Incompetence in the Executive Suite
We rarely use the word incompetence for executives. It sounds too blunt for people with the right titles, the right degrees, the right number of years behind their name. So we find softer words instead — bandwidth, style, priorities, politics. But strip those away and what’s often left is plain incompetence, just dressed well.
It starts with how we define smartness. Somewhere along the way, smartness got redefined as tactics — the ability to say the right thing to the right person at the right time, to manage optics, to survive a room. Integrity quietly dropped out of the definition. An executive can be tactically brilliant and still be the least competent person in the building, because competence was never about managing perception. It was about doing the work honestly, even when no one’s measuring the performance.
This shows up first in what people actually chase. Most executives, if they’re honest, are climbing toward a title and a rung on the ladder, not toward the work they’d choose if titles didn’t exist. The corner office becomes the goal, and the job that came with it becomes incidental. You can tell, because the moment the title is secured, the hunger for the actual work quietly disappears. That’s not ambition. That’s a costume change.
It shows up again in how time gets sold instead of value. An executive’s calendar fills with meetings, updates, reviews — hours accounted for, little of it adding up to anything that moves the business. Presence gets mistaken for contribution. Somewhere we agreed that showing up for the hours is the job, when the job was always supposed to be the outcome those hours were meant to produce.
And underneath both of these is the oldest tell of all: working for money and not for the work itself. Money is a fine reason to take a job. It’s a poor engine for doing it well. Executives who are only there for the compensation optimize for the compensation — for the next raise, the next promotion, the next signal to the board — not for whether the product is good, the team is healthy, or the customer is served. The irony is that a lot of that money then gets spent trying to impress people who were never actually paying attention. We build the life that signals success to people who don’t care, while quietly starving the parts of life — and the parts of the job — that would have made us actually good at it.
We compound the problem in how we hire and promote. We seek years of experience over what was actually learned in those years. Ten years doing the same year ten times looks identical on a résumé to ten years of real growth, and organizations reward the résumé, not the growth. So we keep installing “experienced” people into roles where their experience never translated into competence, and we’re surprised when the results don’t follow.
Then there’s the relationships. Somewhere in a career, relationships stop being relationships and start being currency — networked, managed, leveraged for the next move. But relationships are worth more than the promotions people trade them for. An executive who treats every connection as a transaction is optimizing for the wrong asset, and eventually finds themselves promoted, isolated, and unable to explain why nobody trusts them anymore.
None of this is a character flaw unique to executives. It’s what happens when an entire system rewards the appearance of competence over the thing itself — when tactics get paid before integrity does, when titles get paid before the work does, when hours get paid before outcomes do. Executives aren’t incompetent because they’re worse than everyone else. They’re incompetent because they were promoted by a system that was never actually measuring the right thing, and few of them ever stopped to ask if the ladder they were climbing was the one worth climbing.
The way out isn’t a training program. It’s a simple, honest question, asked often: am I doing this because it’s the work, or because it’s the appearance of the work? Most of us already know the answer. We just don’t like sitting with it.
