Workplace Reality #7: Organizations are full of leaders and managers who are incompetent and painful

This post is part of the series on 9 Realities of Modern Workplace.

In this post, we talk about Reality #7: “Organizations are full of leaders and managers who are incompetent and painful“.

When I wrote the original post, one of my friends called up to protest against it, he felt this comment was too harsh. I have no doubt that he is a good manager. However, I can’t say the same for large majority of leaders and managers you see at any workplace. For the purposes of this discussion, a leader or a manager is one who has people, project or technology responsibilities – people manager, tech lead, project managers, etc. Again, for our discussion, we define incompetence as the lack of demonstrated ability to do lead or manage people, project and technology, and we call it painful when the lead or manager gets in the way of doing things rather than helping with it. Hence, what I am saying is this: a large number of leaders/managers in organizations lack ability to lead or manager, and usually get in the way rather than help in doing things.

Different Success Drivers for individual contributors and leaders

When I teach the open course on new leadership, I point out the fact that there is huge difference between success drivers of an individual contributor and a leader.

You solve different types of problems, you work in a different environment, and perhaps the most significant of all, your effectiveness and performance depend on others doing well. When an individual contributor gets promoted to leadership role, they are expected to understand this different and adapt themselves to it. Unfortunately, it is not an easy change to make for many individuals (especially when mentorship and training for new leaders is patchy in most organizations) and many don’t change, trying to apply their individual contributor world view to leadership, and slowly evolve into a mediocre leader.

Performance Management Systems don’t measure leadership well

Another factor that aggravates the situation and fosters poor leadership is the bias of performance review systems. Most such systems are geared towards measuring visible indicators of what a person did, in an area that consists of hard skills, because these are easier to measure. It is easier to see the results produced by an individual writing good code to solve problems, much harder to see the results of mentoring by a manager, or design inputs by a tech lead that made the individual perform so well. This results in very poor (and sometimes missing) measures of leadership performance. There are significant differences between being a people manager and being a technical lead (or a senior individual contributor) in terms of performance measurement (which I dealt with in this post), but for current discussion, we can ignore that.

My central argument is this: very few organizations do a good job of identifying, developing and measuring the performance of their leadership talent, and hence the paucity of good leaders and managers in most organizations, and the reality statement above.

Dealing with the reality

Given this reality, what do you do with it? Two things:

• Identify competency level of your leader: Observe the gap between what the leader says and what the leader does. Action speaks louder than words. When you are in doubt, always believe what you interpret from actions.

• Find mentors in the organization (or outside): Having good mentor(s) is one of the best ways of building your career effectively. This can also offset some of the effects of mediocre leadership if you are exposed to it.

In the next post, we will discuss the Reality #8: “There are lots of star performers who are jerks, or vice-versa“. Stay tuned.

Image: freedigitalphotos.net