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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.
NO SHIT. We needed a paper to tell us what we already knew? Damn, why didn't I write that paper... Here goes.
"INCOMPETENT BOSSES ARE THE LEADING CAUSE OF CAPSLOCK RAGE ON THE INTERNET"
The solution (assuming you're already in a state with incompetent managers) is to allow incompetent managers to be demoted back into a position they're competent in. Unfortunately, society has a huge bias against workplace demotion.
He was a VP in charge of a large software development organization for a Fortune Five company subsidiary.
After a reorg, and this guy came in, he called the staff to his (large, well-appointed) office, and told us to note that he did not have a computer on his desk.
He mentioned that he was a lawyer, and disliked computers.
That was my 'résumé moment' at that company.
Needless to say, that subsidiary has long since gone the way of the dodo.
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
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And what are we supposed to do with these incompetents if we can't promote them out to management?
We can't very well grind them up into hamburger and feed them to the poor.
There aren't enough circuses left anymore where we can rely on escaped lions to keep the manager population in check.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
You seem to have missed the point. I don't think it's a mystery that the competence of your boss contributes to your workplace happiness. The important thing relevant to this study, however, is that the competence of your boss 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.
That's not a "duh", and it's a valuable piece of data that companies can use to try to retain valuable employees, a direction in which they can invest resources to avoid costly turnover and the constant expense of training new employees and/or avoid loss of productivity due to miserable employees.
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.
Have a culture of rotating people in and out of management to "lower" positions. Like department heads at universities, the job lasts a year or two then you're back as a normal faculty.
I rotated in and out of a money management job, now I'm back doing technical stuff. As a result I have a very good understanding of that end of the business as well as the techical end.
--PM
If they have good leadership skills, they'll get out of your way and provide cover. In which case you better have someone with serious technical chops to lead the group in a technical manner.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This kind of thing seems to happen a lot in big companies. People that are deemed "talented" in technical jobs are "promoted" into management jobs. Other managers see this as some sort of reward for being so good at what you do. Often the technical person has risen as far as they can in terms of salary and responsibility and the only place left to go is management.
That's the conundrum. Do you stay in your current position, effectively dead-ending yourself career wise, or do you make the leap into management for greater potential riches?
The problem, as I see it, is that very few companies offer a track to senior management by sticking to the technical path. Inevitably, someone will try and steer you towards project management or some other management job. Google is a notable exception to this.
Many technical people are just not well suited to management jobs. Too many meetings, too much posturing, too many political games...too many whatever. Putting people like this in management jobs helps nobody - especially the technical person that is Ill suited for management.
So what to do?
I think that salary ranges are part of the problem. It guarantees that eventually a person will "top out" salary wise at a given job. At that point you can either go the management route or, more likely, go to a competitor that offers more money. Your hand is kind of being forced. Instead, why not continue to give this employee raises? If they have hung around long enough to get to the top pay scale and they are good at what they do then why force them to have to make that choice?
I have been a technical manager and I can say without hesitation that one great developer is worth more than 10 average ones. If I have a great developer on my team I'm going to pay them really well. If he ends up making more than me then so be it. In the end, I will look good because this rock star will carry the team. It's a win-win.
Studying why people are unhappy in their jobs is worthwhile so that people can learn how to find jobs that they are happier in as happier workers tend to be more productive.
I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion though. Personally I find that my best managers were the ones that had little or no technical ability in the realm of what their staff did. They also happened to be the ones that actually understood the role of a manager and managed the team/projects on the whole rather than trying to get into the details. All the "knowledgeable" managers I've had fall into two equally bad (to me) categories. The first really doesn't know as much as they think and make life more difficult by injecting bad or wrong information into the process which (at best) drags things out or (at worst) makes the whole team look like a bunch of idiots that can't get their stories straight. The other group is those that actually do know their stuff, but they fall back to just doing it themselves rather than managing their team to get things done.
The real key is that the staff has to trust the manager to stay out of the low level details and the manager has to trust his staff to actually be competent at their jobs (and if not, do something proactive about it). Without the trust and everyone sticking to their actual role it all falls apart and people are miserable.
quite regularly, those things that "everybody knows" turn out to be not actually true.
Yes, and this is why we bother to study things. If you could go back in time a few hundred years, you'd find that already "everybody knows" how the world works, more or less, and they'd be wrong about a lot of it.
In fact, I don't even think this is necessarily what I'd expect. Yes, of course your boss's competence would have some relationship with your job satisfaction, but this goes much farther: "your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being"
That's quite a statement. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm not sure I buy it. There are multiple things about this statement that give me pause. For one thing, there's the issue of it being a predictor for your total well-being, and not just job satisfaction. I can see how that could be, since our jobs are such a huge part of most of our lives, but it's still a bit surprising. Second, that it's the strongest predictor, which means that if you search through all kinds of things in a person's life-- marriage, family, education level, wealth, body fat percentage, serotonin levels-- you can best predict a person's total well-being by looking at their boss. That's quite a claim. Finally, it stands out that they're indicating the problem is "technical" competence. I'm not even sure what that means, but I suspect the implication is something like, "General competence as a worker or a manager aren't an indicator. It's an issue of technical competence in your particular field."
Further, one of my immediate questions when reading this was, "Is it that having an incompetent boss makes you unhappy, or that being unhappy makes you more likely to rate your boss as incompetent?" I read enough of the paper to see that they anticipated this and attempted to rule out the latter possibility.
In my experience, it's OK if my boss isn't technical if:
Believe me, I understand the problem, but I would suggest that the problem might not be quite where you think it is.
For example, someone who is a competent manager might have developed a process for sorting out issues that are beyond their technical expertise. They might choose someone from among the techies to serve as an adviser, or choose a technical lead who is capable of making those decisions, and delegating those decisions outright. They could round up the senior techs and have them vote on it.
Or honestly, they could ask you to present your arguments, and judge based on the information that they can gather from people who understand it better. I've had plenty of bosses do this pretty successfully. They see that there's a technical disagreement, and they ask each side to explain what the consequences are. When you reframe the question from, "Which technical decision is better?" to "What are the consequences to our business of one technical decision vs. another?" then you don't need to be a technical genius to make the decision. You just need to understand your business needs.
And if it turns into a popularity contest, then that's a failure of management, and not technical incompetence.
. Shocking as this might be, a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck
To live paycheck-to-paycheck as an adult is to fail at life, or at least to fail at being an adult. Adulthood means responsibility, which for most of us primarily means financial responsibility.
Alternatively, the spouse.
IMO, the only good reason not to move to a better city for your line of work is because your spouse has a better career, and you're following his or her job around the country instead. Of course, not wanting to move with no job lined up is totally understandable, but to not even look for work in a hot market - well, it's fine to have other priorities, sure, but you chose not to have your career as a priority, don't blame others for that.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.