Why do Incompetent People end up at the top of the corporate pyramid?

For one reason, we see time and time again that skilled craftsmen often end up with leadership responsibilities. A skilled salesman, car mechanic, baker, electrician, plumber, etc. does not necessarily become good leaders because they have been great craftsmen. The older you become and the longer one stay in the corporate business world the sharper our instincts generally gets, when it comes to expose incompetent leaders especially if one has survived a couple of storms before. Most people will at some point work for a bad boss. Employees do not leave companies, but bad bosses. Naturally, the board of directors and C-level executives struggle to accept this. After all, they have overseen the selecting process and admitting that it was a wrong choice is perhaps a step too much to require.

There is general an inability or unwillingness to measure the performance of their leaders. Unlike in football where the head coach are carefully scrutinized based on how the football team perform, businesses tend to lack robust metrics to compare the performance of their leaders and evaluate how they impact their teams, business units or the organization as a whole. There is also the influence of toxic politics in an organization. Leadership is often reduced to a popularity contest, a political game in which Machiavellian and manipulative leaders thrives and flourish. This also explains why incompetent leaders will reproduce copies of themselves. Such bosses will go to great lengths to sabotage the career prospects of talented and ethical employees focused on helping organizations rather than pleasing their bosses.

There is a failure to understand actual leadership and the tendency to ignore the science of leadership at the expense of flawed leadership models and unreliable evaluations of leadership. I once had a conversation with a recruiter and a CEO, where both claimed that change management was nonsense. Change management is a professional knowledge, without this the probability of failing is significantly. Perhaps it is not so strange with such an attitude that 70% of all change projects actual fails. Organizations focus on the wrong soft skills, selecting leaders on confidence rather than competence, charisma rather than humility, and narcissism rather than integrity.

Organizations should pay attention to the science and focus on the qualities proven to make people better leaders: competence, humility, and integrity. Competence is a function of experience, knowledge, and intelligence. Detecting it should not be hard at all so long as those tasked to detect it have competent and expertise in the field. Humility and integrity can be assessed with science-driven psychometric tests and 360 degrees feedbacks.  Organizations and especially recruiters must learn to distrust their instincts. People often assume that intuition is a valid tool in the social and behavioural sciences. But there is a science to understanding and predicting human behaviour, just like there is a science in chemistry. Using data and predictive assessments — even when the results run counter to one’s intuition — will help organizations detect true leadership potential and select the right people.

 “Warning” sign:

Lack a Vision for the future of the organization: I once met a CEO who only said that the future is difficult to predict and no one know. As the ostrich he stuck his head in the sand and hoped not having to make any decision. A CEO need to decide and show the company's path forward. To lead a company is not a one man show, there are any number of ways to get the best ideas from the whole team, not to mention other stakeholder such as customers, vendors, shareholders, board members etc. In a healthy organization, the best ideas bubble up to be acted upon. A CEO without a vision is a waste of space and salary. Lots of CEOs who spend time in the media talking about the importance of “disruption” and “sustainability” and other buzzwords have no clue where they are leading the company. If you think the average resume is full of fluff, check out any annual report some time.

Lack the ability to react to changing circumstances: The real world presents us with new challenges every single day. Some CEOs do not have the ability to react in the moment and turn the ship to the left or the right, instead they go straight ahead into the icebergs. Then  they start blaming the marked or other people. I met a CEO who stated that he got the market against him. The market never goes against one, it is about the adaptability and being able to keep up with new framework conditions.

Do not share information and avoiding answering questions: CEOs who know what they are doing do not mind answering questions from the media, their employees, and their customers. Even if they do not know the answer, they still answer the questions by saying that they do not know. Instead of acting on need to know basis as some CEOs does, as they were the head of the secret service. Good CEOs talks about their ideas and believe in what they say and share their beliefs with employees without hesitation. If you do not know what your CEO believes want, that is a big red flag.

Surrounds only with nodding dolls: If there is no room to have other perspectives than the view of the boss, just get out of there and not waste your time on someone who does not deserve it. We often see that bosses employ highly qualified personnel, but they are not at all interested in input, because they know best themselves. And when the boss's strategic choice fails, it is the middle managers who are to blame.