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Opening Salvo
The person in the room who everyone is working around isn't always the one who got passed over. Sometimes it's the one who got promoted. You know who it is, the people around them know who it is, and the organization has been absorbing the cost of the gap between the role and the person in it long enough that the workarounds have become infrastructure. What hasn't happened is the conversation that addresses it directly, and the longer that conversation doesn't happen, the more expensive the silence gets relative to what it would have cost to have it earlier.
I actually have more understanding than judgment, but we have to call it for what it is. Sure, the promotion made sense at the time, or it made sense politically, or it avoided a harder conversation about someone who had been in the org long enough that passing them over required a level of directness nobody at the top was prepared to bring. The reason doesn't matter as much as the result, which is someone in a seat they weren't prepared for, a team that figured that out faster than the organization was willing to admit, and a senior leader who owns the decision and has been managing around it rather than through it ever since.
What's in your purview is the conversation you've been finding reasons not to have, and the organization already knows you've been finding them.
Practical Personas (with a tinge of hyperbole)
The Tenure Reward: They were the obvious choice by every internal metric that didn't include whether they were ready for the scope, and the promotion came because passing them over would have required a conversation about the gap between their contributions and the level they were being considered for that nobody at the top was prepared to have. The org absorbed the decision and has been absorbing the consequences ever since, and the person in the seat is executing as well as someone can who was handed authority before the preparation that should have preceded it.
The Loyalty Pick: Someone vouched for them, or they were the safe choice in a room that needed to move fast and didn't have the appetite for a search, and the decision made complete sense given the pressures that produced it. Their team figured out the gap inside the first ninety days and has been routing around it in ways the senior leader who made the call interprets as normal organizational friction rather than evidence of what the promotion actually cost.
The Manager of the Gap: They know the person isn't performing at the level the role requires, they've known it long enough that the workarounds their team built around it have started showing up in the org chart, and the reason the conversation hasn't happened yet has more to do with the discomfort of having it than with any genuine uncertainty about what it needs to say.
Ask Yourself
Think about the last promotion your organization made that the team around it has been adjusting to ever since. What did you know at the time of that decision that you didn't act on, and what have you done with that information since?
If the workarounds a team has built around a leader became permanent infrastructure, what does that tell you about how long you've been managing around the gap rather than addressing it?
When the org has been working around someone long enough that the workarounds feel normal, the problem isn't the person in the seat. It's the decision that put them there and the silence that's been protecting it ever since.
When it all clicks.
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Talent Management 101 (TM101)
Person-Job Fit: When the Promotion Created the Problem
When the fit between a person and a role is strong, the role amplifies what the person brings. When it isn't, the organization begins compensating through workarounds, redistributed accountability, and the informal leadership structures that emerge when the formal one isn't functioning at the level the role requires. The compensation doesn't announce itself as a response to a bad promotion decision. It shows up as friction, slower execution, and a team that has learned to route around their leader in ways that have become indistinguishable from how the work gets done.
Why It Happens
Promotion criteria reward the past rather than anticipate the future: Most organizations promote based on demonstrated performance at the current level rather than demonstrated readiness for the next one. The skills that made someone exceptional as an individual contributor or mid-level manager are not the same skills the senior role requires, and the gap between those two profiles doesn't surface until the person is already in the seat.
The political cost of passing someone over exceeds the organizational cost of promoting them: When a candidate has tenure, relationships, or visibility, declining to promote them requires a directness that most senior leaders find more uncomfortable than absorbing the consequences of the promotion itself. The decision gets made to avoid a conversation, and the conversation the organization eventually needs to have becomes significantly more expensive than the one that was avoided.
The gap gets managed rather than addressed: Once a promotion has been made, reversing or restructuring it carries reputational and relational cost for the senior leader who owns it. So the gap gets managed through informal workarounds, redistributed scope, and the gradual accumulation of accommodations that protect the decision rather than correct it, and the organization pays the compounding cost of that protection indefinitely.
The Question Organizations Avoid
If your organization has built its execution around working with a leader rather than through them, the question isn't whether that leader is trying hard enough. It's whether the decision that put them there was made for the right reasons, and whether the silence that followed it has been serving the organization or protecting the person who made the call.
The Plug
This newsletter is brought to you by AstutEdge, a performance improvement consultancy. We help organizations close the gap between what leadership intends and what actually gets executed by fixing the misalignment in people, systems, and structure that stalls results.
We work through consulting engagements and coaching. If your organization is producing effort without outcomes, let's talk.
Visit astutedge.com or share this with a leader who feels the drag.