Posted on 11/25/2001 12:46:53 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
When Becky Boyd was a sales representative for Hewlett-Packard Co., she stopped bringing her boss along on customer calls because, she said, "he was so stupid he'd actually jeopardize sales."
For starters, he was incapable of picking up on body language. "When a client was busy and wanted to discuss H-P's products, this guy would walk around the room, cracking jokes," she said. When he did get down to business, he would talk about obsolete systems and suggest products that were incompatible with the client's.
"I don't think he was smart enough to know he was doing his job the wrong way," said Boyd, who now owns an Atlanta public relations firm.
Most workplaces have their share of incompetents, of course, but Boyd's former boss belonged to a particularly maddening species: ladder-climbers blithely unaware of their own ineptitude. Every office has one, and maybe several. Often, they occupy positions of power.
A manager at a recruiting firm in Pompano Beach, Fla., recalled his encounter with one of them at an Internet startup where he once worked. One of the founders had hired his brother, who flunked out of medical school, to drive a custom-built, 30-foot armored vehicle emblazoned with the company's logo at trade shows and the like.
The brother kept coming up with outlandish promotional ideas, such as paying National Hockey League players to promote the company because hockey was his favorite sport. "We ignored his moronic demands, but he'd just get abrasive," the manager said. "He knew no one was going to fire him."
What he probably did not know was that he deserved to be fired. "It's very difficult for incompetent people to know they are incompetent," said David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "If they could figure it out, they probably wouldn't be."
Dunning, whose research has focused on illusions in human judgment, said that the most incompetent people actually tended to think more highly of themselves than their competent colleagues.
It is a workplace Catch-22: If you think you are incompetent, you probably are not, but if you think you can do no wrong, you almost certainly can and will. "When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden," Dunning said. "Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it."
Roughly one of six employees or managers fails to realize it when they are told about it point-blank, according to Frank M. Shipper, professor of management at the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business at Salisbury State University in Maryland.
Their bungling can be costly. Richard Cohen, an executive with a Massachusetts technology company, tells the story of the chief information officer at a giant consumer goods company where he once worked who ignored his subordinates' advice and bought 600 personal computers that the manufacturer stated would probably be discontinued. His reason: They were cheap.
Then he parked them in inventory for a year. "That is like 10 dog years in the technology world," Cohen said.
For some reason, workplace dummies often get rewarded for their missteps. The phenomenon is known as "failing upward," and Cathy Rusinko, an assistant professor of management at Philadelphia University, witnessed it at another organization where she once worked.
A colleague was unable to master the basics of the office's phone system, and had the annoying habit of sending the same e-mail messages over and over again by mistake, prompting four of the 20 people in the department to file formal complaints about him.
He was promoted shortly thereafter.
"The good news was he didn't have as many" people reporting to him directly, Rusinko said.
Of course, some incompetent people were once competent but were promoted to jobs they could not handle. That tendency was satirized in a best-selling book published in 1969 whose title, "The Peter Principle," has become part of the business lexicon. Given enough time, the author Laurence J. Peter wrote, "each employee rises to, and remains at, his level of incompetence."
One skill many incompetent people do have is making friends in high places. Recalling her boss at Hewlett-Packard, Boyd said: "He was good friends with upper-level managers. I went to his boss one time, and he told me there were reasons he was there, so just leave it alone."
In other cases, senior executives are unaware of a supervisor's ineptitude because his underlings do his work for him, according to Robert Butterworth, a workplace-stress psychologist. The underlings then go home and "kick their dog," he said.
"They can't sleep," he said. "The sublimation creates symptoms like irritability. And that's why people end up coming to me."
Most office workers dislike complaining about their dimmer-witted colleagues, but they would be smart to keep a diary of their own accomplishments to show their bosses in annual reviews, workplace specialists say.
Such records will reduce their odds of being laid off for somebody else's stupidity, they say. "Don't just groan about an incompetent to your supervisors or you'll come off as a whiner," said Laurie Rozakis, co-author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Office Politics" (Alpha Books, 1998).
Even when they know who the dunderheads are, many employers lack the heart to cut them loose. "Some companies, especially small ones, are held hostage by the incompetent, especially if they have been around for a long time and have become entrenched," said Andrew J. Birol, the president of Pacer Associates, a consulting firm in Solon, Ohio.
Bonnie Russell, president of 1st-pick.com, a legal-resource Web site in Del Mar, Calif., remembers a former boss who never fired anybody, not even a receptionist who answered telephone calls with the word "um" followed by a long pause and who was forever losing documents.
One day, the receptionist outdid herself, Russell recalled. She went into a manager's office and told him: "Um. Don. Your mother is on the phone. Something about your father dying."
It's not the fault of the people so much as it's the system. Once you reach mid managment and up you are generally below what the private sector pays for equal level of responsibilityl, sometimes by a factor of 5 or more. So who stays, the insecure and the incompetent, and they can't be fired(unless the rape a commisioners daughter, and then it will cost $150,000).
One last thing, the private sector is 15 to 25% more efficient. The private sector lives on providing service and products(or the're out of biz), the government thrives on creating new problems and not solving the old ones(job security).
I bet the terrorist are chuckling over the thought of government screeners at the airports!
"It's not what you know... It's who you blow"
Stuff like this is why the Dilbert cartoons are so popular and funny. It's because they are rooted in reality.
The readers really panned this book. Only a reader in China liked it.
Many cry "victim" status for one thing or another and have lawyers waiting in the wings so management folds
or stalls and sends problem employees to programs like "anger management," "sensitivity training" or buys them off.
Co-workers are usually the ones left to deal with them and pick up the slack.
The home office laid off all but four of us on Oct 1. Those four, including the incompetent boss are shutting everything down. Three of the four, get laid off on Nov 30.
The fourth? He is the incompetant boss. He is being transfered to San Antonio, to work his magic there.
Go figure.
That sounds like Lee Brown. He's in a run-off in the Houston mayoral race, December 1.
The only place his incompetence was rewarded was in the Clinton White House and that stint in Houston when crime shot through the roof.
LEE BROWN
Political offices sought or held: Mayor of Houston, since 1998.
Education: BS, Fresno State University, 1961; MS, San Jose State University, 1964; MS, University of California-Berkeley, 1968; PhD, UC-Berkeley, 1970.
Background: Native of Wewoka, Okla.; Texas resident nine years; professor of public affairs, Rice University, 1996-97; professor of criminal justice, Texas Southern University, 1992-93; director, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, 1993-96; Houston police chief, 1982-90; New York City police commissioner, 1990-92; sheriff, Multnomah County, Ore., 1975-76; public safety commissioner, Atlanta, 1978-82.
In the Bible, King Saul was praised by the people for killing thousands of enemy soldiers in battle. Then David came along, and was praised by the people for killing 'tens of thousands.' It didn't matter that David was unswervingly loyal to Saul; Saul got so angry, he threw a spear at David, then chased him all over Israel, trying to kill him.
I'm sure they'll be no worse than the folks at the license branch. (Shudder)
I have this same problem at work. We have an individual like this in my office. We don't let him go anywhere near contractor or client meetings because he can and will screw up. In meetings with contractors, he always comes up with really stupid, unnecessary, and expensive project requirements that needlessly drive up the cost and hassle factor of projects. When dealing with clients, his incompetence jeapordizes sales. We've had to be innovative in coming up with special assignments or send him off to some school to keep him away from contractors and/or clients. This person cannot be fired because he is the fair-haired boy of somebody in upper management. This guy has been promoted out of many departments just to get him the hell out of the office to go be somebody else's problem. He will probably be promoted out of my office, too.
I sure hate to wish a terrible car accident on somebody but it's probably the only way to solve the problem.
Yes and survival. Like the show, the Weakest Link.
Often they gang up on the smart one to clear the path.
But in the end they always have to watch their own backs.
My current supervisor is a failed lawyer. He started at a topnotch job at the other end of the country and then went through a series of about ten different jobs, each one a bit less prestige and responsibility than the one before. Now he's my supervisor. He brags about his ability to read "body language" - you can read his real well; he walks out of the room while people are talking to him, if he's not interested in what you're saying then his eyes not only glaze over but they also wobble side-to-side (I thought he was having a stroke). I recently got a big honor from other members of my specialized field and when I told him he didn't want to hear it - his predecessor would have thrown a party!
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