Incompetent employee. Psychology of personality: how to understand that you are out of place? A set of measures for planning the growth of an employee

The higher the position, the more educated people should get there.

The country will long remember the “disruptions” in Orsha. Although what's wrong with that? Many bosses start every morning with yelling and insults.

But there are rules of office etiquette. There are various kinds of attestation commissions, and they should not allow rude people and boors to the leadership, because the humiliation of human dignity, redneck are unacceptable qualities for a leader.

These rules do not come to a person by themselves.

Of course, education is needed. If it was not there, it will definitely affect later.

To form a good leader, it is also important to follow the rules of the career ladder. This is when a person in the service grows gradually, from step to step. Lieutenant, first lieutenant, and so on.

When you become a colonel, you will be assessed whether you are a real colonel, and only then you get the opportunity to wear trousers with stripes, that is, you become a general.

An exemplary system of training and education of personnel, by the way, was formed in the USSR.

It was strictly forbidden to jump over the steps. It is with us that you can jump not only over steps, but even over flights of stairs. Just like that, from major to general. And at the same time to be able to hang around 18 orders and 86 medals, just like Brezhnev before his death. It is possible for us to immediately take off from a district official to the level of a bank manager.

Obviously, with each new position, the level of a person should also increase. Promotion suggests this. Promotion is called promotion because it is not only a new position, it is a new circle of communication with people who have passed through the sieve and are in a higher position, these are new opportunities and a new outlook, a new culture surrounding a new position, this is the promotion of a person. And at the same time, the rules of etiquette and business etiquette are being honed and more and more become a habit.

So, the higher the position, the more educated, more educated and cultured people, with appropriate business qualities, should get there.

So, there is elementary business etiquette.

Which of these was violated during the riots in Orsha?

The first is the “splits” themselves.

There is such a rule - criticize subordinates in private, praise in front of everyone. You can not insult and publicly humiliate a person for a mistake or a wrong decision. This is on the one hand. On the other hand, people do not have respect for a tyrant.

Second rule. Hold back your emotions. Even raising the tone for a public person is unacceptable, as it looks like incompetence and creates a bad atmosphere. And this atmosphere, unfortunately, has been successfully created in the country. “Elechtorat” likes it very much, “yak yon them” scolds. How they, humiliated and insulted, stand with their heads bowed. How carefully they constantly “write down” something in their notebooks, in fear of incurring public “fair” anger. And this is the worst! And this is the center of Europe! And such spacing is now at every enterprise, many believe. And hazing where?

The sergeants also began to understand their military power in their own way.

The third rule - you can not constantly look for the guilty. If everyone is doing something wrong, topsy-turvy, then the culprit should no longer be sought among subordinates, the leader himself is to blame! If the search for the perpetrators is chronic, this obviously already indicates that the leader is in the wrong place!

And the last.

It is said that Napoleon sometimes allowed himself to be scolded. To do this, he had an old hat, he threw it at his feet and trampled it furiously.

So it was in the war.

So it was Napoleon!

After Lee Iacocca was unfairly fired from the Ford Corporation, he received an offer from the Chrysler Corporation to bring it out of the crisis ...

Starting to analyze the situation Lee Iacocca found that the corporation “… looked like Italy in the 60s of the last century. The company consisted of a cluster of small states, each of which was ruled by its overlord. It was a tangle of mini-empires, none of which paid attention to what the others were doing. I was surprised to find that the corporation has 35 vice presidents and each of them runs on his own treadmill. There was no committee system here, there was nothing to cement the organizational structure, there was no practice of meetings at which people could exchange views. I, for one, could not believe that the manager in charge of the design department was not in constant communication with the head of the production department. But that is exactly what happened. Everyone acted on their own. I only took one look at this situation and was almost ready to run away. That's when I finally realized that I really got into trouble.

Lee Iacocca, The Career of a Manager, cited in Coll.: Management Theory. Management in 3 parts, part 2, Minsk, GIUST BSU, 2007, p. 223.

It turned out that in addition to the structural mistakes made in the organization of the company, many managers managed to degrade so much that it was impossible to fix it:

“I had a disgusting feeling, because once in their place, all these people could achieve remarkable success. They themselves explained the predicament and embarrassment simply: “I never sought this position. You address me questions as an accountant-auditor, but I do not know the answer to them. What I understand is in spare parts and car service, I do not know accounting. Maybe I can master it, but I need more time for this.

All employees understood that I came to the corporation to clean up and clean it up, and everyone was afraid that they would become its victim. They were not sure of their position. They lived in fear, and for this they had every reason, Within three years I had to fire 33 from 35 vice presidents. That's almost one every month!

On a number of occasions I have tried to revive some of the managers. But nothing worked for me they were simply not able to cope with their duties, Charlie Beecham used to say that once a guy has grown to twenty-one years old, you will never be able to change his character and habits. It seems to you that you can do it, but his idea of ​​himself is already ossified. No one is humble enough to continue learning as an adult.

Unfortunately, Beecham, as usual, was right. When Paul Bergmoser came to the corporation, I remember telling him: "Try to save at least one of these guys." He worked with them for six months and then told me, “It's impossible. Each of them is accustomed to the methods adopted here to play their own game. They are already incorrigible. Too late".

One difficulty always gives rise to another. When a person feels not very confident in his place, the only thing he wants is for the next administrator in the hierarchy to be an insecure person. He thinks to himself: "If the next one after me turns out to be very capable, he will expose me and, in the end, will replace me." As a result, one incompetent manager pulls another incompetent one. And they are all hiding behind the overall weakness of the system.”

Lee Iacocca, The Career of a Manager, cited in Coll.: Management Theory. Management in 3 parts, part 2, Minsk, GIUST BSU, 2007, p. 227-228.

People who are naturally devoid of a sense of humor love to tell jokes. Drivers barely able to stay in their lane love to teach others how to drive. Managers who do not even have a basic understanding of the field in which they work love to call specialists on the carpet and scold them for not understanding anything about their work. Well, why, why are all these people so blatantly incompetent and do not notice it?

This is due to the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect: people with low intelligence, a modest level of skill and a narrow outlook, due to their modest abilities, cannot understand that the decisions they make are erroneous, and the talents they endow themselves with are are false. That is why it seems to them that they are right in all their actions and understand the situation better than others. Over time, this attitude takes on the character of psychological defense: a limited person begins to defend his vision of the situation precisely because he feels that if he only admits the thought that he is wrong, more talented people will push him out of his familiar place.

However, it is the talented who have the opposite effect: they are well aware of how complex the laws of reality are and how vast the field of knowledge that can be mastered in the future - this leads them to underestimate their own abilities, to underestimate their place in society. “I know that I know nothing,” repeated the sage Socrates, who led a more than modest life and was constantly attacked by fools who were confident in their rightness. Is one of the limited people capable of admitting this to himself? It seems not.

The effect was theoretically predicted and then experimentally confirmed in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, members of the Department of Psychology at Cornell University (USA). The theoretical basis for the hypothesis was the observations of great philosophers. Dunning himself quoted the expressions of Charles Darwin: “Ignorance more often gives birth to confidence than knowledge” and Bertrand Russell - “One of the unpleasant features of our time is that those who feel certain are stupid, and those who have at least some imagination and understanding, filled with doubt and indecision.” And the practical source of inspiration, oddly enough, was the crime. And curious: the authors were interested in the amazing case of the robber MacArthur Wheeler, who robbed two banks one after the other, smearing lemon juice on his face, because he believed that lemon juice did not allow his face to appear on the recordings of security cameras. Psychologists admired the depth of incompetence of a person who did not even try to check the correctness of his idea, although the mistake threatened with prison.

Having gathered in one room people employed in different fields of activity, but at the same time having completely different levels of real knowledge, the authors of the experiment gave them a questionnaire where they were asked to mark their level of competence in the field in which they worked, and then pass a series of tests that allowed to establish the true level of their competence. Based on the results of these two tests, a graph was drawn up, which showed the dependence of real knowledge on people's confidence that they are well versed in their field of activity.

The graph looked like an imperfect parabola: on the left side, where the least competent participants in the experiments were represented, it reached its climax - one hundred percent self-confidence values. Then it fell sharply - the vast majority of people who were well versed in their profession had an extremely low opinion of their experience and skills. Toward the end, the curve rose again—there were the best of the best, true experts in their field, who could not help but realize that they understood it much better than most other specialists.

And yet the confidence of real experts barely reached two-thirds of the scale of the opinion about their own skills and knowledge, which marked complete laymen. As Dunning and Krueger found, the profane not only overestimated their competence, but were also unable to adequately assess specialists who had a truly high level of skill in the same field. In addition, they sincerely did not believe that they had made mistakes in tests related to their professional activities - most remained in their opinion even after they were pointed out to their mistakes and logically substantiated their wrongness *.

Since then, the Dunning-Kruger effect has been repeatedly confirmed by other researchers. Specifically, it has been tested on OB/GYN students at the University of Florida** as well as a wide sample of general practitioners***. The fact that doctors were the first to test the conclusions made by psychologists is alarming.

However, the hope that the blind, unable to see the abyss of their ignorance and the shining peaks of knowledge that other people have reached, can improve, nevertheless exists. Dunning and Krueger suggested that the laymen take a special training course, where they were not only given knowledge related to their profession, but also an idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe methods by which real indicators of competence can be obtained. These methods made it possible to check both the professionalism of others and their own real level. As a result of the training, the laymen realized the level of their previous incompetence - even if their professional level did not grow after that.

Vyacheslav Ignatiev. I am in charge of the operational efficiency department in a gold mining company.

Expert in optimizing the activities of enterprises in the machine-building, chemical and processing industries.

I live in St. Petersburg.

The most dangerous kind of incompetence is malicious incompetence. When a person not only fails, but masks his incompetence. He makes every effort so that the deception is not discovered, and his career continues to go up - with no real reason for that.

Here are eight signs by which you can identify a "maliciously incompetent" employee.

1. He greets the leader the loudest

Thus, the employee wants to create the impression that he is a leader in the team, a person with an authoritative opinion. Loud greetings coupled with first and middle names are sweet butter for the ears of some executives, they take it as a sign of respect and melt instantly.

2. He speaks on professional topics in the language of personal feelings and other people's opinions.

Often uses the expression "I think". This allows the opportunist, if necessary, to quickly retreat from the original position. And he will certainly take advantage of this opportunity.

3. Often resorts to the help of colleagues

Because, in principle, he does not have the necessary knowledge about those things that he just confidently talked about. After receiving the task, an incompetent employee hurries to retell it to other colleagues, listen to their comments. For some, this is interesting or not very information, but for an opportunist, it is a way to survive. In addition, in case of failure, you can refer to a colleague who “advised” (see paragraph 2).

4. Almost never works alone

For each task, a report on the results and, in fact, the result itself must inevitably follow. Because Incompetent employees cannot achieve significant results alone; they definitely need someone who will do the work for them.

As partners, opportunists try to ask for a person who has deep professional knowledge, but dismisses formal reports, considering them "empty chatter." The former do not hesitate to take advantage of this, presenting it as mutually beneficial cooperation: "you will do it, and I will report it."

5. When discussing the results of his work, he turns the conversation to the failures of others.

A simple trick to divert the attention of the manager from discussing the results of his work is to mention the failure of a colleague, especially if the manager does not know about it. But even a well-known problem can be used for shading: “of course, it didn’t turn out very well, but certainly better than Ivanov’s.”

When working in a team, describes in detail the various circumstances associated with colleagues, due to which the result could not be achieved.

6. Spends a lot of time in the kitchen

Uses kitchen gatherings to gather information about his colleagues and the successes of each of them, and, at the right time, hide behind the failures of others (see item 5). Is there a better place for this than the kitchen?

7. Often runs to "smoke"

Going out for a smoke is a great opportunity to build informal relationships with co-workers. But the main purpose of being in a smoking room is not to talk with colleagues and not even smoke a cigarette. The goal, the opportunist's jackpot, is to get closer to the management: give a light to the head of the department, treat the director with a cigarette.

8. Tries to be the first to report any news not related to work

“Pyotr Ivanovich, you have already heard about ...”, “Ilya Semenovich, what do you think about ...” - this is done in order to be remembered by the leader, to emphasize his attention to the opinion of his superiors.

Conclusion

Opportunists are often in good standing with managers, because they never bring bad news. The vast majority of their words are obvious, something that everyone already knows. The rest is news service information and bus gossip.

Managers who have not learned to filter the useful from the useless, over time, begin to consider "convenient employees" as a model of intelligence and diligence.

When flatterers and opportunists themselves become leaders, hell begins for subordinates during their lifetime.

Many cases of the destruction of new buildings and the fall of spaceships are the result of building a career by people who did anything at school and university, just not getting the necessary, but painfully boring knowledge.

If we want to live in a prosperous country and an adequate society, we must stop the dangerous activity of people who use non-material tricks to obtain quite material benefits for themselves and their loved ones.