I have a coworker. Nice enough person, I suppose, but I get frustrated sometimes by the kinds of questions she asks me. It seems to me they are basic questions that she should either already know the answers to or at least be able find the answer to herself (since google is everyone’s friend). I think some of the frustration comes from poor communication on my part. I never know how to answer without potentially hurting her feelings. I’m always concerned that my response will be too “dumbed down”. Like, imagine if someone were to you ask what a feline is. You could say “It’s the term we use for members of the mammalian order carnivora like lions, tigers, and housecats”, but that answer would not be helpful if that person doesn’t know what mammals, orders, carnivores, tigers, lions, and housecats are. You could say, “It’s a furry animal with pointy ears that goes ‘meow meow’,” but that is the kind of response you give to someone whose intellect hasn’t been developed yet. I have a hard time finding the middle ground with this particular person. Her responses to my responses rarely provide the information I need to know whether I went too far into an explanation or not enough. Usually all she will say is “Gotcha.” Sometimes I feel like she still doesn’t really get it, but she’s ready to be done with the conversation.
I also think I get frustrated because this coworker wants to be boss one day. She has “AMBITIOUS!” practically tattooed to her forehead. The prospect of her supervising me one day makes my stomach hurt. I have had bosses who I believed were not my intellectual equal but we still got along great. I’ve never had a boss who was dumb, though. My current/previous bosses might have occasionally said stupid things, but they possessed enough cleverness to make up for it. They can pass as smart, even brilliant. I just can’t see that ability in my coworker.
How challenging is it to work under someone you think is kinda dumb? If you’ve had this experience, how did things work out? What strategies did you develop? What advice would you give?
I’ve had to work under bosses who were disorganized, and bosses who seem like they got to where they are by socializing with the decision makers rather than competence. Sadly who you know and how you dress seems to be a meaningful factor in how far you get in the corporate world.
For the most part I tended to fare better the less interaction I had with management. As long as they gave me assignments and let me do them on my own time in my own way things went fine. It was when they tried to micromanage that it caused problems since they didn’t understand the job as well as I did, nor did they understand how my productivity could fluctuate. With a dumb boss I had I would just gently correct his misinfo, or I would just do it the correct way and he didn’t notice anyway.
Dumb? Not really. Not good at being a manager - definitely. And I’ve been that person on a few occasions. I’m terrible at managing people, and I avoided placing myself in any kind of management position once I came to that realization.
When I was a teacher I saw something interesting - it’s a field where you can go into management with zero aptitude. All you have to do is take the required classes and do the internship experiences and poof, you’re a vice principal or a dean. These were often the people the OP speaks of with “ambitious” written all over them. I think of them as very similar to the Selina Meyer character from Veep - people who don’t have any particular ideas or principles, they just want to be in power. Not necessarily stupid or dumb, just people who shouldn’t be in charge of anything.
Met one person (in another field) who was on a management track and I once asked her what attracted her to it. She answered simply and directly, “Power.” At least she was self aware.
Oh boy, do I! Before I enjoy reading the other replies, here’s my tale.
It was a position with a small defense contracting company that I got last year. My position was a business analyst. They were vague about many answers to my questions like how big the team was, which was a red flag, but the role sounded very independent so I jumped at it. On my first day the man who I thought was my manager introduced me to the lady who he said was going to be my actual manager (and she would report to him). I’m fine, so I chat with her a bit over the week to try to get to know her. She has an odd email signature that shows her title as development lead rather than manager of the business analysts like I was told, so I asked her about that.
Her first day was one week before mine, hired as a dev lead as her email indicated. On her second day she was gold “congrats, you’re going to be the manager of the analyst team!”. I politely inquired if she had management experience and she said she did not. Indeed she was very uncomfortable with all of it. They were staffing up the whole team, which meant that she was required to interview people and make hiring decisions. Her boss crashed one of our small meetings one day to pin her down on a hiring decision. She made ugly faces and tried very hard not to be the decision maker. She even said right out “I don’t feel comfortable making decisions like that”. He cornered her until she picked one, right there in front of me. I was thinking to myself, lady if hiring makes you uncomfortable wait until you have to fire someone!
Over the next few months I saw that her administrative skills were very poor. She struggled to use Visio, Excel, our issue tracker, and took forever to do things. She would assign testing tickets to me instead of a tester. She would assign analysis tickets to a tester instead of me. She would assign a ticket to me and email my coworker (also an analyst) to tell him it was high priority and vica versa. Like she had no clue who she was assigning things to.
Once I suggested that we do regular 1:1 meetings and she agreed. However in our first one it was apparent that she thought I had asked her for a performance evaluation. She said I was doing fine and (direct quote) “I asked around about you and nobody has a problem with you”. So not great communication skills either. Not terrible, but lacked the tact and careful choice of words that a manager should have. I didn’t bother with more 1:1 meetings.
The coup de grace was a few months later when the company lost the contract we were all hired for and terminated us all. I happened to not be in the office when it happened, and when I got the vibes that something was going on, instead of telling me, she told me to call her boss. The next day she called me at home and said that she’d asked the client for a description of the contract we were working on so we could put it on our resumes. Nothing wrong with that, but then she asked me if I knew what it was we were working on. We’d been working on this contract, both of us client-facing, for about 8 months and in all that time she never understood what we were doing?!
You’ve described my coworker. She is more into palace intrigue (which boss just got demoted, which one got promoted, which boss is hated by all the other bosses, which one is loved by all) than the nuts and bolts of what we do. I find office politics entertaining too, not gonna lie. But I really love the nuts and bolts stuff.
She may be thinking that she doesn’t have to get the nuts and bolts stuff, seeing as how she intends to be the manager one day.
I had a manager who would micromanage for absolutely no reason except presumably so they looked like they were doing something. There was no “breather” time between tasks after something was done you’d have to immediately run to another part of the building and immediately start doing that, and if work was slowing down instead of finishing it they would take everyone off the task except one and then have the people go off and do other things, leaving the lone person to now take four times longer finishing up.
Also they were fond of threatening to call the cops on you, as the idea was they’d fire you so fast you would be now considered trespassing and be forced out by the cops.
My dumb bosses were the ones who didn’t ask questions when they didn’t know something.
I’m always happy to answer when someone asks. I don’t understand the “you should have looked it up yourself” reaction. People learn best from people who know. That shouldn’t be discouraged.
I’ve heard plenty of stories about teachers who were put into administration to get them out of the classroom, but the school couldn’t outright fire them because they coached winning teams. (I have heard from more than one person that the man who was principal at Columbine at the time of the massacre was, by all accounts, the worst teacher his students ever had - even the goof-off kids didn’t want him - but yeah, he was a winning coach, so they promoted him just to get him out of the classroom.)
Difference between being clueless( many, many of my bosses through the years )and natively stupid( few of them ). I have had bosses who made dumb decisions all the time, usually based on a lack of information and an unwillingness to ask for opinions/assistance from someone who would know better. And sometimes they would make what I consider “dumb” decisions( i.e. those that I disagree with strenuously ), which aren’t really dumb per se, but more based on very different priorities. The latter are at least tolerable, the willful ignorance ones less so.
This is as opposed to just not intelligent. I have had several bosses I’d consider to have borderline personality disorders, but only a couple I thought were flat out stupid. As in completely unable to grasp an issue even if carefully explained to them.
I’m sorry if you find this offensive, but I think there is such a thing as a stupid question. If the two of us are feline biologists, and you ask me what a feline is, I’m going to wonder if you’re pulling my leg or you’ve lost your mind. If you’ve been hired to be a spreadsheet monkey and you’ve been doing that job for 16 years and yet you don’t know how to calculate an average in Excel and don’t know what a “median” is, then I’m going to wonder if you’re pulling my leg or lost your mind when you expose that ignorance to me. This reaction isn’t something I can help, sorry.
I’m totally down for a good in-depth philosophical discussion about the “why” behind a process. Why do we do it X way and not Y way, for instance. Great question. But it is hard to be enthusiastic about answering a question like “How do we do X?” when 1) I’ve explained it to you plenty of times in the past, 2) presumably you should already know how to do that, given that it is your job to know X like the back of your hand, and 3) the answer is in the instruction manual, and you should know this since knowing the content of the instruction manual is your job, not mine. I will give you a pass the first ten times you ask me this question. But if you keep it up, I’m going to feel a certain way about your intellect.
I had a really dumb boss once, and it was as painful as you’re probably imagining. She was a manager at the restaurant where I had just started as a hostess. One of the jobs of a hostess was to periodically check the restroom and restock the toilet paper. The toilet paper dispenser was locked, and the key was kept at the host stand. Except when this dummy was working; she would take it back to the manager’s office, which was also locked. I asked her repeatedly to stop taking the key as it prevented me from doing my job. She finally yelled at me that I didn’t need the key, as I could just tear away the old roll without having to unlock the dispenser. She had days to think this over and it didn’t occur to her that the point was to put in a new roll, not just get rid of the old one. There were dozens of things like this with her. I would’ve quit if she hadn’t been transferred soon after.
I dunno. I think I’d be able to distinguish an incompetent manager who is smart from an incompetent manager who is dumb. It would be incompetent management for the boss to play favorites in the office or dock people’s pay for small infractions, for instance. But I think most people would find this kind of incompetency preferable to being in a workplace where the manager makes stupid accounting mistakes that affect the business’s bottom line–mistakes he doesn’t learn from because he can’t even recognize they are mistakes. Or being in a workplace where the boss relies on staff to make all the decisions because she never knows what to do. Assuming the two personalities were equally non-obnoxious and sane, I’d always choose to work with the smart incompetent than the dumb incompetent.