Managing Leadership^®

Almost 30 years ago, a military unit I was in had a competition for its young lieutenants. We were deployed aboard Navy ships in the Western Pacific, so the contest was to write an order for a ship-to-ship raid, and the winner would get to actually use his plan to conduct the raid against one of the ships in the fleet.

During the planning period, I asked a more senior buddy of mine how his was going. He said he was already done, and pulled out a single piece of paper to show me. On it, he had hand-drawn a ship with planes diving on it, bombs falling all around, complete with screaming sailors jumping off the boat, jets crashing in the ocean – even sharks circling ominously. In response to my look of utter amazement, he explained that we were platoon commanders, and he only wanted to command his platoon. But, if you demonstrate too much skill in doing paperwork, he warned, they assign you extra duties where that is a key requirement, such as investigations.

As it happens, I won that competition. It was especially useful, because my platoon, to which I had been newly assigned upon reporting to the unit, was a “difficult” outfit with severe morale problems – two of my bosses had even told me they considered it basically non-operational. But that changed immediately and dramatically when I gave them the news that “they” had been personally chosen to conduct this raid. They instantly became – and remained – the most motivated and capable platoon in the battalion. (There are lessons in that, of course, but we’ll return to them another time.)

And, sure enough, I was later seconded to conduct the next legal investigation – as an additional, not primary, duty – that came up, and then another. And, yes, they were both a drag. Meanwhile, my buddy remained a highly regarded and successful commander – even appointed as an acting company commander at one point, well below the rank at which that normally occurs. And never an additional duty, or even routine assignment as a staff officer – just pure command. We all envied him, although none of us had the nerve to follow his really remarkable example.

As it turns out, though, many others have. According to a recent Jared Sandberg column in the WSJ, some even consider this approach to be an indispensable office skill. Sandberg notes that one executive who was tagged to organize the annual company picnic proved so (calculatingly) incompetent, and pestered so many others with questions and requests for assistance, that the assignment was finally given to someone else.

Referred to as “strategic incompetence,” this technique for attaining “power through powerlessness” is interpreted by many of its victims as an unimpressive unwillingness to take one for the team. And, sure enough, just as my buddy warned, the ones who show not only the ability, but the willingness, to organize the picnic, fix the office copy machine, and the like – well, they wind up doing it every time. And those who feign incompetence enjoy their clean desks.

Others, though, reputedly appreciate the opportunity to take on these little tasks, because it allows them to demonstrate skills of general and wider value to the firm despite their “lower status,” according to an expert quoted in the referenced item. It is a sort of mutual regard that resembles that shown in some social orders found in nature. “I think,” he adds, illuminatingly, “of apes grooming.”

How do you think of yourself at work – as groomed, or grooming?

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