Organizations rarely fail due to a lack of frameworks, tools, or technology. They fail because decision-making becomes distorted when people who should never have reached certain positions end up occupying them.
The most expensive mistakes do not always appear on a profit and loss statement; many of them live in that invisible space between what a team could achieve and what it actually delivers under weak leadership.
“Promoting the wrong person is not just an HR mistake. It is a cultural signal, because it communicates unambiguously what the organization truly rewards — and what it does not.”
A genuine talent repellent..
1. The Predictable Pattern: How Incompetence Gets Promoted
In every company there are individuals who advance not because of their capability, but because of their proximity to power, their political skill, or their talent for creating a (very false) perception of productivity. These individuals tend to share several traits:
- They manage upwards aggressively and downwards poorly.
- They confuse visibility with impact.
- They excel at presenting results but never at producing them.
- They neutralise or push out colleagues who could expose their limitations.
When one of these individuals is promoted, the organization absorbs the decision quietly, but the teams immediately detect the mismatch. From that moment on, performance erodes little by little, but inevitably.
2. The Hidden Tax on High Performers
The most expensive consequence of promoting an incompetent leader is not their own poor performance — it is the impact they have on those around them.
High performers quickly experience one of the following:
- They compensate for the leader’s gaps, doing two jobs instead of one.
- They lower their standards because excellence is no longer rewarded.
- They mentally disengage.
- They leave, taking with them talent, context, trust, and institutional knowledge.
This creates a silent yet measurable tax on productivity. A team that could deliver at 120 ends up delivering 70. A project that should take three months drags on for nine. Decisions that should be made in a week take a quarter. No one records these losses anywhere, but anyone paying attention can sense them from afar.
3. The Cultural Domino Effect
Promoting an incompetent leader does not end with that individual. It triggers a cultural chain reaction:
- Good managers become cautious; advocating for talent becomes risky.
- Teams become defensive; less collaboration, more blame-shifting.
- Ambitious employees update their mental model of the company: political skills matter more than professional mastery.
- Mediocrity becomes normalized because challenging it is perceived as confrontational.
Over time, the organization becomes highly stable yet deeply unproductive — a dangerous combination that masks stagnation until it is too late.
4. Real Dynamics: What Happens Inside the Room
From cases I have observed, the dynamic is surprisingly consistent:
- The incompetent leader frames dissent as negativity.
- They escalate minor issues upwards to demonstrate “control”.
- They avoid specialists and surround themselves with generalists who will not question them.
- They present partial or inflated results to maintain the appearance of progress.
Meanwhile, the team operates in a low-trust environment. Meetings become theatrical performances, and reports become instruments of justification rather than tools for decision-making. Creativity fades because creativity requires safety and the assurance that it can be developed — and incompetent leaders rarely create safe environments.
5. How to Break the Cycle
Fixing this problem requires structural courage:
- Reward competence publicly. Make capability visible again.
- Rebuild clarity of roles and expectations. Incompetence thrives in ambiguity.
- Measure leaders by team health, not self-reported performance.
- Establish real upward feedback mechanisms with consequences. Please, no surveys — consequences.
- Re-establish a merit-based narrative. Even symbolic moves matter.
Organizations that correct these distortions early recover faster than those that try to “ride it out” or protect the wrong people for political convenience.
6. The Final Point
Promoting an incompetent leader is not a minor decision — nor are its consequences. It reshapes the culture, distorts incentives, and quietly drains the organization’s potential. The cost remains invisible until resignation letters arrive, innovation dries up, or a competitor overtakes you simply because they allowed their teams to be led by adults.
The first question is why incompetent people get promoted. The second is critical: why, once promoted, they are allowed to stay.
