Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It?

Bosses may be an overbearing breed, but more often than not, you've got to admire their business chops. Wouldn't you love to have that same sense of competence and confidence, that ability to assess tough problems and reach smart solutions on the fly? Guess what? So would they. If you have ever suspected that your boss isn't actually good enough at what he or she does to deserve the job in the first place, a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that you might be right.

Social psychologists know that one way to be viewed as a leader in any group is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say. This works well when leaders know what they're talking about, but what if they don't? If someone acts like a boss but thinks like a boob, is that still enough to stay on top? (See the best business deals of 2008.)

To determine just how easily an all-hat-no-cattle leader can take control of employees, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, devised a pair of tests. Cameron Anderson, an associate professor of organizational behavior and industrial relations, along with doctoral candidate Gavin Kilduff, recruited a group of 68 graduate students and divided them into four-person teams. To eliminate the wild card of gender, the teams were either all-male or all-female. Each group was given the task of organizing an imaginary nonprofit environmental organization; the group that did best — as determined by the researchers — would win a $400 prize. While the prize was real, the purported goal wasn't. Excerpt...

You bring up something that most people don’t realize or don’t want to realize. I also was in the electronics industry. Managers that are highly experienced, are stronger leaders than those with less experience in the field that they are managing. The article said, without really tuning in on the point, that students that scored high in the SAT tests, did better than the others in the math situation. This relates to experience.

I worked for a large company that wanted to do a study that put minorities and women in management positions where there were none, regardless of their experience. They felt that they could be trained to manage any group. Gotta give the company credit for trying, but...........it failed totally. It ended up that 90% of them either were fired or they went back to their production jobs.

Remember the idea of “Work smarter, not harder.”? Employees will figure out if a manager knows his or her stuff real fast. Same goes for the people in this country when it comes to their politicians. If Obama succeeds, it will not be due to his experience or abilities. It will be due to those around him or others in Washington. If it seems that he is going to fail, you will see people getting as far away from him as possible.

In big pharma, the most corrupt and absolutely ruthless rise to the top.

Except for my (now retired) mentor. He was an excellent boss, and I (and several others) rose with him to middle management.

The rest? They’d rape their grandmothers if it would get them a bigger quarterly bonus.

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