Does this happen? Is this true beyond the world of Dilbert?
Sort-of specifically, what I mean is something like this scenario.
Person A is incompetent, but somehow has manage to attain a high rank in a company.
Person B is competent, but has a rank which is lower than A’s. A may not be directly over B, but is in a position that enables A to influence the availability of resources to B and things like that.
Because of A’s incompetence, B never manages to accomplish things he needs to accomplish to further the company’s goals.
A then makes a case that B is incompetent.
B gets the boot.
Does this actually happen? If so, do you have stories?
I didn’t get the boot, but a story from a long time ago:
I subcontracted to write a course for IBM to teach internally about web marketing (this was in 1997, if it matters). I did a ton of research and wrote a slideshow (not PowerPoint, but whatever error-plagued clone of PowerPoint they had, I forget) with detailed slides, student notes with tons of detail, and enough instructor notes attached that instructors could figure out the correct flow of the course and how to answer questions. It took weeks to write the whole course.
Near the end of the process, someone at IBM that should have been reviewing the material all along told me on a conference call that my student notes were too detailed. They were very clear about why: their department planned to bill other departments to teach them the course, and they were worried that someone from another department would take the course and use the student notes to teach it to others within their department, depriving the first department of the billing opportunity for all those other students. I had to take about two days to go through all the slides and delete all the student notes, moving them to the instructor-only copy.
The result was a crippled course that would not be nearly as useful for students, since I’d designed it with the intention of including a lot of useful processes and links in those student notes.
What I hear is that after they bought the course, they decided against using it. I can’t imagine why.
I had a stint where the boss was a control freak and made people look bad by being vague about expectations and then moving the goalposts so he could write you up for poor performance. I should have known this on the first day (ahh, sweet retrospection). The “orientation” for the job mostly consisted of the boss telling me that he’s glad I was there, because the guy I was replacing was so incompetent it wasn’t funny, no, I mean he was terrible. A few months later, it didn’t matter what I did, the response from the boss was to sit down with me and carefully explain This Is Why Your Work Is Unacceptable by nitpicking things that he never specified to begin with, or claiming that I should have been bolder in finding more ways to please him rather than sticking to just his literal instructions, or how is so unhappy that I went off and did my own thing assuming that I knew what he wanted rather than sticking to the literal instructions. He was impossible to please. He also adamantly refused to tolerate “active listening” and confirming that an oral instruction was understood. He would say, Do <complex task>, and I would take notes and repeat it back in my own words to confirm that I truly understood the nature of the request. His response was that I should have been paying attention, go away, the work better be done, no he would NOT repeat it or confirm or deny anything about what the instructions were, it better be done though. After a few months, there were convenient “budget cuts” that made it impossible to keep me around. Lol.
Hell yes, especially in certain fields such as the postdoc research community. You’ll see an older, well-credentialed leader who has long forgotten the nitty-gritty of the field and is much more interested in swanning around the world giving lectures and socializing. The actual hard work is done by eager recent graduates who don’t get much credit and do get the blame for whatever goes wrong, but do admittedly get some valuable experience. It’s probably a pretty common symbiotic relationship.
All the time in academia. Usually chancellors or higher have a requirement to hold a phd. What makes absolutely no sense to me is that the subject of expertise is open. So, while this person might be a great history professor, they make a horrible boss who can’t read spreadsheets or do basic math.
I’d be surprised to find someplace where this kind of thing didn’t happen. It’s a very common tactic of incompetents to make others look worse than them.
Yes, this happens often enough to have a name - the Peter Principle. The principle is commonly understood as “Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence.” IOW, employees who excel at their job tend to be promoted until they are in a position where they no longer excel.
More common than your scenario, though, is one where a person who is perfectly competent in their position is promoted beyond their level of competence and ends up being fired. I have seen it numerous times and have never understood it - it’s such a waste. At least offer them a chance to go back to where they were competent.