Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

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 false definition of “incompetent”.

edit: people might ask, so here's a list of things that, in my experience, get people promoted at large companies:

politics, self-promotion, networking, choosing the right (high-visibility) things to work on, taking credit, delivering new revenue and/or new marketable shiny products/services, having the right senior leadership mentors/wing-people.

Note how none of these really require that a person be good at actually managing a team of people effectively.

> ...I’m not sure if every post will end up being occupied by an incompetent manager, but I do think that when a lot of managers realized they’ve hit their peak or comfort level, they then start to focus on playing politics instead of delivering results to hold on to their position.

I have an alternative theory.

When you're a single contributor you have total control over your productivity and success, but very little impact on your the company's success. Then when you're promoted your control decreases, but impact rises. As you move up the ladder you are constantly trading control for impact.

Eventually you end up as CEO and these numbers converge with a large impact relative to a single contributor but little control over the success of a company. Little enough control that its sometimes hard to distinguish from noise. But your affect on perceived success drops off at a slower rate than actual success. This means to get promoted at higher levels it is more impactful to focus on perceived success over absolute success, and people who are better at this will have more luck getting promoted at high levels. Basically it's a lot easier to convince the board of AT&T that you're doing a 3% better job than to actually get the company to perform 3% better.

This would explain why most non-founder CEO's are so polished.

I wonder how many people who reference "The Peter Principle" have actually read it?

It's short-- maybe 100 pages long-- and IMO not particularly good. It's essentially just a pile of brief vignettes about incompetent people being promoted, many of which feel like they were largely made up for the book. "There once was a guy named bob. He was bad at his job and got promoted. So there." ---- it is not quite that bad but it is also not obviously much better. Analysis is mostly limited to just repeating the headline thesis in a number of different ways.

I suppose it is a fine read if you were already convinced that its premise was true and just want the thrill of having your preconceived notions confirmed by a written page-- which I assume explains its commercial success. If you come into it with any doubts about the premise they will not be dispelled.

Perhaps you could say that by being constantly referenced in any related discussion, "The Peter Principle" by being unchallenging and agreeable while saying little of substance has fittingly risen to the level of its incompetence.

Having lived my entire life in a world this book existed in, perhaps I just don't Get It... maybe there was a time where this idea had to be repeated a dozen times before people would accept that it was a thing that happens, even sometimes. If so, then I suppose it served its purpose. I don't, however, think it has much to offer the reader now.

How many times do people who are good at their jobs get promoted just because there isnt anywhere else to go? You cant make any more money at the level you are without switching companies so you get stuck going into management.

I got promoted to being a manager of a small group just because there wasn't anyone else to do it and I am completely incompetent as a manager of people. I don't enjoy it and didn't ask for it. It is only a source of my continued disappointment in my lack of competence. It does however pay better.

There are solutions to this problem.

My favorite was outlined in https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/... - namely treat different kinds of jobs as different skillsets and take away the perverse incentive to switch to one you might not be qualified for. Specifically, moving from being an individual contributor to a manager should come with an immediate pay cut. (With opportunities for a pay raise down the road if you prove competent.) And there should be a promotion track for individual contributors. Furthermore, most managers should manage someone who is higher paid than themselves.

When the perverse incentive is taken away, people are more likely to switch jobs because they think that they will be good at the new job, and not because they want to be important, well paid, or whatever.

But this does require a mindset from managers that they are in charge, but not necessarily more important. Which is a cultural shift that is easier in some organizations than others.

I've witnessed this first hand so often that I'm well aware of what it's caused by: overload at the top.

The end beneficial owners of a business have limited power over it. They exert weak control remotely. Usually this amounts to no more than "hire someone to run the business, reward him based on profits" (and sometimes barely even that).

That person, the CEO, also has limited control. He only has so much energy and time in a day.

Meanwhile, parasitism is the norm. The easiest way to get a promotion is to simply do less work and do more of what you want. Spending all day in meetings sounding important, going on junkets, playing around with new tech for fun, puttering around with emails instead of impactful work, etc. Then you're getting the same pay for less work.

Therefore it requires constant pressure from the top to retain alignment of the staff with profitability. How effective the CEO and his team is in suppressing politics, suppressing friendship based (vs meritocratic) promotions, suppressing false work / lazing (meetings & makework etc), will always hit a limit. It's just as much an area of ongoing development as anything else in business -- how to maintain the productivity of small teams as the organization grows and vice becomes harder to suppress.

So I think this is more likely the cause than people being promoted to the point of incompetence -- the organization grows to the limit of its leader's ability.

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.

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.]

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.

Competent or incompetent, it seems to me like the people who get promoted (especially at a higher level) are the ones who tell the best stories. Those stories might be true or false, good for the team and organization long-term, or perhaps it only benefit the storyteller and the listener in the moment.

Much of what we wish were attributable to objective measurements of contributions just breaks down to the competing stories we tell each other. The objective data is just there to support the stories, but it rarely stands on its own.

My incompetent manager got promoted because higher level people on the team left.

It's a viable career strategy. It's hard to hire, so if you stick around you'll have more responsibility fall into your lap.

The other thing I notice is that he's great at kissing butt.

As an aside, my advice to people stuck under a crappy manager is to get out ASAP. You can even switch teams and be under the same skip manager.

This article definitely resonates with my experience of 20 years in the engineering and research and development.

Bad organizations tend to promote based upon faulty metrics and, commonly, people are promoted to their natural level of incompetence or are promoted a single level when the best organizational fit may be a 2-3 or three level promotion. e.g. from principal engineer to director of new product development.

Good organizations work hard to figure out peoples strengths and what they enjoy, and then play people in their natural positions (as best as possible).

Someone else wrote in this post that they got promoted from an engineering position to managing a small team and they hate it and don't feel like they are doing a great job. I can relate... a good engineer might not make a good team manager. You need a lot of strengths to team/people manager that a lot of engineers don't even want to have: attention to other people's details, high emotional IQ, enjoy Gantt charts, well organized, to name a few.

... but that same engineer discussed above might make a great director or CTO (or consultant to the CTO, etc.) where they are applying their technical knowledge to investigate technology, plan strategically, and chose technical directions that have immense impact on on the company's future.

I have heard many a "CTO/chief scientist type" describe how much they hate detailed project planning and paying attention to all the little details people are supposed to be working on. But I know good managers who love that stuff.

In larger organisations the main criteria I've noticed for people being promoted is that they want to be promoted and spend most of their time sucking up senior managers - actual performance in their current role frequently has nothing to do with it.

Read The Gervais Principle.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Because they are useful to do the "dirty" work. I realised that when I started running my company. There are good employees and bad ones. It's emotionally hard to fire the bad ones, but if we are separated by a few managers, it's easy to make the cold rational decision and let those managers do the rest.

Sometimes they do (get promoted) and sometimes they don't. The reasons are as varied as the people who hold the positions. That said, this article seems to be tinged with disdain for managers. Many people believe they are smarter or could do a better job than their manager. Most of those people would be wrong, but it's easy to hold irrational beliefs when you don't really know what you're talking about and have no desire to find out.

An interesting (albeit long) take on this comes from Venkatesh Rao and is called the Gervais Principle [0]

VERY long story short:

- The people at the top (what he calls Sociopaths although not necessarily in a negative sense) need a layer of people below them to both do the work and take blame for when things go wrong

- The people in the middle (he calls them Clueless) need to be hard working and smart BUT, crucially, not smart in a "political power" sense. In other words, you want them smart enough to do the work but not smart enough to figure out they are being used.

- The people at the bottom basically do the minimum to get by and are just there for the paycheck (he calls them Losers)

It's the middle layer that most people think of when they think of "why is a manager incompetent?". The smarter folks have put that incompetent person there precisely because they are not smart enough to figure out "the game".

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Summary of the Principle: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/02/04/the-genealogy-of-the-g...

Often, they get promoted to get them out of the way of day-to-day work and into pie-in-the-sky land where they can't be a drag on the real work of the company.

It's best formulated as the Dilbert Principle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle

this is such a blanket statement. i use to have a manager that was an unbelievable programmer and dba. he was an absolute pleasure to work with and THE best manager to date i have ever had. this dude deserved the promotion. he applied the principals he knew as a programmer so things got done and the timelines weren't unrealistic at all. he also respected us and didn't forget where he came from.

It really depends a lot on the company, both its size and culture, but at least in some companies I think incompetents get promoted because ultimately many execs have an inflated sense of ego and like to promote yes-men instead of people with a more critical mind.

Here is some real practical advice (since the article is missing that):

One of the big hotshots in your company likes cycling? Well, you like to go cycling too! Let's go cycling together in the weekend!

Become friends with one (or multiple) of the big bosses, and your career is set. And it's probably going to be a clique of higher ups, since they are all buddies at this point.

Golf is not as popular in Europe as in US, but it's still a place for the higher up's to socialize.

Humans are mainly emotional, not rational. They will promote their friends first. Whether this is good or bad is not the discussion, it's the reality of human nature.

> In practice people gravitate to, hire and promote individuals they like to be around, not people who demand accountability....especially when the ship is smooth sailing.

> However, when a company needs to grow or is in a crisis, CEOs or the Board would often hire highly competent and pushy executives, to crack the whip and fix the boat. Accountability and performance become important attributes.

This is super interesting. But I can't seem to grasp actually choosing to promote the more likable person over the more competent, unless the competent person was downright unlikable.

As a skeptic, the title begs the question: do incompetent managers actually get promoted? How do we know this?

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.

I wonder how much of this is just another form of the Fundamental Attribution Error? Everyone thinks they are the competent ones, surrounded by incompetent people that are bringing them down and preventing them from being truly excellent at their jobs. Sure, I fail to deliver things, but that is because of reasons x,y,z; my manager, on the other hand, struggles because they are incompetent.

is can far easier to promote either up or across rather than push them out as many are loathe to work with HR to push out incompetent or under performing.

then of course as others have mentioned, having no where else to promote someone other than to manager. we used to joke where I am about 15 year longevity reward was the manager title

Is the hypothesis that _most_ managers that get promoted are incompetent, or is the question really "Why do any incompetent people get promoted?"

Easy enough to quote dynamics / principles that might lead less capable people to more often be promoted (managing up, kissing up, some Peter principle-related skill limitations) but at the same time as in any field most managers will fall in the middle between excellent and abysmal, and probably be "just OK."

So maybe a simple answer is that the "mean" manager is below our expectations, therefore most managers will be below our expectations?

> In a big company which is established, nobody likes being made to work harder. Everybody is just an employee, sometimes all the way up to the CEO. So a pushy and outperforming executive rocks the cushy lives of everyone.

oh.

This reminds me of the old SGI postmortem memo [0] which said "optimists tend to be promoted". I've seen the exact scenario described in the 'management issues' section of that memo played out several times, so it resonated with me when it came out and I still see it happening today.

[0] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassi...

Most often what lowr employees think are parameters for promotion are NOT the real parameters for promotion.

If sycophancy is what it takes to get promoted, the real criteria is sycophancy and not technical merit. There are no incompetent managers being promoted, only good/bad values (again, depends on the perspective of the lower rung employee), in the company.

All this remind me of a quote by an old friend from a long time ago: life is mafia, freedom is to get fscked on your own.

> For example, he talked about a phenomenon of being “kicked upstairs”. This is when a person gets promoted as a sort of encouragement, because higher management wants to show other staff that they too, could be rewarded with progression.

This has always had the exact opposite effect on me.

I saw many people getting promoted for being loyal and on very good terms with the leaders.

Because they have yet to reach their level of incompetence (aka Inverse of Peter Principle)

I once held a presentation titled "How come my boss is an utter idiot" and used "Parkinson's Law", "Peter Principle" and "Dilbert Principle" as source

I think this is quite true... in my company they started creating "coheading" (2 bosses) also in small department or units and this makes the whole process faster and more evident!

Everyone is familiar with the Peter Principle at this point. I believe there is something to it, but it doesn't explain what we find in modern companies. It's too passive a mechanism to explain the malevolence that typically quickly develops in most successful companies.

The Gervais Priciple seems to much better explain the modern organization:

"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

This is why McKinsey, others have “Up or out” policy. In theory, it can prevent all this bs. In practice, hopefully it prevents a lot of it

Because they go along with the plan of upper mgmt.

Depends on what the company rewards. That manager is probably very competent at that particular thing.

Team succeeds? Take credit. Team fails? Blame them.

"Incompetent Manager" is a pleonasm.

To get rid of them.. a incompetent person is basically organizational tech debt.. and if you can move the tech debt away from you, abstract it.. the organization can recover and be more effective again. So up s/he goes, to be encapsulated in a personal little pearl of people, while to organisms capability suffer less.

Also remember, if you wouldnt promote the person away from you, you would basically demote or keep him around, neutral-moted. So your lack of support creates a antagonistic figure in your workplace.

So lets play nice, push the hr-failure to the waterhead, where they can pea-cock around with a harem of secretarys, and hopefully do neither good nor harm.

Cluster B personality disorder