Historical past is crowded with CEOs who’ve flamed out in very public methods. But when the reckoning arrives, the identical query typically lingers: How did this individual maintain getting promoted? In company America, the phenomenon is named “failing up,” the regular rise of executives whose efficiency hardly ever matches their trajectory. Organizational psychologists say it’s not an anomaly. It’s a characteristic of how many corporations consider management.
On the core is a well-documented bias towards confidence over competence. Research persistently present that individuals who communicate decisively, mission certainty, and take credit score for wins—whether or not earned or not—usually tend to be perceived as management materials. In ambiguous environments, boards and senior managers typically mistake boldness for capability. So long as a pacesetter can narrate failure convincingly—blaming market headwinds, legacy techniques, or uncooperative groups—their upward momentum could proceed.
One other driver is uneven accountability. Senior executives usually oversee huge, complicated techniques the place outcomes are onerous to tie on to particular person selections. When outcomes are good, credit score flows upward. When outcomes are dangerous, blame diffuses downward, and center managers, mission leads, and market situations turn out to be handy shock absorbers. This enables underperforming leaders to outlive lengthy sufficient to safe their subsequent promotion.
Then there’s the mobility phantasm. In lots of industries, frequent job adjustments are learn as ambition and momentum quite than warning indicators. An govt who leaves after quick, uneven tenures can reframe every exit as a “development alternative” or a strategic pivot. Recruiters and boards, underneath strain to fill prime roles rapidly, typically depend on résumé alerts, like brand-name companies, inflated titles, and elite networks, quite than deep efficiency audits.
Satirically, early visibility may speed up failure upward. Excessive-profile roles enlarge each success and failure, however additionally they improve identify recognition. An govt who runs a troubled division at a world agency could preside over mediocre outcomes, but emerge with a fame as a “big-company chief,” making them enticing for a CEO function elsewhere.
The reckoning normally comes solely on the prime. As CEO, the buffers disappear. There isn’t a one left accountable, and efficiency is judged within the blunt language of earnings, inventory value, profitability, or layoffs. The traits that when fueled ascent, equivalent to overconfidence, risk-shifting, and narrative management, turn out to be liabilities underneath full scrutiny.
The central lesson for aspiring CEOs is that the very system that rewards confidence, visibility, and narrative management on the way in which up typically masks weak execution till the highest job strips these protections away. Future leaders who need to keep away from “failing upward” should intentionally construct careers grounded in verifiable outcomes and direct possession of outcomes as a result of on the CEO degree, there isn’t any narrative robust sufficient to substitute for efficiency.
Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com
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