There is a particular kind of meeting that almost everyone who has spent enough time inside a large organisation will recognise. It has been running for an hour, plenty has been said, yet remarkably little has been decided. Someone near the top of the hierarchy has spoken confidently about strategy, performance, transformation, accountability and the need for people to take greater ownership. They have used all the right language, challenged the room to think differently and perhaps even drawn something impressive-looking on a whiteboard. Around the table sit several people who actually understand the problem. They know why the numbers are wrong, which part of the process is failing and what needs to change. More importantly, they know what will happen if nothing changes. Yet most of them remain silent.
Eventually, the meeting ends. Actions are distributed, another meeting is scheduled, and everyone returns to work. The real conversation often begins outside the room. Someone explains what the senior manager was actually trying to say. Another points out why the proposed solution will not work. Somebody else quietly agrees to fix the problem before the next meeting, while the people with the necessary knowledge and experience get on with making a questionable decision workable. Six months later, the person who led the meeting gets promoted.
That, for me, is where the competence crisis begins. It is not simply about incompetent people occasionally reaching senior positions because every organisation makes poor appointments and no recruitment or promotion process will ever eliminate human error. The deeper problem appears when an organisation becomes better at recognising the appearance of competence than competence itself. Confidence starts to carry more weight than capability, visibility becomes more valuable than contribution, and fluency in corporate language begins to matter more than understanding the work. People quickly learn that managing upwards can produce greater rewards than solving difficult problems downwards. Eventually, the organisation creates its own definition of talent, and talent increasingly means people who look as though they should be successful rather than people who repeatedly demonstrate that they can do the job.
This distinction matters because organisations rarely fail through one spectacular act of incompetence. Capability usually deteriorates much more quietly. Poor decisions accumulate, standards gradually become negotiable and experienced employees compensate for weak leadership because somebody has to keep things working. Problems get translated into more comfortable language, and people stop asking difficult questions because they know how those questions will be received. From the outside, the organisation can continue looking perfectly healthy. The reports are produced, meetings take place, targets are discussed, and leaders talk enthusiastically about transformation. Beneath all of that activity, however, the people who actually understand how the organisation works may be spending increasing amounts of time compensating for people who do not.
Competence Is Harder to See Than Confidence
One reason organisations struggle to recognise competence is that genuine competence is often remarkably difficult to observe. A highly competent employee does not necessarily look impressive while working. They may prevent problems that nobody else ever knows were possible. Experience allows them to recognise weak signals before those signals develop into failures. They understand which procedures matter, where flexibility is appropriate and when a seemingly minor deviation should concern them. Much of their value exists in judgement, and judgement is difficult to measure until circumstances require someone to use it.
Confidence is much easier to see. You can hear it in meetings and observe it during presentations. It appears clearly in interviews, assessment centres, leadership programmes and conversations with senior management. Someone who speaks quickly, answers questions immediately and communicates with certainty can create a powerful impression of capability. Sometimes that impression is entirely justified. A confident person may also be extremely competent. The problem starts when the organisation assumes the two things are interchangeable.
There is a significant difference between being able to explain what should happen and being able to make it happen when circumstances become messy, incomplete and inconvenient. The distinction becomes more important as people progress through an organisational hierarchy. At relatively junior levels, performance is often visible. A technician either repairs the equipment or does not. A salesperson wins business or fails to win it. A warehouse team gets the product out of the door, while a trainer either creates an effective learning intervention or produces something that does not improve performance. The relationship between action and outcome can usually be seen.
Climb higher through the organisation and that clarity begins to disappear. Results become collective, decisions take longer to produce measurable consequences, and responsibility spreads across departments and functions. Language also becomes more abstract. Instead of repairing, selling, building or delivering, people start aligning, enabling, transforming and strategising. None of those activities is inherently meaningless, but they create greater distance between individual contribution and observable output. That distance creates space between what someone actually contributes and what other people believe they contribute, and inside that space perception can become extremely powerful.
Organisations Reward the Evidence They Recognise
It would be easy to blame individuals who become skilled at navigating organisational politics, but that ignores the role of the organisation itself. People respond to incentives. If visibility receives rewards, ambitious people will make themselves visible. When senior leaders favour agreement, employees who want to progress learn not to challenge them unnecessarily. If promotion depends heavily on presentations, candidates become better at presenting. When executives respond positively to polished corporate language, people learn to speak that language.
There is nothing particularly mysterious about this behaviour. The organisation has taught its employees what success looks like, and employees adapt accordingly. The more important question is whether the signals being rewarded bear any meaningful relationship to the capability required at the next level.
A technically excellent employee may receive promotion because of their technical ability despite showing little evidence that they can lead people. A charismatic manager can progress because senior leaders enjoy working with them even though their own team performs poorly. Someone who repeatedly rescues failing projects may gain a reputation as a high performer, while the quieter colleague who builds systems that prevent those projects from failing receives comparatively little attention. Another employee may become regarded as leadership material because they speak confidently in senior meetings, volunteer for visible initiatives and understand how to package their contribution using language senior managers recognise.
Meanwhile, the person quietly holding everything together is described as dependable.
I have always thought organisations should pay much more attention to that word. Dependable employees frequently become organisational shock absorbers. Managers give them difficult work because they know it will get done. They inherit failing projects because they have demonstrated that they can fix them. When deadlines become tight, somebody asks them to step in. Colleagues seek their advice because they understand how things actually work rather than how the process map says they should work. Their competence earns them additional responsibility, while somebody else’s visibility earns advancement.
Eventually, competent people notice the difference.
The Promotion Paradox
The Peter Principle has survived for decades because most people who have spent time in organisations have seen some version of it. A person performs well in one role, receives promotion and eventually reaches a position in which the abilities that previously made them successful are no longer enough. A brilliant engineer becomes an ineffective engineering manager. An exceptional salesperson struggles as a sales director. A highly capable operational manager moves into strategic leadership and discovers that the skills required are very different.
There is, however, another promotion problem that receives less attention. Sometimes the person being promoted was never the strongest performer in the first place. They were simply the strongest at being promoted.
Those are different competencies.
Traditional promotion processes can unintentionally reward behaviours demonstrated during the selection process rather than behaviours required in the role. Consider the interview. Candidates know they are being assessed, so naturally they prepare. They construct examples, practise answers, study the organisation’s values and learn how to describe their experience effectively. Experienced candidates understand techniques such as STAR and know how to structure a situation, describe their contribution and connect themselves to a successful outcome.
That may provide useful evidence, but organisations need to be clear about what it proves. Someone can describe conflict resolution beautifully while being terrible at resolving conflict when emotions are high, and careers are involved. A candidate can explain psychological safety without ever having created it. They can speak convincingly about accountability while avoiding difficult conversations with underperforming employees. Someone can even sound strategic while repeatedly making poor strategic decisions.
A polished account of competence is not competence itself. It is evidence about competence, and the quality of the decision depends on whether that evidence reflects what actually happens when the person is doing the job.
The Translator
Almost every dysfunctional organisation eventually creates a person I think of as the Translator. This is the individual who sits somewhere between senior leadership and operational reality and spends a surprising amount of time converting one into the other. A senior manager delivers an unclear instruction, and the Translator works out what they probably meant. A strategy contains contradictions and the Translator quietly resolves them. A project brief lacks essential detail, so somebody fills in the gaps. An executive makes a commitment that is technically impossible, and the Translator finds a way to deliver something close enough that nobody needs to confront the original mistake.
Organisations love these people because they make things work, but their competence can hide significant leadership weaknesses. Every time the Translator turns a poor decision into a workable one, the original decision-maker is protected from the consequences of their own lack of understanding. The leader sees that their instruction produced a result, their manager sees successful delivery and assumes competent leadership, while the Translator receives another difficult problem because they have proved they can be trusted.
Nobody necessarily learns anything from the experience.
Competence further down the hierarchy begins supporting the illusion of competence further up it. The situation can continue for years because the organisation may even describe what is happening positively. People are showing initiative. The team is agile. Employees demonstrate ownership, and everyone pulls together when circumstances become difficult. Sometimes those statements accurately describe a healthy culture. At other times, they provide a convenient way of describing competent employees who continually compensate for weak leadership.
There is a significant difference between the two. Healthy empowerment gives people authority to make good decisions. Dysfunctional delegation gives them responsibility for repairing bad ones.
The Politician
Another recognisable character is the Politician. Organisational politics is often discussed as though it were automatically something unpleasant, but politics is simply part of how people influence decisions when formal authority alone is insufficient. Every organisation contains politics because every organisation contains people, competing priorities and limited resources. Problems emerge when political skill becomes disconnected from genuine contribution.
The Politician understands visibility exceptionally well. They know which meetings matter, which projects have executive attention and which senior leaders need to hear about a success. They recognise that valuable work which nobody notices rarely helps a career. None of that is necessarily wrong. Good leaders should communicate achievements, employees need stakeholder skills, and professional networks matter. The difficulty comes when managing the perception of work becomes more valuable than performing it.
Someone who understands this environment soon learns that organisations cannot reward what they cannot see, so they make sure the right people see them. Success becomes highly visible while failure becomes collective. Difficult questions get asked when important people are watching. Initiatives become particularly attractive when senior leadership has attached itself to them. Language starts to mirror the language used at the top of the organisation because familiarity creates confidence.
Even the way uncertainty is expressed can matter. One person says, “I don’t know.” Another says, “I’ll take that away.” Both may mean exactly the same thing, but one exposes a gap in knowledge while the other sounds like ownership. In an organisation that has started confusing presentation with competence, those small differences accumulate.
Over time, people learn which version gets rewarded.
The Ghost
The third character is much less visible, which is precisely the problem. The Ghost is competent, experienced and increasingly silent. They were not necessarily always like that. At some point they probably challenged decisions, suggested improvements and pointed out risks. They explained why the latest initiative would not work as intended and offered alternatives based on experience.
Then the organisation taught them to stop.
Perhaps somebody labelled them negative. Maybe challenging a senior manager damaged their reputation or they watched it happen to someone else. In many cases nothing dramatic happens at all. Their ideas are simply ignored often enough that eventually they stop offering them. There are only so many times a capable employee will walk into the same wall before deciding to walk around it.
They continue doing their job and may continue doing it extremely well, but the organisation no longer receives everything they know. The employee has not resigned, sickness absence has not increased, and their performance measures may still look perfectly acceptable. An engagement survey might detect nothing unusual. Yet the organisation has lost access to part of that person’s capability because they have moved from commitment towards compliance.
Ask them to do something, and they will do it. Ask what they think about the latest initiative, and they will probably tell you it is fine. Then they go home.
This is one of the hidden costs of the competence crisis. Organisations spend considerable time worrying about talented employees leaving for competitors, yet pay far less attention to talented employees who remain while deciding that contributing anything beyond what is required is no longer worth the effort. Losing a capable employee physically is expensive. Losing them psychologically while continuing to pay their salary can be just as damaging and much harder to detect.
Why Competent People Do Not Always Rise
There is an assumption buried inside many conversations about careers that the most capable people will eventually rise through the organisation. I am not convinced there is any reason to believe that must happen. Technical and professional competence do not automatically include self-promotion, networking, political awareness or impression management. Someone can be exceptional at their work while having little interest in making sure senior management knows about every contribution they make.
Deep expertise can also create a curious disadvantage. The more somebody genuinely understands a complicated subject, the more aware they usually become of uncertainty. They recognise exceptions, understand dependencies and know where their own knowledge ends. Put that person next to someone with shallower knowledge but considerably greater confidence, and the less knowledgeable person may initially appear more authoritative.
One person explains that a decision depends on several variables and recommends understanding them before committing. Another says with absolute confidence that the organisation can deliver.
Which sounds more like leadership?
In too many organisations, it is the second person, at least until somebody has to deliver the promise.
Competence frequently produces nuance because reality is nuanced. Confidence can produce certainty because certainty is persuasive. Senior leaders working under pressure may prefer the certainty because a clear answer reduces discomfort, while a qualified answer can feel obstructive. Reality, unfortunately, does not become less complicated simply because the organisation prefers a simpler answer.
Eventually someone still has to deliver, and that is usually when the competent people reappear.
When Corporate Language Replaces Understanding
Every profession develops its own vocabulary, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Shared terminology allows people to communicate complex ideas efficiently. Corporate language becomes dangerous when it stops describing reality and starts replacing it.
A department does not have enough competent people, so it has a capability challenge. Nobody knows who owns a process, so there is an opportunity to strengthen accountability. A project fails and lessons are identified. Employees become exhausted, and suddenly resilience needs improving. Management makes another poor decision, and the problem becomes communication.
Language can soften reality until nobody has to confront what actually happened.
Leaders should obviously communicate with care. There is no benefit in humiliating people or deliberately using inflammatory language. Accuracy, however, does not require cruelty. If a process failed because somebody lacked the knowledge or ability required to perform their role, the organisation needs to understand that. The appropriate response might be training, coaching, clearer procedures, better supervision or redesigning the role. Sometimes it may require accepting that the person should not occupy that position.
None of those interventions can be chosen intelligently until somebody accurately identifies the problem.
Calling everything a development opportunity may sound supportive, but it can also become a sophisticated form of avoidance. Organisations cannot manage competence without making judgements about competence.
Leadership Potential Has Become Too Vague
Leadership potential deserves similar scrutiny. Potential matters because organisations cannot fill every senior position exclusively with people who have already performed exactly the same role. Everyone needs a first opportunity at some point. The problem lies in how loosely organisations sometimes define what potential actually means.
Someone has presence. Another person is strategic. A third needs more visibility, while somebody else is apparently not quite ready. These phrases appear constantly in talent discussions, yet ask several managers to define them objectively, and the answers can become surprisingly vague.
Vagueness creates space for bias because people naturally recognise leadership when it resembles their existing mental model of a leader. If an organisation’s senior leadership favours a particular communication style, personality or professional background, people who display similar characteristics can feel naturally credible. The organisation then reproduces itself, often without anybody deliberately deciding that this should happen.
A more useful approach starts with the role rather than the person. What decisions will someone in that position need to make? What knowledge do they require? Which behaviours genuinely matter? What level of judgement will they need when information is incomplete? What evidence shows that the individual can already operate at or near that level, and where are the genuine gaps?
Those questions are less exciting than discussing whether somebody has leadership presence, but they are considerably more useful.
Every Promotion Sends a Message
A poor promotion decision causes more damage than simply putting one person into the wrong role. It tells everyone else something about what the organisation values. Employees watch who gets promoted, who receives recognition and whose behaviour senior leaders tolerate. Every appointment therefore communicates something about what really matters.
When somebody who consistently delivers excellent work is overlooked while a more visible colleague advances, people notice. If managers continue progressing despite leaving damaged teams behind them, employees notice. When challenging a poor decision harms a career while agreeing with senior leadership improves it, people notice that too.
The organisation never needs to publish these rules because employees learn them through observation.
This is why competence and organisational culture cannot sensibly be separated. Culture is not simply what an organisation says it values. It is what people learn will happen when they behave in particular ways. A company can publish statements about excellence, integrity and accountability, but promotion decisions reveal whether those words have any practical meaning.
If you want to understand what an organisation genuinely values, look at who succeeds inside it.
Competence Needs Psychological Safety
Having competent people inside an organisation achieves little if those people cannot use what they know when it matters. A knowledgeable engineer who cannot tell a director that a deadline creates an unacceptable risk becomes organisationally useless at precisely the moment their expertise is most important. A healthcare professional who notices dangerous practice but fears challenging someone more senior faces the same problem. So does an analyst who knows the numbers do not support the preferred strategy but also knows senior management has already decided what it wants to hear.
In each case, the organisation technically possesses the competence. It simply cannot access it.
Psychological safety is sometimes misunderstood as creating comfortable workplaces in which nobody feels challenged or criticised. That interpretation misses the point. A psychologically safe team can have difficult conversations precisely because people believe disagreement will not automatically lead to punishment, humiliation or exclusion.
Competence needs some friction. Experts disagree because complex problems rarely have perfect answers. Professionals challenge assumptions because that is part of professional responsibility. Experienced employees recognise risks that enthusiastic newcomers may miss, while newcomers sometimes challenge assumptions that experienced employees have stopped questioning.
Strong leaders do not remove that friction. They make productive use of it.
The organisation that should worry us is not the one where capable people openly disagree about important decisions. It is the organisation where everybody agrees in the meeting and criticises the decision as soon as the senior manager leaves.
Seniority Does Not Make an Opinion Correct
Organisations need hierarchy because somebody ultimately has to make decisions and carry responsibility for them. Authority, however, does not transform an opinion into a fact. The further someone progresses through an organisation, the more important it becomes to understand this distinction.
Senior leaders inevitably operate across areas where they cannot possess detailed expertise. A chief executive cannot personally know every technical detail of finance, operations, technology, people, logistics, safety and customer behaviour. Nor should anyone expect them to. Their competence therefore depends partly on how effectively they use the competence around them.
That requires intellectual humility.
A capable leader can admit that they do not understand something and ask someone to explain it. They can recognise when another person knows considerably more about a subject and use that expertise without feeling threatened by it. They can ask what they might be missing before committing the organisation to a decision.
None of this weakens authority. It improves decision-making.
Weak leaders sometimes experience expertise as a threat because another person’s knowledge exposes the boundaries of their own. Strong leaders recognise that their job is not to be the cleverest person in every room. Their job is to create conditions in which the organisation can make good decisions.
That is a much more demanding form of leadership than simply having the loudest voice.
AI Will Make the Competence Crisis More Difficult
Artificial intelligence adds another dimension to the problem because organisations have already spent years struggling to distinguish people who understand something from people who can talk convincingly about it. Generative AI makes producing the appearance of expertise dramatically easier.
Anyone can now create polished reports, presentations, strategies, policies and analyses in a fraction of the time those outputs previously required. That does not make AI a problem in itself. Used intelligently, it can increase productivity, improve access to information and allow competent people to spend less time on repetitive work.
What changes is the evidential value of polished output.
When producing something that looks professional becomes easier, professional appearance becomes weaker evidence that the person producing it understands the subject. The important question therefore shifts from whether someone can produce a convincing answer to whether they possess enough judgement to determine whether that answer is correct.
AI can generate recommendations, but somebody needs enough competence to recognise when those recommendations are wrong. It can produce procedures, but someone must determine whether they are safe, practical and appropriate. An impressive business case can appear in minutes, while the assumptions underneath it may still be nonsense.
The more capable these systems become, the more valuable genuine human judgement may become. Not because humans will continue performing every task manually, but because somebody has to evaluate what the technology produces and take responsibility for using it.
An organisation that already struggles to distinguish confidence from competence may find this increasingly difficult when almost anyone can generate confident, authoritative-sounding language on demand.
Stop Rewarding the Performance of Competence
Solving the competence crisis does not require another leadership slogan, values workshop or glossy competency framework. Organisations need to examine what they actually reward.
Promotion decisions provide an obvious starting point. Rather than concentrating primarily on how somebody performs during an interview, organisations should examine their record of judgement and the effect they have had on the people and systems around them. A manager’s team can tell you a great deal about that manager. So can the quality of the systems they leave behind and the way they behave when circumstances become difficult.
How someone responds when they are wrong may reveal more about their leadership capability than how confidently they describe a success. Their willingness to seek expertise matters. The ability to make sound decisions when information is incomplete matters. So does the ability to create an environment where capable people can challenge them.
Perhaps the most useful question is also one of the simplest: what happened because this person was here?
That question removes a surprising amount of noise.
Organisations should also pay attention to the people performing invisible recovery work. Who fixes the problems after the meetings? Who gets called when something genuinely goes wrong? Whose judgement do colleagues trust? Who understands how the organisation really works rather than simply knowing what the procedures say? Who continually supports weaker performers because everyone knows they can?
Those people are not automatically suitable for promotion. Technical competence and leadership competence remain different things. They should, however, be visible to the organisation. Continually relying on someone’s capability while overlooking them for development is an effective way to turn a committed employee into a Ghost.
Leaders Have to Make Challenge Safe
If leaders genuinely value competence, they have to make it safe for employees to demonstrate it. That means rewarding people who identify problems before those problems become embarrassing and resisting the instinct to interpret disagreement as negativity. Leaders need to separate challenges to an idea from challenges to their authority.
What happens after someone speaks up matters far more than any policy encouraging employees to do so. People watch closely. If an employee raises a difficult issue and subsequently disappears from important conversations, colleagues learn something. When a leader repeatedly asks for honest feedback but becomes defensive whenever they receive it, everyone learns something. If somebody identifies a genuine risk and receives thanks even though the message was uncomfortable, people learn something different.
Culture develops through these small experiences.
No amount of communication about openness will compensate for leaders who punish people when they are actually open.
Competence Must Eventually Have Consequences
There is another side to this argument that organisations sometimes find uncomfortable. If competence genuinely matters, sustained lack of competence must eventually have consequences.
That does not mean humiliating people or creating a culture of fear. Everyone has gaps in knowledge and ability. People need opportunities to learn, and new managers inevitably make mistakes. Organisations should provide appropriate development, coaching and support.
Development, however, cannot become an indefinite substitute for performance.
If somebody repeatedly demonstrates that they cannot perform a role despite receiving appropriate support, the organisation eventually has to act. Otherwise the consequences simply move elsewhere. Colleagues compensate for the gap, managers work around it, capable employees receive additional responsibility and customers experience poorer outcomes. Standards gradually decline because the organisation has decided, perhaps without admitting it, that avoiding one uncomfortable judgement matters more than the additional burden placed on everyone around that person.
That is not compassionate leadership. It is avoidance.
A competence system only has credibility when its standards mean something.
Look at What Happens When Nobody Important Is Watching
The best evidence of competence rarely appears during the presentation somebody gives while trying to impress senior management. It appears in what happens when nobody important is watching.
Watch how a manager treats the least powerful person in their team. Look at what they do when something goes wrong and whether their first instinct is to establish facts or find somebody to blame. Notice whether people bring them problems early or hide those problems until they can no longer be concealed. Observe what happens when someone with greater technical knowledge disagrees with them.
Pay attention to whether they can admit uncertainty.
Look at what happens to the people who work for them.
Those behaviours reveal considerably more about leadership competence than polished corporate language because competence ultimately appears through decisions, behaviour and outcomes. It exists in context and becomes visible through performance. Everything else is evidence, and some evidence is considerably better than others.
The Meeting After the Meeting
Eventually, we return to the meeting where this article started. The senior leader leaves believing the message was clear and the team remains behind. Someone closes the door, and the competent people begin the real work. They translate the instructions, correct the assumptions, identify what is actually possible and decide who needs to speak to which department. Someone quietly raises the risk that nobody wanted to mention while the director was present, while somebody else agrees to rewrite the plan.
By tomorrow morning, the original decision will have become something workable.
Viewed from above, the outcome can look like effective leadership. Viewed from below, it feels very different.
If this happens occasionally, it is simply organisational life. Leaders are human, instructions will sometimes be unclear and good teams should improve decisions. When it happens continually, the organisation has a much deeper problem because the people compensating for weak competence eventually recognise what they are doing.
Some leave. Others become cynical. A few stop challenging anything. Some become Translators because that is how they keep the organisation functioning, while others learn from the Politicians and decide that appearing competent is a more rational career strategy than quietly being competent.
That is when the competence crisis becomes self-reinforcing. The organisation begins producing exactly the behaviours it claims to dislike because those are the behaviours its systems reward.
The Real Competence Crisis
The competence crisis is not simply a shortage of skills, nor will organisations solve it by sending more people on courses. Training has an important role, but training cannot fix a system that continually rewards the wrong behaviours.
The deeper crisis begins when organisations lose the ability to recognise, reward and use genuine capability. Confidence becomes confused with knowledge, visibility with contribution and corporate fluency with leadership. Once those signals begin driving careers, capable people adapt to the environment around them. Some become louder, some become more political, some leave, and others disappear quietly into the organisation.
Meanwhile, the people who understand how the system actually rewards behaviour continue responding rationally to it.
That is why leaders cannot solve this problem by simply asking employees to show more initiative, take greater ownership or develop a growth mindset. They have to examine the organisation itself and confront some uncomfortable questions about who gets promoted, who gets listened to, who receives the difficult work, who gets the credit and who gets protected when things go wrong.
They need to consider who can challenge a decision without damaging their career and whose judgement everyone suddenly seeks when something serious happens.
Those questions tell you considerably more about an organisation’s relationship with competence than its competency framework ever will.
Organisations do not become competent because their values say competence matters. They become competent when capability genuinely influences decisions, when expertise can challenge authority, when promotion reflects evidence rather than impression and when leaders possess enough confidence in themselves to admit that somebody else knows more.
The most dangerous person in an organisation is not necessarily the person who lacks competence. Most organisations can identify an obvious skills gap and do something about it.
The greater danger is the person who lacks competence but has become exceptionally good at looking as though they possess it.
The real test of a competent organisation is whether it can tell the difference.
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