
Why do incompetent managers get promoted? - hgsyndrome
https://medium.com/@lancengym/why-do-incompetent-managers-get-promoted-815165a03bee
======
mdorazio
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.

~~~
derekp7
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 style that employees feel good about actually helps the
company thrive, then those companies that promote "bad" managers would go out
of business and be replaced by ones that promote "good" management style.

~~~
PeterStuer
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.

~~~
achillesheels
This is how a Kodak can develop digital cameras yet go bankrupt when their
revenue model breaks.

------
JamesBarney
> ...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.

~~~
perl4ever
You are, at one point, using "large impact" and "control over success" as
though they were obviously not synonyms.

But if control is "indistinguishable from noise" then it sounds like
control=impact, which means I don't understand your overall point and
distinction at all. It seems like it gets all muddled along the way.

~~~
JamesBarney
By control I mean how much do your actions and ability affect the final
outcome. For instance a great chess player will win far more often than
slightly worse player. The players have almost complete control over the game.
Chance, other players, etc have very little control over the game. But in a
hand of poker a very skilled player will only win slightly more often than a
worse player, so he exerts far less influence over the outcome of the game.

So I think of being an individual contributor as playing chess for $100 and
being a CEO as playing a hand of poker for $100,000.

And to take this analogy further you gain a lot of information about a chess
player's skill by whether he wins, but very little from a single hand of
poker. Did the poker player lose because he got a band hand or because he's a
bad player. There is a similar difference between CEOs versus developers. You
can figure out if a developer is any good by seeing how successfully he
completes a project or task. But it is very hard to figure out how well a CEO
is doing by just looking at his performance.

------
nullc
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.

~~~
downerending
I've read the book. It's a funny and insightful idea that could be expressed
in one page. The author cleverly turned it into a book and made some money.

You don't have to read the book, but like so many "laws", there's a kernel of
truth that's worth knowing.

------
eppp
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.

~~~
TuringNYC
It is even worse. For companies without SME tracks, SMEs find themselves
getting almost no raises or comp despite contributing to more and more revenue
and/or important/complex work. Then you see stupid things happen, like they
find need for and hire 2 or 3 people just so they can justify a 5% raise. Then
they find need for and hire more people to justify another 10% raise.

Suddenly you have a company with many FTEs doing almost no meaningful work,
existing just to justify tiny increases in the manager's comp. This is really
an HR issue -- ultimately they set a set of rules and people play by those
rules.

Forward thinking companies I've seen have SME IC tracks where you can grow
comp by contributing to more and more influential projects w/o forcing a
management track.

~~~
ginko
What does SME, FTE and IC mean?

~~~
agumonkey
Surface Mount Electronics, Field Transistor Effect, Integrated Circuit

------
btilly
There are solutions to this problem.

My favorite was outlined in [https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-
Differently/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-
Differently/dp/1531865208) \- 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.

~~~
apple4ever
That’s a laudable but terrible way to get better managers.

------
epicgiga
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.

------
EA
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.

~~~
blakesterz
That sounds about right. Also it doesn't matter if they're incompetent so long
as their bosses find some use for them. That is, if most of their employees
think they suck, but their bosses and grandbosses are happy with them, then
they get promoted.

~~~
whatthefox
Exactly! When things cannot be measured we are left with perception only.

------
ryandvm
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.]

~~~
chmod775
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.

------
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.

------
danans
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.

------
ansq
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.

------
cashsterling
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.

------
arethuza
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.

~~~
usrusr
Fully agree with _want_. But it doesn't have to be an ass-licking contest: if
there isn't an oversupply of interested candidates just signalling that you're
not overly opposed to the idea of switching into management can be enough.

------
aazaa
Read _The Gervais Principle_.

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

~~~
chrisdhoover
Read it the last time it was mentioned here. It makes me sad and a little
paranoid

~~~
blaser-waffle
It's a great read -- utterly dark and hilarious -- but don't take it too
seriously. The author goes out of his way to keep things cynical, and though
he uses The Office as a set of examples, he neglects a lot of scenes in The
Office that completely negate his points.

------
dchyrdvh
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.

~~~
dpeck
it was a interesting realization when I came to terms that a great many roles
in our society exist because emotions are hard for people to deal with. So we
"outsource" some large percentage of it to someone to be a buffer and
absorb/redirect some of it so that the rest of the process goes smoothly.

Its present in some aspects of nearly every field and while its frustrating to
those of us who like to think that we're more rational, it is more likely a
genius hack of the human system that lets us get things done at scale/speed
than otherwise.

~~~
perl4ever
People often say that "homo economicus" is not at all like real humans, but
there's a lot of machinery to close the gap.

------
IAmGraydon
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.

------
alexpotato
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/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/)

Summary of the Principle: [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/02/04/the-
genealogy-of-the-g...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/02/04/the-genealogy-of-
the-gervais-principle/)

~~~
perl4ever
"but not smart enough to figure out they are being used"

As if, if they were smart enough, they would do...what?

The implication is that you can't have a stable situation in which people are
being "used" with their knowledge. That doesn't make sense to me.

My perception is that what keeps the system stable is that different classes
of people have different value systems, and they accordingly dehumanize other
types, which keeps them from encroaching on others' territory.

------
thrower123
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle)

~~~
ansgri
In Russia (I guess from Soviet times) there’s a similar saying, ‘a good
engineer won’t get promoted.’

------
thrownaway954
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.

------
Tainnor
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.

------
koonsolo
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.

------
francisofascii
> _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.

~~~
blaser-waffle
40 hours a week is roughly a 3rd of your working week. Like a full 1/3 of Mon-
Fri is spent working. For executives and managers, those working hours are
probably greater -- like 50+ sometimes.

If you're looking at spending 1/3 of your life sleeping, and another 1/3 doing
work related stuff, why not spend it around people that are tolerable to be
around? That's a huge chunk of your life.

Imagine spending 25 years working with assholes.

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

------
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.

------
cortesoft
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.

------
Shivetya
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

------
sailfast
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?

------
gherkinnn
> _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.

------
faster
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...](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-
haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html)

------
draklor40
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.

------
caiobegotti
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.

------
reportgunner
> _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.

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

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

------
wolfi1
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

~~~
ansgri
What did _your_ boss say about it?

~~~
wolfi1
well, coincidentally it was in the transition between two jobs (the
presentation was not in the company itself)

------
Tarkus69
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!

------
vearwhershuh
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-...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/)

------
antipaul
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

------
RocketSyntax
Because they go along with the plan of upper mgmt.

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

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

------
5cott0
"Incompetent Manager" is a pleonasm.

------
honestoHeminway
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.

------
himinlomax
Cluster B personality disorder

