As incompetency abounds, why are so many incompetent manager/leaders allowed to keep their jobs? The quick answer seems to be that the known incompetent is better than the unknown incompetent. Incompetency leads to ineffectiveness and a continuous state of organizational imbalance and ultimately decline. Incompetency will persist as long as it is tolerated.

The personnel policies of professional sports teams very clearly establishes the value of performance: if you don’t perform well, you don’t perform at all. You will be benched or traded… period. The best performing athletes play; the under-performing don’t… period… end of story. And although the professional sports team’s personnel policy seems cold and unfeeling, the sale, trading, or release of players is most often accompanied by the phrase “Well, it’s just business.” Compare this policy with the difficulty of a RIF or firing of incompetents. They are worlds apart.

Decades ago Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hall wrote The Peter Principle.[i] At the time I didn’t pay much attention to the central concept of the book: people/employees rise to their own level of incompetence, that is to say they are promoted to a level at which they can no longer perform well.

The Peter Principle makes more sense all the time as the pace, complexity and growth of business and government has increased, and the basic trust people have for organizational and political leadership has diminished due to perceptions of increased incompetence.

Don’t allow yourself to be permanently stuck working with or for an incompetent leader. Their incompetence and nincompoopdom will rub-off on you if you let it.