many managers never take a single course on management. Quite a few are jerks because they learned from a jerk boss. And yes many of them are there because they kiss the butt of their boss.
I can’t say that I’ve had a “dumb” manager. I’ve had bad managers, but most of them have been OK. Now, I’ve had managers who did not know as much as I did and were not skilled enough to do what I was doing. They were also sometimes paid less than I was. (I worked jobs where my time was billed at a certain rate and I was compensated accordingly.) IMHO, managers are there to coordinate the work and facilitate the activities of their direct reports. It’s a special skill set that may not overlap at all with the skills of the worker bees.
I know that bad spelling does not necessarily equal dumb, but ever since my manager posted a sign near a clogged sink that he had called the “plummer”, I never quite thought of him as brilliant.
mmm
I haven’t had dumb managers in a long time, but yes, I’ve had them in previous jobs and career tracks.
It can actually be a very positive experience, though, assuming there’s nothing else going on (illegal activity, personality conflict with the dumb manager, the dumb manager is verbally or sexually harassing you, you are verbally or sexually harassing the dumb manager, etc.).
If the manager is dumb, socially awkward, and/or generally inept, but otherwise tolerable, there is a lot to be gained by working with that. If the manager comes to you with the same question a million times, well . . . answer it a million times. Politely. Amiably. If the manager can’t work a spreadsheet, help him. Hell, go home, open up a Youtube video or two, and become an expert in creating and organizing spreadsheets. I don’t care how dumb that manager is; I have yet to run into the dumb person who doesn’t at least acknowledge the usefulness of a more intelligent creature willing and able to go out of their way to help him or her.
And if the manager isn’t intellectually dumb, but can’t work with the customers, take up the slack there, too. As long as you are OK with the manager taking the credit for some of the things you do (often amounting to an attaboy, a certificate, a cheap plastic cup, or . . . if it’s a GREAT job . . . maybe some cake), THAT’S to your advantage. You can make a very comfortable and uplifting life for yourself in your organization by taking a little extra time to make your manager’s life easier. As the nuns used to say–and probably still do–what you do today will be returned to you tenfold.
If not? Meh . . . there’s always the next position, right? Personally, I’ve had some great experiences with inept bosses and managers, although it’s been well over ten years since I’ve had to put up with any.
The last boss I had was not dumb in the absolute sense (he had a MS) but he was dumb relative to the other managers. His boss gave him the shit jobs to do and his technical comments in meetings were ignored - rightfully so. But he was a nice and supportive guy, and I got to do anything I wanted, so I’m not complaining.
There are managers who are dumb but recognize it, and support intelligence in their staff, and there are managers who are dumb but think they are brilliant. This guy was the former, I also had one of the latter. The former is much better.
Mostly my managers were very smart.
I haven’t had any actually “dumb” overall bosses. The closest have been a couple who don’t know how to treat people. And by “don’t know how to treat people”, I don’t mean they’re abusive or micromanagers ( although I’ve had those). I mean managers who don’t understand that if everytime I point out a problem with a new policy, the answer with “that’s what they want”, I’m going to stop mentioning the problems and then when an issue comes up my response is going to be “that’s what you told me to do”*. If everytime I mention an email that we both received, you tell me to resend the email because you neither remember it, nor can be bothered to look for it , I’m going to figure out that you don’t actually read your email. If you don’t reply to emails I send you, I’m going to start ending my emails with something like 'this is what I plan to do- let me know if you want something different." Which is going to mean at some point I will handle some issue in other than her preferred way- but I will have asked for direction and not received it.
- The latest iteration is that none of my calls can go to voice mail.(although I wonder why I have voice mail if that’s the case) Support staff are only working one day a week, so I’ve been forwarding my desk line to my cell phone so that I can answer when I’m away from my desk . The only time a call goes to voice mail is if I’m on another call. Still not acceptable. So from now on, whenever another call comes in, I’m putting the first call on hold and answering the second- even if the first call is from her or one of her bosses. And when there is blowback ( assistant commissioners tend not to want to be put on hold) my response is going to be that my directions from her are that no calls can go to voice mail. That’s probably not what “they” wanted - but “they” probably didn’t realize it would be an issue in smaller offices and she is certainly not going to tell “them”.
My manager is truly an idiot and Im self-employed. 
Hey, I’m here to help.
I don’t know that I’ve had many managers (or clients) who are legitimately stupid. A lot of them have done stupid things or don’t seem particularly creative at dealing with anything outside of their narrow job description.
I had one manager back in my Deloitte days who seemed pretty dump. She was from Brazil and I had just moved to New York and she kept saying to me I had no idea how cold it got in the city. I’m like “You know I moved down here from Boston, right? I’ve basically lived my entire life within 2 hours drive of Manhattan.” Still, she insisted I “had no idea of the cold”.
That’s fine. Maybe she doesn’t know American geography outside of New York any more than I know what’s a few hours outside of Sao Paulo. But another exchange went something like this:
Manager: How do we get to the subway from here?
Me: There’s a station right across from the building in City Hall Park.
Manager: [angry] You’re a consultant! I expect you to give me a better answer than that!
Me: [confused] So…do you want me to bill a bunch of hours putting together a long PowerPoint deck that kind of but doesn’t really tell you where City Hall Station is?
Devious, self-serving, spiteful, and disinterested, manipulative and unkind, I have worked for (not all in the same person), but never dumb.
I have also worked for wonderfully inspiring people too, and sometimes even the bad ones were good.
Most have been way smarter than me, which is preferred. Two appeared less intelligent, but they weren’t dumb unless you think I am. At least one Doper does.
When a rumor got around that a certain farmer was underpaying his help an inspector came to check up. “How many people do you employ?” he asked.
“Two hired men and a hired girl.” said the farmer.
"I understand that you are paying them below the minimum wage, " the inspector said.
“Is that so!” said the farmer. He called the hired men and the hired girl. “Now,” he said, “Tell this fellow what your wages are.”
“One hundred dollars a week,” each of the hired men answered. Eighty dollars a week plus room and board," answered the girl.
“Well, that’s all right,” the inspector said. He turned to the farmer. “Are you sure you don’t employ anyone else?”
“Only the half-wit,” the farmer said. “He gets his board and a little cash each week for his tobacco.”
“That’s disgraceful!” the inspector said. “Let me talk to him!”
“Talk to him!?” the farmer said. “Why you’re talking to him right now.”
Where I was in high school, the teachers were employed by the state. There wasn’t anybody at the school or district who could get them fired. It just didn’t work that way. The really bad, worst teacher in the school was given administrative duties. Eventually, experience in administrative duties would give him a promotion to a leadership position in another school.
When I was working as a contractor, I got to see many small offices, and I formed an opinion about managers, as follows:
Most smart people have the experience of being good at something, but also the experience of not being particularly good at something, and have no expectation that they will be any good at management. They don’t apply for management jobs, because they don’t want a job they aren’t good at.
Some people aren’t really any good at anything, and have no perception that there are things some people are good at, and things that some people aren’t good at. They have no expectation that they will be bad at management. They do apply for management jobs, because it’s a cushy well-paid job with no apparent requirements.
This leads to a situation where many of the people in management aren’t good at anything, and have no perception that they are bad at management.
Working in technology, I kind of feel like there is more of an “inverse hierarchy of competency” than a true “Peter Principal”. What I mean to say is that in a lot of other fields, you would tend to expect that moving up the latter more or less correlates to greater knowledge and ability. Instead what seems to happen is that you need the best and brightest who know what they are doing actually doing the work. While the less skilled and knowledgeable can do more of the “dumb” work like project management and sales. I’m guilty of this as well. When I started my career years ago, I found that I was an extremely competent developer - stuff like Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, SQL, Java, .NET etc. But I didn’t want to write code, constantly keep learning new languages and take orders from middle managers who didn’t know how this crap worked my entire career. So I went to business school and eventually got into management roles. Predictably, the technology changed over time and now I’m one of those middle management types who doesn’t really know how all this shit works.
I probably would have been unsatisfied with that answer as well. If I knew where City Hall Park was, I probably would have seen the subway sign. But if you didn’t know where City Hall Park was, or had never gone there from the building, knowing where something is won’t tell you how to get there from here. Like a hallway or vague direction.
If you don’t know the name of the large park across the street from the building you have been working at for several weeks, that is not my problem.
If you can’t infer that when I say “the park” or “City Hall Park”, I am referring to the large park across the street from the building and visible from our window, that is also not my problem.
Even if these things were somehow “my problem” and you were still “unsatisfied with the answer”, there is a polite way to ask for additional clarification (or ask me nicely to hold your hand and guide you there like a child). It is not treating someone as if failed to live up to some arbitrary performance standard.
There’s a trait I’ve noticed, usually with weak, insecure managers (you also see this with Donald Trump) where they need to constantly be seen as “right”, “all-knowing” and “powerful”. They become very hostile when they have to defer to someone else for answers. It’s like they have some need to belittle them or demonstrate that the knowledge the person possesses is beneath them.
I’m trying to figure out how she got to work every day without seeing a subway station- is there a NJ transit bus with a stop right by City Hall or something?
Are you kidding? I’m in law enforcement. Politics, nepotism, and cronyism run rampant when it comes to people getting promoted to management positions. Then there is the Peter Principle where good cops got promoted to their level of incompetence.
During my first career there was a Captain who had slept her way to the top (no lie). She had absolutely no clue on how to manage and when there were tough decisions to make the situation became a complete disaster because of her stupid ideas. At first we rhought she would delegate authority to give everyone a role. It turned out it was because she had no idea what she was doing herself and hoped someone else would.
I had to deal with an investigator once from the state department of criminal investigation. He kept screaming at me “who the f*cks idea was this? Who wrote this report? Are they insane!?!” It’s hard enough dealing with a line deputy who is a dope. But when the dope is your commanding officer it is excruciating!
Yes, I have a boss that is stupid. Not seriously drooling incompetent. No he’s the kind that will give you a % based on a specific number, tell you the dollar value of that % and explain that that is next years claims budget. If you can get claims down to x% in the subsequent year, that raw dollar amount is the bonus. Oh and good news, we’re projecting a 30% increase in business and income. Oh also, please kindly disregard the fact that an annual claims cycle runs 6 months behind the annual business cycle, so you already have no control over this coming year’s claims.
Yeah, he thought nobody would catch that little bit of switching between percentages and raw numbers and back again. Claims were worse for two years after that.
I’ve mentioned Sheboss several times. This is one of the briefest.
The woman would have been great as head of a team of newbies. When any of them started looking consistently irritated at her it would mean they were ready to be moved to a team with someone who knew the difference between managing and strangling.