As a mid-level employee, you’ve been working for
ACME Company, a manufacturing firm, for past two years. Your job performance has been solid, and on occasion, even praiseworthy. However due to current economic conditions – poor profit earnings, massive layoffs and company restructuring, you now find yourself working for a new boss. Ordinarily reporting to a new leader would not pose a real problem but this time it feels different -- management practices have changed. The team environment has been transformed from one of true collaboration, honest dialogue and a commitment to problem solving to one where backstabbing, finger pointing and plain fear are norms. Congratulations – you are now under control of an “incompetent” leader!An “incompetent” leader by definition is someone whose action destroys camaraderie, instill gossip, encourage dishonesty, and prevent people from speaking freely. “Incompetent” leaders tend to use their own weapons to get noticed and promoted. They usually lack vision, interpersonal communication skills and confidence to resolve conflict.
You might think term “incompetent” leaders should only be reserved for those in company’s upper echelon such as Chief Executive Officer of Chief Financial Offer.
After all, aren’t they ones entrusted with setting direction for entire organization? While this may be true to a certain extent – CEOs do serve as “compass” for company, but many CEOs are not directly involved in daily operations of their organizations. Those responsibilities fall on shoulders of senior and middle managers. And, it is “collective leadership” of those managers -- their style of execution, their effective ability to communicate, manage and motivate their teams that keep companies on course. If a leader lacks competency to manage his or her team, then team morale diminishes, productivity and performance drops, and companies ultimately fail. What’s worst is fact that today we live in a heavy Information Economy where bad news about a company spreads instantly thereby allowing competitors to profit from your company’s incompetent leadership. In quest to attain “better and cheaper staff,” one would think that organizations had all advantages needed to rid their companies of every single under-performing employee – managers included. However, nothing could be farthest from truth. Unfortunately in many cases, it is good, high-performing, mid-level employees who first are shown door, while ineffective managers – ones who really need to take a hike – remain.
For whatever reason these foul apples may have been left behind; fact that they are present causes a lot of problems either through their actions or sometimes through their inactions. The truth is that “incompetent leaders” have always existed and will continue to exist despite best efforts from HR and other performance improvement initiatives to detect and remove them before bringing irreparable harm to an organization.
So what can you do to protect yourself and survive working for an “incompetent” leader? Here are some quick tips:
1. Do not make it a personal matter. This is a hard one, simply because working for an incompetent boss is such a personal matter. Remember, that most of these leaders do not have a problem directly with you, but they too are frustrated and are shouting loud their own insecurities -- most likely mirroring to you things that they should be doing.
