“Imagine the judge is slightly hard of hearing, bored and a bit daft,” was the advice given to new barristers earlier this week by an experienced member of the profession. But it is not just those in the legal profession who consider their seniors “a bit daft”.
A civil servant once told me that her job was “saving politicians from their own stupidity”. I have heard doctors say they spend more time dealing with incompetent managers than their patients. Then there were the engineers who treated their manager like a work-experience student confined to harmless tasks.
There are many reasons why daft bosses are such a common curse. Sometimes it is as straightforward as their lacking intelligence, although a 2017 study found that the best leaders tend to have slightly higher IQs than their followers. But even smart employers can come across a bit daft if they lack the right information, which can happen when employees don’t feel “psychologically safe” enough to share it with them. In 2007, Nokia employees were too scared to speak up about flaws in the operating system they were developing, meaning management persisted with an unworkable product.
In the rare situations that you do manage to get your point across to your employer, there is no guarantee they will understand it. One reason is the Dunning Kruger effect, which is when people with the lowest level of objective ability in an area believe themselves to be among the most talented. You are also likely to reach different conclusions if you don’t share the same background, which is often why generalist managers, with no experience of doing the tasks of the people they are managing, tend to perform worse.
Even if your manager does share your expertise, they are frequently not interested in their own performance – but that may not be their fault. Organisations that emphasise image and symbolic manipulation can often reward smart people for not using their intelligence, creating a culture of “functional stupidity”. So go easy on your boss – it might be the system that’s daft.