It's Time to Talk About Male Mediocrity at Work

Some men use "strategic incompetence" to avoid work and responsibility. Here's how I learned to stop doing that.

- By Ross McCammon

The unkempt hair wasn't the tell. The XXXL T-shirt wasn't the tell. No, the giveaway about disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried was on his sheepish face: that self-deprecating grin.

"I'm sorry... I fucked up," Bankman-Fried tweeted in November, owning up with a virtual shrug to a crypto calamity that erased $8 billion of other people's money. "Had I been a bit more concentrated on what I was doing, I would have been able to be more thorough," BankmanFried told the New York Times as his crypto exchange, FTX, unraveled.

Bankman-Fried's ostentatious display of incompetence is likely self-serving, given that he faces criminal fraud charges, but the implication is unmistakable: Other, lesser minds should have been sweating the small stuff.

When I read about Bankman-Fried's professed ineptitude, my first thought was "What a clown!" But increasingly I've begun to feel a wary connection: "There, but for the grace of God..."

I wrote the book on workplace behavior. Okay, maybe not the book. But a book. It's called Works Well With Others. Published in 2015, it tells the story of how I, as a young in-flight magazine editor from Texas, navigated New York City's famously status-conscious media world. My book's thesis is that being well-liked by your colleagues and bosses is a path to professional success, in whatever field you're in. There are chapters on shaking hands, making small talk, and giving a toast, and a chapter called "How to Have a Meaningful Lunch in a Fancy Restaurant Full of Important People."

I didn't write the book just for men. But in retrospect I see that some of its advice works best for the demographic I happen to belong to: straight, white, male.