Why do incompetent managers get promoted?

Re:Why do incompetent managers get promoted? by JamesBarney on Friday February 14, 2020 @11:02AM (#22327621)

> ...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.

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Re:Why do incompetent managers get promoted? by brianmcc on Friday February 14, 2020 @11:14AM (#22327722)

"As you move up the ladder you are constantly trading control for impact."

What a wonderfully succinct way of expressing this - it also captures why "control-motivated" people for want of a better description struggle so much with even the first steps of ceding that control. Great expression!

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Re:Why do incompetent managers get promoted? by sailfast on Friday February 14, 2020 @12:06PM (#22328161)

Andy Grove mentions something similar in saying the job of a manager is to focus on "high leverage" activities that enable everyone in your work unit to be more productive, which is more valuable than your individual impact.

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Re:Why do incompetent managers get promoted? by perl4ever on Saturday February 15, 2020 @07:08PM (#22338931)

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.

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Re:Why do incompetent managers get promoted? by JamesBarney on Sunday February 16, 2020 @12:22AM (#22339926)

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.

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Re:Why do incompetent managers get promoted? by whatthefox on Friday February 14, 2020 @02:40PM (#22329582)

"As you move up the ladder you are constantly trading control for impact."

Brilliantly articulated!!

(I logged in after years just to up-vote this comment).

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