When the capable leave and the inept get promoted

There’s a cruel irony in today’s workplaces: the most capable, creative, and valuable people often leave, while those who contribute little, or worse, create obstacles, seem to rise through the ranks. It is a phenomenon many employees have witnessed, and it rarely surprises anyone anymore. In fact, it has become so normalized that entire corporate cultures are built on rewarding mediocrity and punishing excellence.

This post explores that dynamic through the lens of the Peter Principle, a well-known concept in management theory that explains why incompetence doesn’t just exist in companies, it thrives. We will also look at how this mismanagement breeds corporate tumors, positions and hierarchies that do little more than complicate workflows, and why this creates an environment so toxic that talented employees decide their only option is to walk away.

In the end, the problem isn’t just about individual promotions gone wrong. It’s about an organizational system that consistently pushes the wrong people up and drives the right people out.

The Peter Principle revisited

When Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull first published The Peter Principle in 1969, they weren’t simply writing satire, they were exposing an uncomfortable truth. Their idea was brutally simple: in a hierarchical organization, people tend to get promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer competent, and then they stay there. Over time, organizations become filled with people holding positions they cannot manage properly.

More than fifty years later, the principle hasn’t aged a day. In fact, it feels more relevant than ever. In modern corporations, where promotions are often tied to tenure rather than competence, employees who excel in one role are almost inevitably moved up into another role requiring different skills. A brilliant engineer becomes a mediocre manager. A sharp analyst becomes a confused department head. And so the cycle continues.

The problem is compounded by the fact that success in a previous position is mistakenly seen as a guarantee of success in the next. Organizations rarely stop to ask if the skills actually translate. Instead, they cling to the belief that promotion is the ultimate form of reward. But what’s meant as recognition often becomes a trap, for both the individual and the team forced to deal with their incompetence.

The Peter Principle explains why many companies feel like they’re run by layers of ineffective managers who seem detached from reality. Each layer represents people who may have once been excellent workers, but who now act as blockers rather than enablers. Worse still, their presence demotivates the employees below them, who see their own efforts stifled and realize that competence isn’t the ticket upward.

And when good employees notice this pattern, when they see that their future is not growth but frustration and mismanagement, many decide not to play the game at all. They leave, often taking their best ideas and energy with them, while the hierarchy remains intact and incompetence cements itself deeper.

Corporate tumors

If the Peter Principle explains why incompetence rises, then the second stage of the disease is what we can call corporate tumors. These are structures, positions, and hierarchies that do little to advance the organization’s mission, but instead grow uncontrollably, feeding on resources and draining the life out of employees. Like a tumor in the human body, they often begin unnoticed, then metastasize until they overwhelm the entire system.

One of the clearest signs of a corporate tumor is the proliferation of useless roles. Modern companies, especially in the tech industry, are masters at inventing job titles that sound impressive but achieve little. Product managers who don’t understand the product, team leaders whose only task is to schedule endless meetings, or entire layers of middle management dedicated to reporting on the reports of other managers. These roles often arise not because they are needed, but because someone in power feels the need to justify their own position by creating more subordinates.

This process creates an internal ecosystem where meetings multiply, documentation becomes an obsession, and the actual work, the work that generates value, is buried under an avalanche of pseudo-responsibilities. Engineers, designers, and other frontline workers find themselves wasting more time preparing PowerPoint slides for managers than actually building or creating anything. The tumor feeds itself: the more useless layers exist, the more they demand visibility, status reports, and fabricated metrics to validate their existence.

The damage isn’t only operational. The psychological toll on employees is immense. Working under layers of unnecessary oversight creates an environment where initiative is suffocated. Talented workers who want to solve problems or innovate are instead forced into a Kafkaesque labyrinth of approvals, sign-offs, and “alignment meetings.” Over time, they realize their creativity is not just unwanted, it’s actively punished. Meanwhile, those who thrive in this system are precisely the people who excel at politics, not productivity.

The most tragic part is how normalized this has become. Many employees now believe that this bloating of management is inevitable, a natural law of corporate evolution. But it isn’t. It’s a symptom of misaligned priorities, where appearances matter more than outcomes, and internal power games matter more than customers or products.

The result is predictable: a company that looks healthy on the outside, with its army of managers and neat organizational charts, but inside is riddled with inefficiencies that prevent it from ever reaching its true potential. In the long run, these tumors don’t just slow down progress, they kill innovation entirely.

The exodus of the capable

In a company plagued by incompetent leaders and useless positions, the next stage is inevitable: the capable ones leave. When talented, motivated individuals realize that their energy is wasted on meaningless bureaucracy and their skills are undervalued, they begin to ask themselves a simple question: Why stay?

At first, these workers try to resist. They propose solutions, streamline processes, and attempt to introduce a culture of efficiency and meritocracy. But they quickly discover that the system is designed to reject change. Any suggestion that threatens the comfort of entrenched managers is labeled as “disruptive” or “not aligned with company culture.” The irony is that innovation is often celebrated in slogans but rejected in practice.

As frustration mounts, the most capable employees quietly start exploring other options. They know that in a toxic environment, their competence is a liability. The more skilled they are, the more threatening they become to those above them. Soon, these workers conclude that their best path forward is not to fight the system but to escape it entirely. And when they leave, they take with them not only their expertise, but also their institutional knowledge, creativity, and motivation.

What remains inside the company is a vacuum of talent that is quickly filled with people who know how to survive but not how to excel. Mediocrity doesn’t just take hold, it becomes the norm. Promotions are awarded not to those who can solve problems, but to those who can navigate politics and please the right people. The phrase “good enough” becomes the company’s unofficial motto, and the bar of excellence is lowered year after year.

The consequences extend beyond productivity. The work environment deteriorates as employees see their most capable peers leaving while the incompetent rise. Morale plummets, cynicism grows, and the few who remain either adapt to the dysfunction or burn out trying to resist it. The company becomes a shell of what it could have been, its growth potential strangled by the very structures that were supposed to support it.

This cycle explains why so many once-promising organizations collapse or stagnate. It isn’t the market alone that destroys them. More often, it’s the internal rot, the departure of those who could have saved the company and the persistence of those who accelerate its decline.

When incompetence becomes the culture

There comes a point where incompetence is no longer an exception but the very foundation of the organization. What once began as isolated cases of mismanagement evolves into a deeply rooted culture where inefficiency is normalized, mediocrity is rewarded, and any spark of excellence is immediately extinguished.

In such companies, titles multiply faster than results. Layers of middle management appear with vague roles: team leaders, project coordinators, and the infamous product managers who exist not to create but to justify their own presence. Their meetings fill calendars, their reports flood inboxes, and their slide decks attempt to hide the absence of real progress. The result is a workforce trapped in endless loops of status updates, approvals, and sign-offs, while actual work stalls.

As these useless positions expand, hierarchy becomes more important than purpose. Employees are evaluated not by what they contribute but by how well they conform to this artificial order. A worker who questions the relevance of a redundant role is labeled “difficult,” while the person in that role is praised for “alignment.” Over time, the absurd becomes rationalized, and corporate theater replaces true productivity.

The tragedy is that this culture doesn’t just affect the company’s output, it reshapes the employees themselves. New hires, once motivated and idealistic, learn quickly that the path to survival is not through competence but through compliance. They adapt, suppressing their creativity, ignoring inefficiencies, and participating in the charade. In doing so, they reinforce the system, perpetuating the very culture that suffocates them.

Ultimately, when incompetence becomes the culture, the company no longer competes in the market on the basis of innovation, quality, or value. It competes only in political maneuvering. Externally, its decline may appear gradual, delayed by marketing campaigns, brand reputation, or sheer size, but internally, the decay is absolute. The organization becomes what many employees already know it to be: a body full of malignant tumors, where incompetence is not just tolerated but celebrated.

The burden of the capable

In every dysfunctional organization, there exists a paradox: the most competent employees are punished for their competence. They are given the hardest projects, the most unrealistic deadlines, and the heaviest responsibilities. Management convinces them that these are “opportunities for growth,” but in truth, they are nothing more than mechanisms of exploitation.

The capable are lured with false promises of promotion, with endless speeches about “career paths” and “leadership opportunities.” Yet when the time for advancement arrives, it is often the least capable who ascend, chosen for their political pliancy, their ability to avoid conflict, or simply because they pose no threat to those already in power. The capable, meanwhile, are told they are “indispensable where they are”, a polite way of saying they will remain stuck carrying the weight of the company.

This dynamic breeds a toxic dependency: the incompetent demand results but do not contribute. They pass down tasks, shift blame, and deflect responsibility onto the very people who already keep the company afloat. Over time, the most skilled workers are not just overworked; they are burned out and demoralized, watching their effort feed the egos and careers of others.

Worse still, this exploitation is often cloaked in the language of team spirit. The capable are told they are “heroes,” “pillars,” or “the backbone of the organization.” These compliments are meant to disguise the truth: that without their unpaid emotional and professional labor, the entire edifice of incompetence would collapse. The praise comes without real rewards, and once the capable falter, the same system that drained them will discard them without hesitation.

What emerges, then, is a perverse division: the few who work and the many who pretend to. The capable carry the load of projects, clients, and outcomes, while the inept specialize in deflecting accountability and claiming credit. It is a system designed not to reward productivity but to reward survival, where those who do the least often advance the furthest.

A culture that rewards decay

What emerges from this exploration is not just the portrait of ineptitude in the workplace, but the anatomy of a system that rewards the very behaviors that corrode it from within. The Peter Principle explains how incompetence rises to the top, but reality shows us that incompetence does not merely rise, it thrives when wrapped in corporate jargon, political maneuvering, and hollow rituals of recognition.

In such environments, capability becomes a curse. Those who show initiative are worked to exhaustion, given endless responsibilities, and deceived with promises of future reward. Meanwhile, the incapable, shielded by mediocrity, bureaucracy, and networks of mutual protection, accumulate promotions, privileges, and power. The result is a company where the true engine of progress, its competent employees, are systematically drained until they leave, while the parasites remain to climb higher.

The addition of useless positions like product managers, redundant team leaders, or inflated titles in tech companies further distorts priorities. They create layers of administrative theater designed to look like leadership but functioning only as mechanisms of control and self-preservation. Each new layer distances decision-makers from reality, leaving the actual work to a dwindling group of overexploited individuals.

The consequence is cultural as much as it is economic: toxic work environments where resentment festers, innovation dies, and survival replaces collaboration. Instead of rewarding skill, creativity, or integrity, organizations mutate into bodies full of malignant tumors, growing but not living, expanding but not thriving. Employees adapt by learning that silence, obedience, and mediocrity are safer than excellence.

And so, the most dangerous truth emerges: these companies are not victims of incompetence; they are designed for it. Their structures, incentives, and cultures encourage the triumph of ineptitude, while pushing out those who might change the course. Unless this cycle is broken, the capable will continue to leave, the inept will continue to rise, and the organizations themselves will march steadily toward irrelevance, all while rewarding those who ensured their decay.