Dilbertization: When Pointy-Haired Bosses Take Over Your Org Chart

24 Nov 2023

24 Nov 2023 by Luke Puplett - Founder

Elon Musk ruffled some feathers recently when he tweeted that "Big companies steadily increase their Dilbert score over time like entropy." For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Dilbert principle refers to a satirical observation by cartoonist Scott Adams that companies tend to promote incompetent employees to management roles simply to get them out of the actual workflow.

Big companies steadily increase their Dilbert score over time like entropy

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2023

In other words, the Peter Principle is the idea that employees rise to their level of incompetence. Under the Dilbert Principle, employees who were never competent are promoted to management to limit the damage they can do.

The idea is that workers who excel at their given jobs often make terrible managers, especially if they end up being promoted based on their job performance rather than actual management potential. This eventually fills the organization with unskilled leaders floating to the top, dragging down engagement and productivity like an anchor over time.

Musk's commentary hints at the frustrating yet common tendency for large corporate bureaucracies to promote people for the wrong reasons. However, the Dilbert effect is not inevitable. With some diligence, companies can sidestep this personnel pitfall to ensure they develop and promote competent managers.

Symptoms of a High Dilbert Score

How can you tell if your organization is suffering from a high Dilbert score? Here are some common symptoms that arise when companies promote incompetent employees into management roles:

• Inept leadership - Managers may lack essential leadership, communication, collaboration, coaching, or analytical skills needed to guide teams. They struggle with priorities, giving feedback, and nurturing talent.

• Bureaucratic workflows - Unskilled managers attempt to assert authority by instituting unnecessary processes, committees, approvals, and paperwork that slow down operations. They hide behind red tape due to inadequate expertise.

• Low employee engagement - Capable employees feel frustrated and disengaged working under managers who don't understand workflows or how to support their staff. They get stuck with indecisive leaders focused on the wrong priorities.

• High turnover among top performers - Your best people aren't willing to tolerate working for incompetent bosses who don't recognize, empower, or develop them. So your top talent starts leaving while underperformers stick around.

• Leadership development failures - Company spends lots of money on leadership training but sees no change. Program effectiveness suffers if human resources doesn't address root cause - the wrong people are being promoted into management.

• Strategic stagnation - Weak managers risen through the ranks lead to a shortage of visionary and agile leadership at the highest levels of the company. Innovation and growth suffer without competent leadership.

Of course, no single manager encapsulates all these nightmares. But if you see multiple issues across themanagement chain, it may signal that your Dilbert score has room for improvement.

Causes of the Dilbert Effect

How does an organization end up promoting incompetent employees in the first place? Here are some common root causes that allow the Dilbert effect to take hold:

• Using promotions as rewards rather than developing leaders - Companies promote based on performance reviews to reward capability in current roles rather than aptitude for management. This disconnects promotion from leadership readiness.

• Failure to properly train managers - Even potentially talented managers flounder without ample management training, leadership development resources, mentoring, and evaluation mechanisms in place post-promotion.

• Lack of accountability for managers - With no measures of management efficacy, bad managers face no repercussions for poor performance. No visibility into their deficiencies means bad habits become entrenched.

• Poor succession planning - No pipelines exist for developing future front-line leaders or assessing leadership potential. Instead, management roles are filled reactively via promotions or external recruits without vetting.

• Risk-averse culture - Fear of making a wrong promotion call leads organizations to default toward tenured incumbents. Better to deal with the mediocre manager you know rather than shake things up.

• Bureaupathology and politicking - Backroom deals and internal politics edge out legitimate leadership talent, especially when HR lacks power to inject sanity into promotion decisions.

• Blind spots - Existing leadership perpetuates its own weak points by seeing its reflection in those selected for promotion. The blind leading the blind into management, full speed ahead!

Keeping Your Dilbert Pathology Low

There are some things you can do to avoid incompetent employees accumulating management:

Institute rigorous leadership and management development programs to hone critical skills - don't assume capabilities will catch up later. Monitor program efficacy to ensure quality.

• Use 360 performance reviews to identify and address experience or skill gaps to strengthen management bench strength.

• Pay attention to who gets promoted, when, and why so alarms sound if patterns seem to promote style over substance.

• Listen carefully to your top performers - their frustrations with management could foreshadow brewing exodus. Fixing culture requires facing harsh truths.

• Have a meaningful, transparent succession planning process in place to consciously nurture high-potential leaders rather than promoting reactively.

• Audit your management promotion criteria - do skills evaluations reflect strategic capabilities critical for effective leadership?

• Cull toxic aspects of culture that lead to bureaupathology - instill balance of power/transparency through HR. Left alone, bad cultures promote worse leaders.

Watch for "progression to incompetence" where each level gets less competent. Address gaps promptly before dysfunction gets compounded.

Promote Based on Potential, Not Just Performance

The key to avoiding the Dilbert effect is ensuring your promotion practices assess management potential, not just current job performance. Here are some tips:

• Judge capability to grow into management roles, not just output in current roles. Evaluate leadership, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, coaching skills, etc. beyond domain expertise.

• Give high potentials stretch assignments, project leadership opportunities, committee roles, and rotational posts to evaluate management readiness.

• In interviews and reviews, emphasize and evaluate soft skills needed for leadership like communication, collaboration, persuasion, and empathy.

• Don't default to tenure or seniority as indicators for promotion - understand exactly what makes a cold star salesperson necessarily a good sales manager fit.

• If performance is the promotion criteria, require proof those capabilities extend into people management before progressing high performers.

• Audit failed promotions to understand what assessment gaps contributed to putting the wrong person in place and update practices.

Conclusion

The Dilbert principle is an insidious threat to organizational effectiveness, but with vigilance it can be contained. Promoting competent leadership is a conscious choice requiring intentional focus on management potential, developmental pipelines, and succession planning rigor. If you see warning signs of bad management accumulating like legacy tech debt, take it as urgent impetus to improve how people are elevated into positions of leadership.

Of course leadership competence matters, but cultures also need to leave room for humility and growth mindsets. Capable leaders recognize their gaps and continually strive to improve by listening, learning, and evolving. Perhaps the ultimate solution lies in promoting not just competence but also consciousness at all levels of the organization.

With some self-awareness and the right priorities, companies can break the gravitational pull toward entropy and retain vibrant, responsive leadership. Just remember - the Dilbert effect is avoidable. Fight the natural tendency to promote people for the wrong reasons, focus on nurturing real management talent, and maintain high standards for leadership competencies as you scale.

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