The Corporate Village Idiot
A village idiot is generally harmless. The townspeople mostly ignore or humour that person. When such a person suddenly obtains power, it becomes a serious problem.
Certain people in organizations around the globe are what I refer to as corporate village idiots: they run around with their pants on fire all the time, presumably to keep warm. Many are innocuous, as they crawl around the muddy base of the corporate totem pole, where their blast radius is limited and they are primarily a waste of (human) resources. When they manage to ascend the corporate ladder, they acquire authority yet not necessarily the competence to wield that power. Such corporate village idiots are a serious problem for organizations, as they create environments that undermine morale. Few managers seem even aware of the asymmetry of power and its effects on interactions in the workplace.
Note that the corporate village idiot is not a toxic boss who exhibits dark-triad traits.
Such narcissistic, psychopathic, or Machiavellian people are an entirely separate problem.
These ambitious bulldozers raze everything that is in their path to the top, where they tend to cluster.
From the upper echelons, their leadership style spreads and poisons the entire organization.
Toxic bosses see people as chess pieces they can freely move around as they please, which is why micromanagement is their main weapon of choice.
They have a zero tolerance policy against dissension among the ranks.
In extreme cases, they retaliate against people who dare to speak up or refuse to go along with their (hidden) agenda.
This behaviour is deliberate and therefore not an archetype of the corporate village idiot who is unaware of their status as the designated simpleton.
Archetypes
Let’s identify the most common archetypes of the corporate village idiot and describe how they reach the higher levels of organizations.
The Nuclear Shield
The nuclear shield is someone whose skull is so thick it would make a better shield from a nuclear reactor’s core than ten inches of lead. If you repeatedly hit them with a sledgehammer, you’ll only end up with a bent sledgehammer.
Nepotism is usually the reason such people end up in positions of authority. They are wholly unqualified to lead, let alone manage a team of domain experts in a field they have absolutely no experience in or affinity with. Unfortunately, the people under the nuclear shield tend to be good at what they do, which is why the company’s leadership thought it acceptable for their friend to run such a department. Even with exceptional patience, it is nearly impossible for expert subordinates to penetrate the nuclear shield. Instead the experts tend to be frustrated and exhausted from repeating the same basic messages again and again, only to realize the nuclear shield still does not understand any of it.
By ignoring or bypassing the nuclear shield, the nuclear shield’s people can get their jobs done and limit the negative influence of their superior. That typically comes at great personal cost, as the nuclear shield is protected by family relations in positions of even greater authority.
The Fruit Fly
The fruit fly can only retain one piece of information at a time, which means any decision will be based on what they heard (and remembered) last. If you want to affect their decisions, the advice is to get in at the last moment. Stalking their calendar is an effective means to achieve that.
I apologize to all fruit flies in the world. Their short attention span, not their utility to the ecosystem, is the sole reason I picked the name.
Fruit flies tend to be external hires who seem competent enough in interviews with executives, especially those in adjacent areas that only have a smattering of an understanding of the area the fruit fly is interviewing for.
The damage of fruit flies is far beyond their own area or department due to their lack of focus and desire to please people. They make promises to whomever they meet without consulting anyone, which leads to impromptu re-prioritizations that are the opposite of what leadership is supposed to be about. It may be impossible to circumvent a decision made by such a manager or even backtrack it, especially if special promises to customers were made. It may also leave a negative mark on your professional record.
The Butterfly Chaser
The butterfly chaser is similar to the fruit fly in that they both lack focus. Instead of trying to please people to reach the top, the butterfly chaser runs after the latest fad.
The butterfly chaser can either be an external hire like the fruit fly or an internal one who may have at one point in their careers been respected, but they have since only cared about appearances. Butterfly chasers believe that innovation means changing your strategy more frequently than your socks. No one in the executive suite seems to notice their pathology, though.
Note that running after trends can also be a manipulative tactic employed by ambitious bulldozers to distract people: a casual remark from a manager can easily cost a team days or even weeks of futile research. The main difference is that the bulldozer is calculating and politically savvy, whereas the butterfly chaser is a dreamer who is unaware they are actually supposed to be awake on the job.
Teams managed by such corporate village idiots tend to ignore their superiors or risk losing their best members. Because the teams under the tutelage of butterfly chasers rarely perform stellarly, these corporate village idiots often bump into a glass ceiling sooner rather than later, which limits the damage they can do.
The Brilliant Dolt
The brilliant dolt is a manager who is mostly absent, but is always credited with being smart, though they never have a chance to show off their intellect anywhere. They only float in lofty spheres among other executives, and provide zero direction to those below them. Once in a while they organize a session with their underlings, but only to tick a box and spout vague desires that somehow must be translated into a vision, though it remains unclear by whom, by when, or what for.
The brilliant dolt is typically a former technologist with a good reputation who turned into an administrator as they needed to move into management to increase their compensation package. The brilliant dolt was once considered smart, but that fact is for future archaeologists to dig up from the ruins of their careers. Since management and leadership are often conflated by the ignorant, brilliant dolts consider themselves to be (thought) leaders, which is why they spend more time on their public image than on actual strategic work.
The Drinking Bird
The fruit fly agrees with whomever they most recently conversed. The drinking bird, on the other hand, used to be a decent worker but they got promoted to a managerial role they are not particularly adept at. They are merely administrators who think they are leaders, like the brilliant dolt, but they can be swayed easily by people who have strong opinions or data, though the only thing they really always fall for is authority: if someone at a higher level says the opposite of what their underlings tell them, even when backed up by data, they will go with whatever the bosses claim. As long as there are executives who prefer people who agree with their ideas, drinking birds will soar through the ranks.
The drinking bird lacks vision and know-how, which is why such a corporate village idiot asks teams to come up with their own targets and then pretends they did their job of providing guidance and setting goals. Such bottom-up approaches tend to be fine as long as the people under the corporate village idiot are competent. Drinking birds are incapable of critical thought, which is why any top-down ‘prioritization’ will lack data to make it even remotely objective. They may pretend to be objective by co-opting a prioritization framework and using placeholder (i.e. bogus) data. All their decisions are based on their emotions, because they think they know better than anyone else.
The PowerPoint Architect
To the PowerPoint architect, an architecture diagram is just practice for colouring inside the lines. They tend to have positions of authority because they were hired from the outside, usually a consulting company, where their technical incompetence did not really matter much. After all, consultancies are generally employed by clueless executives to solve a problem they cannot solve themselves or because they do not trust their own people. Since these executives are responsible for hiring the people below them, they only need look in the mirror to find who is at fault when it comes to trust issues.
Now that they are in charge, PowerPoint architects mostly create useless diagrams that look impressive in slide decks to other corporate village idiots and executives who lack technical knowledge, but these leave most to be figured out by others. When subordinates ask for clarifications or complain about the lack of detail in their designs, PowerPoint architects will blame their underlings for not being able to figure out basic things themselves. If they dare challenge the designs, the PowerPoint architect reminds everyone on the team of their place in hierarchy.
What To Do?
The obvious question is: Why not provide constructive criticism? Because the corporate village idiot, like any village idiot, cannot benefit from it at all. Everyone in the village knows who that person is, so no one in the village needs a reminder on who the village idiot is. But if you tell the village idiot they are the village idiot, it can only hurt their feelings. Moreover, if they are in a position of authority, such feedback can only backfire.
What about the people above the corporate village idiot? Well, they were responsible for the hiring or promotion of that person, so we can only assume that they are oblivious to that person’s glaring deficiencies.
What if you cannot identify the village idiot? If you cannot identify the village idiot in an organization, chances are you are the village idiot.