{"id":841,"date":"2007-04-20T13:24:30","date_gmt":"2007-04-20T18:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2007\/04\/go-to-your-strengths-the-art-of-playing-dumb\/"},"modified":"2007-04-20T13:24:31","modified_gmt":"2007-04-20T18:24:31","slug":"go-to-your-strengths-the-art-of-playing-dumb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2007\/04\/go-to-your-strengths-the-art-of-playing-dumb\/","title":{"rendered":"Go To Your Strengths &#8211; The Art Of Playing Dumb"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Red Bird and myself are fighting over the chance to claim this CareerJournal.com article &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.careerjournal.com\/~r\/wsj\/career_journal\/~3\/109998857\/20070418-cubicle.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Art of Playing Dumb To Deter Unwanted Tasks<\/a>.&nbsp; Jared Sandberg is an entertaining writer and I highly recommend this article.&nbsp; At first I thought it was tongue-in-cheek, but it is not.&nbsp; This ability is a real artform.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>Strategic incompetence isn&#8217;t about having a strategy that fails, but a failure that succeeds.<\/em> It almost always works to deflect work one doesn&#8217;t want to do &#8212; without ever having to admit it. For junior staffers, it&#8217;s a way of attaining power through powerlessness. For managers, it can juice their status by pretending to be incapable of lowly tasks.<\/p>\n<p>In all cases, it&#8217;s a ritualistic charade. The only thing the person claiming not to understand really doesn&#8217;t understand: That the victim ultimately stuck with the work sees through the false incompetence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I used to work for a manager who consistently asked about the fax machine &#8211; should the papers be face up or face down?&nbsp; We answered the question 5 different times in spite of the clear hieroglyphics on the fax machine.&nbsp; The question continued so we added a label stating face down.<\/p>\n<p>The question still continued so the office manager simply took over the task for him.<\/p>\n<p>A great quote to end the article:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Strategic incompetence involves a lot of unnecessary posturing, notes Robert Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford University. But it&#8217;s not all bad. &#8220;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&#8217;s valued and needed,&#8221; he says. <\/p>\n<p>It can signify a mutual respect found in other hierarchies, he adds. &#8220;<strong>I think of apes grooming<\/strong>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Red Bird and myself are fighting over the chance to claim this CareerJournal.com article &#8211; The Art of Playing Dumb To Deter Unwanted Tasks.&nbsp; Jared Sandberg is an entertaining writer and I highly recommend this article.&nbsp; At first I thought it was tongue-in-cheek, but it is not.&nbsp; This ability is a real artform. Strategic incompetence isn&#8217;t about having a strategy that fails, but a failure that succeeds. It almost always works to deflect work one doesn&#8217;t want to do &#8212; without ever having to admit it. For junior staffers, it&#8217;s a way of attaining power through powerlessness. For managers, it can juice their status by pretending to be incapable of&hellip; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2007\/04\/go-to-your-strengths-the-art-of-playing-dumb\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,11],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5Oho-dz","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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