This is so AT&T!
From Medium:
They can’t answer questions
In my corporate career, I was struck by how important it was to answer questions effectively.
It’s tricky though. 1000 things can happen in a week. Senior managers change their minds on direction and strategy every two seconds.
Having spent a ton of time in managers’ meetings, I noticed most senior managers have fantastic memory. They can successfully answer specific questions about their department and everything there within.
Managers who didn’t know the answers to questions — eventually stopped showing up for the meetings.
If you want to rise high in an organization, do great work, and know the answer to lots of questions.
Needing help on every question is a sure sign of incompetence.
A lesson I learned from military leaders
In the modern US military, you won’t find many generals who haven’t served in combat, and you certainly won’t find any under the age of 40.
This stands in contrast to the 20-something tech CEOs, many of whom make enormous mistakes or alienate their workers.
Most of us work in a more middle-of-the-road organization, but you probably recognize the sure sign of incompetence in a leader: they can’t do any of the work their direct reports do. If those workers quit, that department would be without arms.
I’ll give you an example: I managed a group of vendors and was particularly frustrated with one vendor.
The final straw came with a senior account manager. We had delays and a painful list of issues. She didn’t know the answer to the most simple question, and when I asked another question, she said, “That’s a bit over my head. I’ll need to ask my employees.”
She had no business managing that team.
In the military, there’s a reason most generals serve in combat. You can’t expect generals to lead men to die in battle if they themselves haven’t experienced combat and all the chaos and he-l it entails. There’s a deeper lesson within this fact.
You become a general in a sequential path. You are an O1 → O2 → ……. O8 (one-star general/admiral).
By the time you reach general, you’ve been humbled by service. You’ve swept the barrack floors, shined shoes, cleaned rifles, dug trenches, hauled the trash, and done all that redundant work before gaining power.
You intimately know the things you are asking your men to do.
Great leaders are empathetic and know the jobs they manage. They aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and help their team when things get hairy.
Incompetent leaders are the opposite of those things.
It’s in their attitude
After working for several companies, I came to a grim conclusion.
In most organizations, only ~10% of people are truly high performers. They have great attitudes, are self-starters, smart, and great to work with.
25% are hard-working, competent, and carry most of the company's workload.
About 50% are lazy and just cross the minimum standard of work.
15% are completely incompetent and shouldn’t be at the company.
Many in this bottom 65% are gone at 5:01 PM despite being on a performance improvement plan.
And the thing that stinks: many of them once held promise in the eyes of the interviewer. Nobody wants to hire and manage a dud.
Many in that bottom wrung are managers too. They slid up to their own level of incompetence (the Peter Principle).
There’s another key distinction between the top 35% and the bottom 65%.
Their attitude.
The high performers don’t grimace when something goes wrong because it means more work. They don’t pout or complain incessantly about their job.
They are all in. They are there to crush their goals.
I noticed this in particular with the Indian coworkers who were there on a work Visa. They were the ultimate in keeping their head down and working, never complaining, and investigating problems thoroughly.
They appreciated the opportunity in front of them. They weren’t spoiled and had grown up in a competitive academic environment.
It is completely unsurprising that so many CEOs are of Indian descent in the US.
When I see a coworker with a sour attitude, I see incompetence.
Of word and bond
For years, I often heard women complaining about the dating scene, and men who didn’t “Do what they say they were going to do.”
It struck a chord with me as I went through my 20s, and grew increasingly impatient with flaky friends and people who were constantly, and egregiously late to things.
I realized that the people who were the flakiest, and least likely to honor their word, were also the people who had far more problems in their life. Their careers were stagnating. Their relationships were turbulent and problematic.
Their lack of commitment to their word correlated to a bunch of other character flaws, for which they were paying a steep price.
I have since kept a strong radar pinging for people who fail to follow through on even tiny commitments.
My advice to you — and one that I’ve painfully followed — take a knightly approach to your word. This means saying no to things you aren’t sure you can follow through on.
If you explain yourself and say, “I don’t want to make a commitment I am not sure I can honor.”
They’ll usually understand and appreciate it. This is especially true in dating. Women hate, hate flakey dudes.
Recap for memory: 4 signs of incompetence — in life and in work
It’s very simple. Watch out for these signs:
They can’t answer questions about their tasks and projects.
They can’t do the job of the people they manage.
They don’t honor their word or commitments.
Their attitude is poisonous.