagement, which imho for knowledge workers does not work.
=
To each their own, and I have had this argument elsewhere before, but I will say this: brittle organizations are built on the basis of competency; if you cannot do my job, why should I trust you to understand my issues?
I ended up in this position completely by accident and I don't know what to do about it.
I hope I can find somebody else to take over from me and actually be a leader so that I can be less of a drain on my company's growth potential. I'm sure I'd enjoy my life a lot more if I wasn't in a leadership position at all.
I read the original, here's the newer one:
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About...
There's no shame in being a founder and CTO while handing of the CEO role to someone with better management skills.
IMO there are a lot of problems with friends, teammates, etc. that suddenly make sense when viewed through the framework of oneself possibly having Asperger's.
I haven't started it yet, but a supposedly helpful book on the topic is "Asperger's on the Job" by Rudy Simone.
Rather, it is describing managers who don't really have a purpose or view on anything.
For example, let's say one of your employees completes a project or assignment. If they ask, "did I do a good job?", would you be able to answer that - do you have a standard for "good" in your mind, a sense of what the company is trying to do, and assess how that project fits with that purpose? If you can do that, you are not an absentee manager. There are good and bad ways give feedback, but doing it at all means you are not an absentee.
The kind of manager being described by the article is unable/unwilling/uninterested in the organization's goals and how their team's efforts fit into the goal. The absentee manager will almost always respond to a request for feedback with "you are doing great, keep it up", regardless of the actual output. This is a soul crushing kind of experience.
The idea can be taken too far, but there is a nice balance in there. Feedback from both directions should affect a boss's performance rating.
And then they have to be the ones to support the whole idea of that feedback in the first place!
I think gp is saying that part of managing and evaluating managers is to get results from the manager, but also get feedback from those they manage. If you're only getting results and not going one level deeper you aren't doing a good job as a manager.
Of course the company structure / culture has to encourage that bottom up feedback (to two levels, not just one). A lot of organizations / managers consider that "going above their head" so that kind of communication really needs to be enforced / required from the next level up.
I think the idea of "they have to support that" isn't just about managers applying this to themselves, but not wanting to set the precedent elsewhere.
If you've got 4 or more layers at your company, then there are multiple layers with both superiors and reports. If layer 3 says "hey, layer 1, tell us if layer 2 is doing well", then it's pretty obvious 4 should go ask 2 the same question.
It can still happen, not everyone is opposed to feedback, but implementing something like this at any layer can get opposition from everyone anywhere in management who worries they'd get a bad review.
Being effective at that level is really difficult, and as easy as it may be to criticize leaders who are bad at it, it's really a rare leader that excels across the board. Keep that in mind when judging failures, it's always easy to point out when people mess up when you don't truly understand the scope of the problems they're facing. There's a reason good leaders are paid so well.
So you're a manager. You are not a big deal. You are not the talent. Don't call yourself "Boss". You are Brian Epstein, not John Lennon. You are there to manage the affairs of the band. You are there to handle the shit they don't or can't deal with; there to mediate disputes, advocate for their interests and make sure, to the extent that you can, that they have the resources they need to execute on their goals. Your 1:1 meetings are all about enabling the person, both individually and as a team member. Ultimately your job is to ensure the integrity and effectiveness of the team as a gestalt, which is why you are allowed to fire people and manage underperforming individuals. If you have authority it was allocated to you by the team who you serve, and it is because you acted on their behalf.
Leadership is not management. Leadership takes many forms and can come from anyone. Whether you're the CEO or a middlerank or an individual contributor. The critical difference is that someone with resources at their disposition - a leader who is also a manager - will have a much easier time of executing on a vision.
Leadership without management is useless.
The sad thing in all this if he could have fired the worst few he would have been a great leader.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2015/12/03/labor-unions-dec...
http://evonomics.com/corporate-mergers-strangle-economy-jord...
You just have to wedge yourself between money and talent.
If you're in management, manage.
If you're not, and you have a boss, leave.
I wouldn't hire our Director to be a noob IT guy and the manager doesn't know how to manage anything, nor does he want to (just wants to program and be left alone to complain about the shitty BA).
All the while the C suite dbags keep trying to outsource everything to the tune of millions of dollars a year and it's failed for the last 12+ years running.
The business world is hilarious sometimes. My wife's state job is even worse though. Her boss essentially has no boss. Is an alcoholic so doesn't work 2-3 days a week. Constantly is micromanaging the dept but also misses critical deadlines (federal funding). While her coworkers rarely show up at all.
I don't know what happened to this world, but it's honestly as funny as it is sad now.
Question: In this situation, if the person serving as COB+CEO is "incompetent" (e.g., "absentee"), what can shareholders do, besides divesting their holdings?
Source:
Todays Wall Street Journal
Author: