Your Incompetent Boss Is Making You Unhappy

HnT writes A new working paper shows strong support for what many have always suspected: your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being, way ahead of other factors such as education, earnings, job tenure and public vs. private sector. On top of other studies which have already demonstrated that happy workers are more productive workers (e.g. this 2012 paper.), it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world.

Comments

Re:Duh

[ArcadeMan]

We need a paper to tell our bosses what we already knew.

How do you get good people to step up?

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Many people don't want to manage other people. It's a tough job, often thankless, and in the words of a co-worker who quit being a boss and went back to technical work, it's like managing a bunch of four-year-olds who can't get along.

If you want good bosses, step up to the plate and make the sacrifice and do the job. Also, be a good employee, good employees can attract good bosses.

Also, in a random digression, I don't think a good technical boss necessarily HAS to be good technically. S/he just has to be able to listen effectively to the people who ARE good technically--which is something s/he should be doing even if s/he IS good technically. A boss who doesn't listen is in my opinion worse than a boss who is ignorant, knows it, and respects the experts s/he supervises.

--PeterM

Re:How do you get good people to step up?

[gsslay]

Employees having been whining about their boss' incompetence since the beginning of time. A large percentage of them reckon they can do their bosses job, and better.

And then one day they have to do a bosses job. That's when they find out that there's way more to it than they imagined.

Re:How do you get good people to step up?

[Enry]

Honestly, it depends on the outlook of the boss. I went from technical to management and back to sorta technical/sorta management. The proper attitude for a mid-level manager especially for technical staff is "what can I do to make sure they can do their job?". And that's how I approached my staff at the time - what do they need from me, what tasks do I think they could be doing to further their career, what grunt work stuff has to be done and assigned to somebody? Balance all that out, make sure your team knows you are looking out for them (and take their side when dealing with upper management) and you'll have their support and enthusiasm. I wound up getting laid off and still talk to the people that used to work for me. They say I was one of the best managers they had, partially because I was technical enough to know what they were talking about, but also I was working with them before being promoted so I was almost literally in their shoes and could see their side of issues.

Re:No shit,

[Tom]

Yes, it did. Because quite regularly, those things that "everybody knows" turn out to be not actually true.

We as humans are amazing at spotting some things and judging them correctly immediately. It's a survival trait, which is why it's so highly developed.

But it goes wrong in many cases, especially in those where false positives are harmless but false negatives deadly.

Looks Like This May Be Controversial ...

[CrankyFool]

I manage a group of engineers; I've spent about half of my career being an IC engineer and half managing engineers, and it's been intertwined -- in this company, I started off as an IC, then became a manager, moved to another group as an IC, then became a manager. When my boss proposed to me that I manage the group I manage today, I declined because I didn't think I was technically competent enough -- I'd never actually built the huge, scalable, systems they built, and I knew they could run laps around me.

Eventually, he persuaded me to take the position, with my team's consent. On my first day with my team I sat down with each person in the team and literally my first question to each of them was "What's my job around here?" And they told me they didn't need or want someone to review or approve their technical decisions -- when they had doubt, they talked with each other. They wanted someone to help them understand our customers a little better, and that's why they wanted me.

Generally speaking, I figure my job is to act as a retention aid (my presence around should make my engineers want to stick around more than if I wasn't around) and doing whatever the hell my team needs done that engineers don't want to do. I have technical opinions, sure, and sometimes I even disagree with my engineers. And they do whatever they think is the right thing to do. I think about 80% of the time we disagree, they're right.

I'm good at some things; I'm bad at others. I wonder if the issue is not whether or not a manager is technically competent, but whether or not a manager is competent in the area in which that manager actually spends their time, and their team expects them to spend their time.

Rubbish

[taustin]

It is not the technical competence of the boss that is the determining factor, it is the competence at managing technical people. Technical competence of their own can help this, though it doesn't always, But it's not mandatory. I have one boss (out of three) who can reliably turn a computer on and off without printed notes (with pictures), and he has very little idea what I do. But they're good people managers. They recognize that they know basically nothing of what I do, and leave me alone to do it. They know what they want - network up and running, computers not overly slow, various new toys their friends have, and they know how to tell whether or not they're getting it. Everything else they leave to me, and when I tell them "that's not going to work" or "it's going to cost this much, and you don't want to spend that much," they trust my judgment because they know I know more about my job than they do. I've been on the same job for over 20 years, and still look forward to going to work every morning.

Managing people is a specific skillset, and not an easy one to master. And it's an important one, that computer geeks wrongly dismiss in much the same way that MBAs wrongly dismiss technical skillsets. It's a popular mistake that managers have to (pretend to) be able to do every job in their department, because MBAs are taught that. But it just isn't true.

Re:Office Space

[afidel]

You don't have to be a tech wiz to manage an IT department. In fact my bosses boss is a business degree guy who managed malls before being thrust into IT management (he had run his own skunkworks IT group at a previous employer because their central IT was so horrible, new CEO came in, got wind of what he was doing and promoted him to CIO). What he DOES do is listen to both the business people AND his technical people. He won't force a solution that doesn't work for both sides and he won't promise anything to the business that we technically can't deliver. He's by far the best IT manager I've ever worked under. My direct supervisor is technical, and I'm a technical manager, but the guys running the show don't have to be tech guys for things to run correctly, they need to be good managers.

Re:Soylent blue is managers! MAAAANAGGGERSS!!

[plover]

And what are we supposed to do with these incompetents if we can't promote them out to management?

Where do you think executives come from.

You'd be surprised how much damage an incompetent executive can do. It may not be immediate, but it poisons an organization systemically. A bad boss can be fired. Firing a bad exec may not remove the toxins fast enough for the organization to recover.