Promoting the Wrong People

April 5th, 2008 by hragitator | Posted in Management |

Have you ever seen a seemingly terrible employee get promoted? You know the types, the grouch that nobody likes, the whiner, the laze-about, the incompetent clutz, the bully, and so on. Everyone is shocked when they hear the news. So, why do companies do this? Why do they promote the wrong people?

 
photo credit: deaddamien

There are a variety of reasons, and none of them are very good to be honest. Yet, they happen everyday and will probably never go away. Let’s look a little closer, shall we?

• There is no one else. Let’s face it: sometimes companies don’t plan very well. This is true for human capital as much as anything else, and it often happens that a key position in a company is vacated and they simply have no plan in place for replacing the person. It’s desperate times that call for desperate measures, and sometimes there’s simply not enough time (or money) to do a prolonged and expensive search for a top-tier candidate. So, you do the next logical thing and pick the best you have. Sometimes the best you have has a hard time tying his shoelaces, let alone managing people.

• The right person is working on something too important. I have seen companies promote a less qualified candidate because they can’t afford to lose the best candidate from a critical project or assignment. This is well chronicled in about a hundred Dilbert strips, so I won’t go into it in more detail.

• They need to meet their “quota”. It’s said but true. While companies who are forced to complete an Affirmative Action Plan (AAP) are not supposed to set a quota and are still supposed to favor protected classes when all other factors are equal (they never are), companies secretly set quotas for race, gender, age, etc. It’s an ugly fact that’s not too much of secret. If the government believes it’s not happening, they’re blind. Regardless, some employees, competent or not, can get a free meal ticket here.

• The hiring manager is incompetent. I read in a management book somewhere that “sevens hire fives”. In other words, if you have a less than competent manager, they’re likely to hire someone even worse then they are. Businesses need to be ultra careful to let only “nines and tens” in the upper levels of the organization. It has a ripple effect that can be extremely detrimental in the long term and compounds over time.

• The employee is bad mouthing his/her co-workers. I recall a time when we brought someone who was working in the field into a corporate job, because they were such an outstanding employee. Turns out they weren’t that great at all, they had just been spending all of their time bashing their co-workers secretly and taking credit for stuff they didn’t do. In fact, it was so bad that we actually caught them expensing inappropriate personal items and made them pay back over a $1,000 worth of reimbursements. Be careful that an employee out of sight looks good only because they are not being watched closely.

Of course there are some other reasons that people like to cite: the employee is good looking, they’re having sex with the boss, they’re part of the “good ol’ boys (or girls)” network, etc. I’ve found that these are much less often true than people like to believe. They’re more exciting and more gossipy in nature, so people are drawn to them, but in reality is often much more boring than that.

Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot you can do about these things other than to accept that they’re out of your control and try to look past them. Changing jobs is usually only a short term solution as well, because these problems crop up everywhere.