Unfortunately most of us spend at least 50-75% of our life working for incompetent leaders! Why? Four reasons:
- The working world in general continues to promote the wrong kind of people to leadership positions.
- It sometimes take us awhile to realize we are working for incompetent leaders.
- Finding a new job is hard work. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay working for a crappy leader vs find time to find a better job.
- There is no guarantee the next job we find doesn’t have an incompetent leader. It’s not easy to tell if your future manager is any good.
3 Common Traits of Incompetent Leaders
There are 3 common traits of incompetent leaders. Your leader could have one of these traits or worse all three.
Trait 1: Absentee leader – this leader “lets” the team do all the work and doesn’t really set strategy, lead, or coach others. Their style is often to outsource any or all efforts that a leader usually need to do to one of his or her team members.
Trait 2: Pretend Leader – this leader wants to be known as a leader so does many things that a great leader does with one key difference – his/her words are not consistent with his/her actions. Here are a few examples.
Trait 3: Aggressive / insecure leader – common examples are someone who take credit for your work, someone who blames you for any fallout, someone who puts you down in front of a group, or someone who micromanages your every move.
Many incompetent leaders are insecure, self interested, and usually lack the necessary self-awareness of their incompetence to make any changes. Their goals is their own comfort/ advancement vs that of the team’s development and collective result. We discuss further on this topic in this month’s recorded coaching call.
How to Work with Incompetent Leaders
Here are the top 3 tips and you can find the complete list of tips in the recorded coaching call here
Tip 1: Lower your expectation – expect them not to have your back
Tip 2: Take ownership – lead aspects that your leader should be leading and is not. At least you can gain experience this way
Tip 3: Feed his/her ego – all incompetent leaders have huge egos but likely also have some strengths. Compliment them on something they are good at. This will keep up the illusion that you are on their side.
While it’s no one’s dream to work for an uninspiring leader, it’s the reality many of us face at work today. You may not be able to change them, but you can still do your best to manage the situation and plot your long term move at the same time.
Your comments: What % of your work life have you been working for an incompetent leader? 25%, 50%, 75%, all the time? I would love to know. Please share your comment below + how you cope during those jobs.
Your comments: Do you have an inner voice that tells you that you are not enough? Do you where it comes from and how to ignore it? I look forward to hearing from you.
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I am always in your corner.
Lei
You can work smarter and live more. Best wishes
Lei