Incompetent Leadership and The Dilbert Principle
Why incompetence is “a natural beat of the work ecosystem”
Ever wondered about an incompetent leader and how they got to where they are? So have I.
Throughout the jobs I held, I have come across all sorts of incompetent leaders:
One Director of Client Services was hired to manage escalations of strategic clients but was trying her best not to join client calls and requested many times not to be added to client threads. In her opinion, she was there to “strategise”.
One VP of Finance did not answer her emails even after 10 follow-ups, on things that required her approval to move forward.
One Benefits Director jumped on a call with a client and called them the wrong name a few times, even after the client corrected him. He also had the audacity to call the client “cynical” in a call. Needless to say, two months later the client was out the door.
The list can go on and on but the purpose of this article is to understand why incompetent or inefficient people get to the top.
The Dilbert Principle
Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, explained this phenomenon through his satirical concept of management, now known as the Dilbert Principle.
According to Dilbert Principle, companies tend to promote incompetent employees to management to minimise their ability to harm productivity. The majority of real, productive work in a company is done by people lower in the power ladder.
In the comic strip, Adams wrote through the voice of one of his characters, that “leadership is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow.” And I cannot agree more.
To give you one extreme example, would you rather have an incompetent surgeon operating on you or would you rather have that person managing the clinic instead?
The problem with promoting incompetent people
Whenever I come across incompetent leaders (and this happens quite often as the turnover in the company I work for is very high) I feel… demotivated.
Why even try climbing the corporate ladder, if these are the kind of people being promoted? It is demoralising because you realise it does not matter how much more knowledgeable you are or how much you invest in your professional development.
It’s often the people who excel at office politics and focus on being visible, who end up getting promoted. I don’t want to overgeneralise — I’ve worked with some truly great leaders and inspiring role models worth following — but the majority fell short of what I would consider real leadership.
Incompetent leadership tends to make poor decisions, and not listen to the people who are doing the nitty-gritty.
Incompetent leaders don’t understand the gaps in processes.
And when clients churn or things go bad, they tend to blame the people below them.
This has certainly been my experience, as I was pointing out a process that was broken and resulted in a lot of clients quoting it as a reason for leaving to other providers. However, leadership still did not think the process I pointed out was the root cause. It was easier to blame the people who were managing the clients than fixing a very long-winded process involving multiple stakeholders.
But as Scott Adams said well, “If you spend all your time arguing with people who are nuts, you’ll be exhausted and the nuts will still be nuts.”
The Peter Principle
The Dilbert Principle is actually a re-interpretation of The Peter Principle, by Laurence J Peter.
The Peter Principle states that “in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
In other words, employees who perform their roles with competence are promoted to successively higher levels until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent.
For example, our current Director of Customer Success started at the same time as I did. We were both Customer success managers. Over time, he climbed the ladder and is now a Director.
The issue is he seems to have amnesia when it comes to all the problems we faced as customer success managers, especially with broken processes and areas that required improvement for which he had really good ideas.
Now, it’s as if he’s forgotten everything and lost touch with the struggles we are still facing. He’s become disconnected from the problems we are facing in the “trenches” and as a result, his decisions don’t genuinely address the real problems — unless he gets his hands “dirty” and joins us back in the “trenches”.
Final thoughts
I think competent leaders share a key trait: they can think both strategically and operationally.
While they don’t necessarily do the operational work themselves, they make it a point to listen to the people who do.
By staying connected to the day-to-day realities, they gain a clear understanding of the challenges, the gaps, and the inefficiencies to make informed decisions that can lead to meaningful improvements.
Rather than being detached from the frontline work and building an invisible throne in their mind, good leaders ensure their strategies are grounded in practical realities.
So, dear leaders, get your hands dirty.
Speak to people below you. Speak to clients.
Understand the real points of friction. Don’t make decisions standing on your little cloud, disconnected from the realities on the ground.
This article has been originally published on Medium, within the "Career Paths" publication. For more corporate drama, follow me on Medium:
https://medium.com/@Lexy.M