Red Bird and myself are fighting over the chance to claim this CareerJournal.com article - The Art of Playing Dumb To Deter Unwanted Tasks.  Jared Sandberg is an entertaining writer and I highly recommend this article.  At first I thought it was tongue-in-cheek, but it is not.  This ability is a real artform.

Strategic incompetence isn’t about having a strategy that fails, but a failure that succeeds. It almost always works to deflect work one doesn’t want to do — without ever having to admit it. For junior staffers, it’s a way of attaining power through powerlessness. For managers, it can juice their status by pretending to be incapable of lowly tasks.

In all cases, it’s a ritualistic charade. The only thing the person claiming not to understand really doesn’t understand: That the victim ultimately stuck with the work sees through the false incompetence.

I used to work for a manager who consistently asked about the fax machine - should the papers be face up or face down?  We answered the question 5 different times in spite of the clear hieroglyphics on the fax machine.  The question continued so we added a label stating face down.

The question still continued so the office manager simply took over the task for him.

A great quote to end the article:

Strategic incompetence involves a lot of unnecessary posturing, notes Robert Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford University. But it’s not all bad. “One way in which lower-status people feel more esteem in the presence of higher status people is to show they have a skill that’s valued and needed,” he says.

It can signify a mutual respect found in other hierarchies, he adds. “I think of apes grooming.”

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Posted By Derrick Moe | Communication, Team Management | |