Why Managers Fail

Computerworld - When I first joined the workforce, I naively believed that workers supported their bosses, looked up to them, followed their directives and sought out their counsel. I also assumed that bosses were generally deserving of respect, since they had been promoted by the sages who went before them. These were the days before Dilbert alerted the pre-career young about the messy realities of the workforce.

Of course, it’s easy to lose the confidence and support of subordinates, and, sadly, there are many managers who are deserving of disrespect and derision. One of the reasons why the “Dilbert” comic strip is so funny is that we’ve all had incompetent and arrogant bosses. There are endless ways for managers to lose the respect of their subordinates, and most do.

Over the years, I’ve heard explanations for this pervasive failure of leadership that fall into two general schools of thought:

1. Defective people get promoted into management. There are many subtle variations on this theme, but the key idea is that people eventually get promoted to jobs in which they are incompetent. Their unsuitability may be either technical or emotional, but either way, they enter their new position defective and are unable to adapt to the demands of the new job. In fact, it may be their defects that lead them to want those jobs in the first place.

2. The position of management, by its nature, corrupts the competence of those who hold the job. In this narrative, people enter management in a generally capable state, but eventually they succumb to the temptations of money, power, ambition and hubris. The position of management is itself toxic to those who would dare occupy it.

Both explanations make good points, and I’m sure that many managers do fail for these reasons. Still, I get to meet a lot of managers, and most of them are neither incompetent boobs nor power-hungry tyrants. Most really want to do what’s best for their organizations and staffs.

So I’m not convinced that either of these stories adequately explains why so many people feel that their managers really stink at their jobs. It seems to me that the most common reasons are more banal and less dramatic. In fact, I think that most managers don’t really fall flat at their jobs at all. Most managers perform most of the tasks of leadership with reasonable competence. They generally seem able to carry out their responsibilities. They generally display professionalism and comport themselves appropriately. What seems to go wrong is that each person has some shortcoming in some area — one foible that everyone notices and no one forgives. They don’t really fail at their jobs. They fail at one aspect of their job, each one falling short in some idiosyncratic way.