[borroka]

To paraphrase, it is not that most leadership/high management is poorer than expected, it appears poorer even when it is expected to be poorer than expected.

At some point between the ages of 20 and 30, you begin to believe that, although it is difficult to point out what they are better at than you or your peers, in order to be in the position they are in, "leaders" must be better in some way--say, in the technical skills, the strategies and tactics used to achieve a goal, the personality that inspires subordinates--than you and your colleagues.

Then, perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly, thanks to age, experience, and new, maybe more jaded, eyes, you realize that the words, strategies, and perspectives communicated or elaborated by those "leaders," which you thought were nonsense but had decided to consider something you simply did not have the tools to understand, were, in fact, nonsense, delusional thinking, intellectual garbage.

And, at that point, you may try to understand how it is possible for such important companies to have such incompetent leaders. But that is another story.

[ryandrake]

Im convinced that a lot of leaders, especially in tech, are leaders not because they are smart or skilled, but simply because they were there early.

[borroka]

This is empirically verifiable and, dare I say it, quite visible.

It is also a virtuous circle: you come in early, you are promoted because there is virtually no one else around, or you are chosen as the best among a group of fairly mediocre people--maybe they use a die to choose who will become the new "leader" of the group--and in a couple of months you go from being just another IC to a rising star.

You are quickly recognized as such and, in an environment with very loose feedback cycles such as management in the technology sector, you are free to fake your way up to the top. As soon as you are exposed, if ever, you can recycle yourself elsewhere as a true and proven leader of vast experience.

Or, assuming you are not very good at leadership in absolute terms, you do a good job anyway because most management is skirting responsibilities, taking advantage, in a good way, of colleagues and the machinery that makes the company work, and, most of all, going with the flow.

[dasil003]

The reason executives talk the way they do is because when you’re speaking to thousands of people everyone has different base context and interprets things a little different. Messages need to be coarse grained and contain little nuance. This is at the heart of all politics.

It’s easy to assume therefore that the words are intellectual garbage, but that’s not always the case. In fact there’s no way to tell competent and incompetent leadership apart just from speeches they give, but make no mistake the distinction exists, and as an employee it’s critical to ferret out the answer over time as you will learn entirely the wrong lessons if you work for muppets for any length of time.

Fortunately good leadership does exist. It is usually built over decades of a solid skill foundation (ie. Experts leading experts) rather than MBAs, and the top skill is sniffing out bullshit. Of course every company has a mix of people, but in healthy ones there will be a critical mass of competent people and they generally know who each other are and keep things pointed in the right direction.

[borroka]

I think that "messages need to be coarse-grained and contain little nuance," as stated in the comment, is a comforting thought, but it has little truth to it. I just have observations, many of them anyway, and not any proper experimental or observation study, but reflecting on them has changed the lens through which I look at leadership and management.

When you say in the previous comment that "it's easy to assume that words are intellectual garbage, but that's not always the case," I see the position/authority bias at work: it can't be nonsense, they are the leaders, what they say has to make sense, if only seen in the context of having to speak all day, or to dozens, hundreds, thousands (unlikely outside of politics) of people every day.

Or look at the layoffs at Twitter, Meta, Google, etc.: even if they seem to make little sense (some of the decisions anyway) in the way they are done, somehow they have to make sense, either because the layoffs are a "blunt instrument," or because the shareholders are asking for something particular or whatever.

I would like to bring an example. A person in my company was hired in a management role, overseeing a function for a group of hundreds of people. As soon as they gave their first "speech," it was clear to my shrewd eyes that the words uttered made no sense, that they were lying about their past, their accomplishments, and that their skills were not what was advertised. If I focus my attention on what people do in a context where I am competent, it takes between very little and not much to assign them to a broad range of competence: incompetent, somewhat competent, okay competent, very competent.

Similarly, I've played a couple of sports at a high level, and if I see people training for, say, an hour, I can assign them to a level of competence, with little margin for error. The guy who does everything differently and originally is sort of an invention of novels and TV shows. Sometimes, very rarely, they show up in real life, so I might add a little bucket labeled "mysterious."

The executive hired by my company fell squarely into the category of incompetent. But because the executive had been hired into that management position by people deemed competent (they weren't, that's why it was a flywheel, a charade), my colleagues considered the executive competent for years, despite the obvious nonsense. It was rather bizarre to observe, but position bias (and "whatever" bias) is as strong as many of the biases related to physical characteristics that we carry around with us all day, every day. And when I tried to explain to my colleagues what I had seen, they did not believe me. I think they still don't believe me.

[dasil003]

You’re conflating competence with the realities of messaging at scale. In reality they are not related as both competent and incompetent leaders at large corporations have to speak in a somewhat wishy-washy way to account for the widely varying contexts that a broad audience holds.

[hgsgm]

"Leaders" are good at one thing: communicating in a palatable way to other leaders. It's a skill, and it is useful to an extent, but it isn't worth the "2x-10x pay because boss has to be paid more than reports"