The Parable of the Executive and Queen Bee Syndrome
By John Taylor; 2007 Dec 22, 11 Masa'il, 164 BE
A few essays ago I talked about the tendency of religious teachings to try to right imbalances by going to opposite extremes. Vacillation from one extreme to another is a symptom of corruption and happens when principles are not grasped. The example we used was the renunciation of cleanliness in Christianity. Christians were reacting to the society around them. The Greeks, like all societies, valued cleanliness and regarded personal hygiene as a mark both of piety and refinement. The Greeks valued bathing, using separate, personal bathtubs. Although a daily bath was a luxury, the sure mark of a freeman (that is, a slaveholder), even slaves were usually allowed time during the day to take a bath.
The Romans took this indulgence further. They bathed together in large and increasingly ostentatious bathhouses. As corruption spread, the institution of the bathhouse grew ever more expensive and elaborate. Many were huge, a strange combination of sports stadium, shopping mall and whorehouse. A large city would have hundreds of bathhouses. When two upper class Romans met, their first question was, "Where do you bathe?," just as when two 19th Century British gentlemen met their question was, "What is your gentleman's club?" With the construction of several aqueducts into
Christians reacted against this. Their ideal was a hermit who cut himself off from society and never bathed. Such uncleanliness was deemed to be the ultimate in unworldliness, detachment and devotion to God. Unfortunately the slave owner's values were not renounced. A life of idleness remained a sought-after goal. In the decline of
In a slave owning society the slave owner, by indulging in useless luxury and frittering his time away in idle, unproductive activities like baths and circuses, shows himself every bit as "slavish" as the laziest of the slaves that perform his daily domestic tasks. Worse, the slave owner mentality has contempt for manual labor; this eliminates creativity and innovation by cutting off contact with physical experimentation. The hermit or monk essentially does the same thing with the religious life, a life that is sterile unless inseminated by the nitty-gritty of working for a living and raising a family.
As mentioned, the Revelation of the Qu'ran set out to correct such unfortunate tendencies that had infested the Christian fold. One of the most important was their error of confounding piety with idleness. For example, it offers the following, which we will call the parable of the executive,
"God sets forth (another) Parable of two men: one of them dumb, with no power of any sort; a wearisome burden is he to his master; whichever way be directs him, he brings no good: is such a man equal with one who commands Justice, and is on a
The lazy, obtuse slave does not serve but does the reverse, his ploys, excuses and diversions make him into a thorn in his master's side. In contrast, a just, active servant of God is someone who gets things done, i.e., an executive. No isolated hermit or monk can ever aspire to being an executive because the only way to get things done over long periods of time is to serve society at large, while perpetuating virtue in a family over many generations. Thus the parable of the executive teaches that there is only one reason God tolerates inequality among His servants, and that is to allow meritocracy to establish itself in work and family and thus to propagate fairness and competence over time and across cultures. Ideally, every distinction in God's Order would arise only from our varying capacities, virtues and styles of serving Him.
This teaching, written into the "constitution" of Islam, kept asceticism and monasticism out for several centuries longer than was the case in Christianity. But my concern today is not with the history of religion but the meaning of this parable. The fact is that today we are more in need of good leaders than ever, and we are every bit as vulnerable to what is being called "toxic leader syndrome" than ever before. The Baha'i Faith and its principle of consultation have a great deal to say to this problem. The thrust of the new Teaching is to end the traditional swing back and forth from personal to collective leadership, between involvement and withdrawal. On one hand, It limits the amount of power that can become concentrated in the hands of any individual. On the other, every individual is expected to be an executive, both materially and spiritually; that is, we are required to search independently, to become educated and to serve family, career and society efficiently.
The problem of incompetent bosses is not as simple as it seems. I have been reading about several studies on the problem of bungling bosses. For one thing, strange but true, when it comes to a higher-up, employees prefer a sadist to a bumbler. One article cites a professor of sociology as saying,
"Surprisingly though, employees dislike incompetent bosses more than ones they found abusive, according to another study. Nobody likes abuse, but employees can find ways to work around abusive managers. Employees do not want to be involved with chaotic, mismanaged workplaces where nothing gets done well and people feel like they cannot be effective," (http://health-care-jobs.advanceweb.com/careercenter/careercenter.aspx?CC=37317)
This has been underlined for me by viewing the BBC television series, "The Office." Here is a boss whose main concern is to create a relaxed workplace by using humor. Unfortunately, he is blocked from this quite desirable goal by the fact that he is an incompetent comedian. His jokes backfire and create a tense, sullen, discontented atmosphere. This would be painful and embarrassing to witness in real life but the humor in watching this comes from the fact that even funnier than a good joke is to watch a person in authority mess up while telling what would otherwise be a good joke.
Behind the problem of the incompetent boss is the paradoxical fact that it is impossible for victims to complain without bringing discredit upon themselves. This is because of the "queen bee syndrome," the fact that incompetent bosses always hire incompetent workers in order to ward off competition for their own job. So if, like the majority of workers, you think you could do your boss's job better than him, think again. He picked you out to work there because even though he does not know what he is doing, you know even less. I will leave the last word on this "paradox of the bad executive" to a workplace pundit and (competent) comedian whose blog is called "Just ask Dan." Somebody asked him what to do about a boss who cannot do his own work, and this was his answer,
"... competent workers all tend to be in the same boat as you are in. They are deemed to have career-limiting tendencies even though the actual work they produce is always rated as excellent. It is a fact that competent workers do not like incompetent workers, and why would they? Incompetence just puts more work on their plate. What is not widely known is that incompetent workers do not like competent workers because the latter demonstrate how little the former get done, and incompetent bosses would rather hire incompetent employees because they feel competent workers might put their own job in jeopardy.
"The amazing part is that, even though most companies follow this same structure, they tend to keep moving forward. Sociologists have been studying this phenomenon in recent years and have named it the incompetence triangle for the way it usually starts at the top with just one person, the CEO, and cascades down the line growing in incompetence until you get to the base workers who are also, on the whole, incompetent. The average number of competent workers in a given company ranges between ten and twenty percent, but it is estimated that they do over half of the real work.
"President Bush was an avid fan of the research being done in this area, and even systematically implemented a planned incompetence triangle in his cabinet. Unfortunately, he was incompetent in creating an efficient incompetence triangle. A ten-to-twenty percent ratio of competent workers is vital for the incompetence triangle to work, and President Bush made the mistake of assigning one hundred percent incompetent officials to his cabinet. Without anyone that is actually competent enough to do the work his Presidency has floundered, though sociologists have found it to be a boon to their research giving them an excellent example of what might happen when the incompetence is stretched too far." http://www.justaskdan.net/ReadArchives.php?Month=10&Year=2006
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