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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

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.

Onanymous 7y ago
>here is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager This is exactly what the article says
zepto 7y ago
Your definition is meaningless - you define competent as ‘whatever gets you promoted’.
petermcneeley 7y ago
You have managed to say a complete truism by simply redefining the word. Edit: "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." Are these your definitions of competence?
- mceachen 7y ago
  I assumed they were saying those are the characteristics that prove favorable for further promotion/ladder climbing.
dcole2929 7y ago
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 delivering on time, and on budget even if the product is compromised. Engineers tend to prefer taking longer and making it correct. Management loves accurate reporting, over communication and documenting. A lot of engineers tend to hate that stuff. Not all but a lot. A manager who isn't technical, or particularly personable but who does a good job of communicating up and out, and choosing high impact projects will do well. Even if they aren't exactly beloved by their direct reports
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  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 planning and impact. And to have a successful team/product/company you will need to aggravate them sometimes and they’ll post things on medium about how their boss sucks and that nobody should ever estimate anything or how all tech debt is awful or whatever. 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.
  - amznthrowaway5 7y ago
    > 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.
linuxftw 7y ago
> choosing the right (high-visibility) things to work on This applies to non-manager types too. Buzz words pay the bills. Always be in the growth sector, not the pay the bills sector.
xibalba 7y ago
> 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.
- pif 7y ago
  Delivering new revenue today is extremely easy and too often overrated. Delivering new revenue today, without negatively affecting future revenue, is what drives a business to be successfull.
  - hgsyndrome 7y ago
    So very true. In many big and stable companies executives have a budget to spend. And it's not their money anyway. I've even been told to spend some money because it has been budgeted already for the year. If I don't spend it we'll get less the next year. Hence I should bend over to find a way to spend it despite it being a waste of money!
- smitty1110 7y ago
  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.
derekp7 7y ago
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.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > 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. I would argue that "bad" managers would generally have higher turnover than "good" managers. And I would further argue that companies have repeatedly demonstrated that high turnover isn't bad when the company is obscenely profitable despite that high turnover.
  - apple4ever 7y ago
    And I’d say that’s because most managers can’t see the opportunity cost of high turnover or low morale.
    - inetknght 7y ago
      I agree
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  Often not. This is a really under looked at part of business. Sales is an excellent example. Most sales cultures are super super competitive. The natural inclination is to promote the best salespeople to be sales managers. But sales talent is a poor proxy for management talent, so you usually don’t get the best results (and your best sales people stop selling!). Resolving this is not easy, because it conflicts with people’s sense of fairness and how we think of career growth. You also need to do a lot of work if you want to figure out what a good management skill proxy is instead.
cashsterling 7y ago
You described what happens at dysfunctional organizations... and most organizations are some degree of dysfunctional. You are almost agreeing with the article, from the way I read the article and your edit.
hrktb 7y ago
Getting chosen to work on high visibility features and creating new products seems contrary to what most people qualify as “incompetent”. Now all you are describing feels more like a Product Owner’s job than a manager. But even putting that aside, employees also want a manager that makes their group look good, takes high visibility jobs and is good at politics. Having a successful manager greatly helps to get promoted, even if that manager tries to take all the credit. Also nowadays peer reviewing is pretty standard, it’s a lot more credible to present oneself as a good manager of a good team.
mumblemumble 7y ago
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.
- bityard 7y ago
  An effective manager does two things first and foremost: 1) Make sure that his/her employees' day-to-day work aligns with the goals of the company 2) Remove any and all roadblocks keeping employees from being efficient and effective in their work, even if it means risking political capital. I've always fantasized that if I ran a company, when annual reviews came around, the reviews would be bi-directional. In order words, employees must (confidentially) review their managers as well as vice-versa. Someone will eventually respond, "okay, but if you let, say, engineers have that much control over how a company operates, you're not going to have a profitable company for very long." To which I would respond: that's why you set the company culture and also you have to be diligent about letting people go who are not a good fit for the company's goals.
  - xenocratus 7y ago
    I can't talk about the company as a whole, but in my circle at Arm reviews come from all the people who work with the reviewed. I did a review of my manager, requested by his manager.
  - huntsman 7y ago
    Are reviews of managers by employees that uncommon? At Google every manager is reviewed by a survey of their direct reports every performance cycle and that certainly feeds into assessment of manager performance.
  - t0mas88 7y ago
    Having working in management for years, both middle and upper, internal and external, as founder and in other companies: I have quite a strong stance against "confidentially". Because the reality is that 80% of the typical workforce (maybe even more in the case of engineers) has a lot of comments about how things could be better and how their manager is doing it all wrong. And those comments tend to come out in an unnecessarily strong negative form if you provide an anonymous forum. But most companies don't need more people telling you what's wrong, they need people that take a responsibility in improving it and move things forward.
goatinaboat 7y ago
politics, self-promotion, networking, choosing the right (high-visibility) things to work on, taking credit A “good” manager gives his team credit for success and takes the blame himself for failures. A bad manager does the opposite. That’s all there is to management really, it’s simple, but very few do it.
- hgsyndrome 7y ago
  Hear ye, hear ye. So very true, and indeed rare. It's the hallmark of great leadership actually. In business or the military.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Popular high school people spend all their time trying to be popular and sacrifice performance in school. Incompetent managers spend all their time trying to be promoted and not fired and sacrifice their performance and the good of the company.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Yes. Popular high school people spend all their time trying to be popular and sacrifice performance in school. Incompetent managers spend all their time trying to be promoted and not fired and sacrifice their performance and the good of the company.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
yogrish 7y ago
Can’t agree more. Currently I am in same situation. I lead a small core technical team that delivers cutting edge tech. My peers lead very big teams that do maintenance work. But my BU head measures success by how many people his reportees handle, new initiatives taken (process wise or fun wise etc ) that bring high visibility and mileage to him. He doesn’t bother about guiding and managing a technically motivated team that brings lot of innovations. He uses same yardstick for all. Edit: grammar correction
eric234223 7y ago
> Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. Employers don't have other option. What happens is the people who love coding don't want to be managers and the people who want don't want to code or suck at coding take up manager positions. The problem arises when these managers have to promote. They choose the lesser capable guy who is not a threat to their job. This is what i have seen in software industry.

Onanymous 7y ago

>here is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager This is exactly what the article says

zepto 7y ago

Your definition is meaningless - you define competent as ‘whatever gets you promoted’.

petermcneeley 7y ago

You have managed to say a complete truism by simply redefining the word. Edit: "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." Are these your definitions of competence?

mceachen 7y ago
I assumed they were saying those are the characteristics that prove favorable for further promotion/ladder climbing.

dcole2929 7y ago

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 delivering on time, and on budget even if the product is compromised. Engineers tend to prefer taking longer and making it correct. Management loves accurate reporting, over communication and documenting. A lot of engineers tend to hate that stuff. Not all but a lot. A manager who isn't technical, or particularly personable but who does a good job of communicating up and out, and choosing high impact projects will do well. Even if they aren't exactly beloved by their direct reports

UncleMeat 7y ago
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 planning and impact. And to have a successful team/product/company you will need to aggravate them sometimes and they’ll post things on medium about how their boss sucks and that nobody should ever estimate anything or how all tech debt is awful or whatever. 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.
- amznthrowaway5 7y ago
  > 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.

linuxftw 7y ago

> choosing the right (high-visibility) things to work on This applies to non-manager types too. Buzz words pay the bills. Always be in the growth sector, not the pay the bills sector.

xibalba 7y ago

> 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.

pif 7y ago
Delivering new revenue today is extremely easy and too often overrated. Delivering new revenue today, without negatively affecting future revenue, is what drives a business to be successfull.
- hgsyndrome 7y ago
  So very true. In many big and stable companies executives have a budget to spend. And it's not their money anyway. I've even been told to spend some money because it has been budgeted already for the year. If I don't spend it we'll get less the next year. Hence I should bend over to find a way to spend it despite it being a waste of money!
smitty1110 7y ago
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.

derekp7 7y ago

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.

inetknght 7y ago
> 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. I would argue that "bad" managers would generally have higher turnover than "good" managers. And I would further argue that companies have repeatedly demonstrated that high turnover isn't bad when the company is obscenely profitable despite that high turnover.
- apple4ever 7y ago
  And I’d say that’s because most managers can’t see the opportunity cost of high turnover or low morale.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    I agree
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
Often not. This is a really under looked at part of business. Sales is an excellent example. Most sales cultures are super super competitive. The natural inclination is to promote the best salespeople to be sales managers. But sales talent is a poor proxy for management talent, so you usually don’t get the best results (and your best sales people stop selling!). Resolving this is not easy, because it conflicts with people’s sense of fairness and how we think of career growth. You also need to do a lot of work if you want to figure out what a good management skill proxy is instead.

cashsterling 7y ago

You described what happens at dysfunctional organizations... and most organizations are some degree of dysfunctional. You are almost agreeing with the article, from the way I read the article and your edit.

hrktb 7y ago

Getting chosen to work on high visibility features and creating new products seems contrary to what most people qualify as “incompetent”. Now all you are describing feels more like a Product Owner’s job than a manager. But even putting that aside, employees also want a manager that makes their group look good, takes high visibility jobs and is good at politics. Having a successful manager greatly helps to get promoted, even if that manager tries to take all the credit. Also nowadays peer reviewing is pretty standard, it’s a lot more credible to present oneself as a good manager of a good team.

mumblemumble 7y ago

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.

bityard 7y ago
An effective manager does two things first and foremost: 1) Make sure that his/her employees' day-to-day work aligns with the goals of the company 2) Remove any and all roadblocks keeping employees from being efficient and effective in their work, even if it means risking political capital. I've always fantasized that if I ran a company, when annual reviews came around, the reviews would be bi-directional. In order words, employees must (confidentially) review their managers as well as vice-versa. Someone will eventually respond, "okay, but if you let, say, engineers have that much control over how a company operates, you're not going to have a profitable company for very long." To which I would respond: that's why you set the company culture and also you have to be diligent about letting people go who are not a good fit for the company's goals.
- xenocratus 7y ago
  I can't talk about the company as a whole, but in my circle at Arm reviews come from all the people who work with the reviewed. I did a review of my manager, requested by his manager.
- huntsman 7y ago
  Are reviews of managers by employees that uncommon? At Google every manager is reviewed by a survey of their direct reports every performance cycle and that certainly feeds into assessment of manager performance.
- t0mas88 7y ago
  Having working in management for years, both middle and upper, internal and external, as founder and in other companies: I have quite a strong stance against "confidentially". Because the reality is that 80% of the typical workforce (maybe even more in the case of engineers) has a lot of comments about how things could be better and how their manager is doing it all wrong. And those comments tend to come out in an unnecessarily strong negative form if you provide an anonymous forum. But most companies don't need more people telling you what's wrong, they need people that take a responsibility in improving it and move things forward.

goatinaboat 7y ago

politics, self-promotion, networking, choosing the right (high-visibility) things to work on, taking credit A “good” manager gives his team credit for success and takes the blame himself for failures. A bad manager does the opposite. That’s all there is to management really, it’s simple, but very few do it.

hgsyndrome 7y ago
Hear ye, hear ye. So very true, and indeed rare. It's the hallmark of great leadership actually. In business or the military.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

Popular high school people spend all their time trying to be popular and sacrifice performance in school. Incompetent managers spend all their time trying to be promoted and not fired and sacrifice their performance and the good of the company.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

Yes. Popular high school people spend all their time trying to be popular and sacrifice performance in school. Incompetent managers spend all their time trying to be promoted and not fired and sacrifice their performance and the good of the company.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

yogrish 7y ago

Can’t agree more. Currently I am in same situation. I lead a small core technical team that delivers cutting edge tech. My peers lead very big teams that do maintenance work. But my BU head measures success by how many people his reportees handle, new initiatives taken (process wise or fun wise etc ) that bring high visibility and mileage to him. He doesn’t bother about guiding and managing a technically motivated team that brings lot of innovations. He uses same yardstick for all. Edit: grammar correction

eric234223 7y ago

> Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. Employers don't have other option. What happens is the people who love coding don't want to be managers and the people who want don't want to code or suck at coding take up manager positions. The problem arises when these managers have to promote. They choose the lesser capable guy who is not a threat to their job. This is what i have seen in software industry.