"History is crowded with CEOs who have flamed out in very public ways. Yet when the reckoning arrives, the same question often lingers: How did this person keep getting promoted? In corporate America, the phenomenon is known as "failing up," the steady rise of executives whose performance rarely matches their trajectory. Organizational psychologists say it's not an anomaly. It's a feature of how many companies evaluate leadership."
"At the core is a well-documented bias toward confidence over competence. Studies consistently show that people who speak decisively, project certainty, and take credit for wins -whether earned or not-are more likely to be perceived as leadership material. In ambiguous environments, boards and senior managers often mistake boldness for ability. As long as a leader can narrate failure convincingly-blaming market headwinds, legacy systems, or uncooperative teams-their upward momentum may continue."
A bias toward confidence over competence causes organizations to favor decisive narrators who claim credit and project certainty, conflating boldness with ability in ambiguous contexts. Senior leaders often benefit from asymmetric accountability: successes are credited upward while failures are diffused downward onto managers, projects, or market conditions. Frequent job moves and résumé signals like brand names, titles, and elite networks are interpreted as momentum rather than warning signs, and recruiters commonly rely on these cues instead of deep performance audits. High-visibility roles amplify perceived success and can accelerate upward trajectories despite uneven performance.
Read at Fortune
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