The Useless Keep Getting Promoted

Author’s Note: This piece is the private-sector sequel to “The Battlefield Is Not a Diversity Workshop,” because apparently the Pentagon didn’t corner the market on confusing virtue confetti with actual competence. Corporate America has been running the same tired magic trick, swapping standards for slogans, leadership for laminated values posters, and achievement for the careful elevation of agreeable mediocrity that poses no threat to the conference-room ecosystem. Somewhere along the way, too many companies decided that moral theater, bureaucratic self-applause, and the sacred ritual of promoting people who specialize in not rocking the boat were viable substitutes for the ugly, unfashionable work of building things, meeting standards, and accomplishing the mission. Spoiler: they’re not.

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There was a time when companies at least pretended to exist for a reason. They made things. Sold things. Fixed things. Built things. They had the decency to understand that payroll was not a group hallucination and that revenue was not generated by “holding space” for Trevor’s feelings about a spreadsheet. A business, in those primitive and barbaric days, was expected to perform a function. It was not a padded room with dental.

Now look at the modern office, that air-conditioned terrarium of credentialed underachievement, where entire battalions of professionally moisturized nonentities drift upward on thermals of jargon, LinkedIn sincerity, and the sort of dead-eyed consensus language usually associated with hostage videos. Every company says it wants excellence. What it often wants is the appearance of excellence without the emotional inconvenience of standards. It wants innovation without conflict, accountability without discomfort, leadership without courage, and teamwork without the ghastly possibility that one person might simply be better at the job than another.

That is how mediocre people breed in institutions. Not by accident. By protection.

Mediocrity is never just a personal failing. It is an ecosystem. It requires managers too timid to judge, executives too vain to admit error, and HR departments that treat honest evaluation the way medieval peasants treated plague ships. The mediocre do not rise because they are talented. They rise because they are safe. They are fluent in the liturgy of corporate niceness. They know when to nod. They know when to repeat the approved phrase about alignment. They know how to take a catastrophe, wrap it in a slide deck, and present it as a “learning journey.” They know how to survive every purge because they have mastered the central art of institutional life, which is to contribute just little enough to avoid blame and just visibly enough to harvest credit.

The genuinely capable employee, meanwhile, makes everyone nervous. Competence is rude. Competence has edges. Competence notices that the meeting should’ve been an email, that the email should’ve been two sentences, and that the project is being led by a man whose core skill is scheduling check-ins to discuss why nothing has happened since the last check-in. Competence also has the bad taste to produce comparisons. Once a real performer walks into the room, the ambient fraudulence takes on shape. Suddenly it becomes obvious that three assistant vice presidents, a strategy consultant, and an internal brand architect have somehow combined to do the work of one adult with a calendar and a pulse.

This is why so many civilian companies operate like daycare centers for polished underperformers. They cannot afford true meritocracy because true meritocracy is discriminatory in the most horrifying way imaginable. It discriminates between people who can do the job and people who cannot. That is the one prejudice the modern institution finds intolerable. It can survive waste, delay, incompetence, political fiefdoms, bloated middle management, and a strategic plan written in the prose style of a scented candle. What it cannot survive, apparently, is somebody saying, “No, Karen, you are not a visionary. You are a conference call with highlights.”

Mission is the antidote because mission is gloriously impolite. Mission asks what the company is for and then judges everything by whether it serves that purpose. It does not care whether Chad in stakeholder engagement feels “deeply seen” by the quarterly forecast. It wants to know whether the product works, whether the customer stays, whether the bills get paid, whether the team can execute, and whether the person running operations understands numbers as quantities rather than as an oppressive social construct.

And once mission becomes real, the whole charade starts shaking like cheap hotel plumbing. Suddenly promotions are no longer participation trophies for those who have lingered longest near the snack table. Suddenly “leadership presence” has to mean something beyond talking slowly in fleece vests while ruining other people’s deadlines. Suddenly you cannot fail upward just because you have a headshot that says “thought leader” and the moral seriousness of a scented bookmark.

That is what terrifies the ornamental class in corporate life. They hear the word meritocracy and react as though someone just proposed bringing back dueling pistols in the break room. They will tell you merit is subjective, as if incompetence is a mystery. They will warn that standards can be exclusionary, which is true in the same way locked doors are exclusionary. Yes. That is the point. A standard that excludes nothing is not a standard. It is an apology with office furniture.

And let’s tell the ugliest truth of all. Many organizations quietly prefer the mediocre because the mediocre are manageable. They do not threaten insecure leaders. They do not expose the frauds above them. They do not ask dangerous questions like, “Why do we have six directors supervising one functioning analyst?” They are politically housebroken. They understand the ancient corporate covenant, which states that if you never embarrass the system by being too obviously excellent, the system will never embarrass you by demanding too much.

But every institution pays for that bargain. It pays in drift. In slop. In endless revisions. In botched launches. In customers who leave with the speed and finality of a witness protection relocation. In good employees who burn out after realizing they are hauling a parade float of ornamental incompetence uphill while being lectured about resilience by a woman whose only measurable output is approving fonts.

A company that forgets merit does not become humane. It becomes dishonest. It starts lying about what success is, who deserves authority, and why failure keeps showing up in expensive shoes. A company that forgets mission does not become enlightened. It becomes decadent. It becomes a place where process replaces purpose, vibes replace judgment, and mediocrity gets promoted because nobody wants the awkwardness of telling a well-networked fool that his ceiling has finally arrived.

The truth is brutally simple. Civilian companies function best the same way every serious institution functions best. Know the mission. Reward the competent. Remove the incapable. Stop confusing pleasantness with value, symbolism with output, tenure with excellence, and self-regard with leadership.

Because eventually reality arrives, clears its throat, and asks the only question that has ever mattered in any office not subsidized by fantasy.

Who here can actually do the job?

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Tammy Pondsmith is an industrial-grade exterminator of managerial vermin who can smell a useless vice president through two walls, a mission statement, and the faint vanilla musk of performance-review cowardice.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.