When position matters more than competence: What happens when leadership capability is missing

It's a scenario that can occur in many organizations: A young manager with only a few years of professional experience leads someone with decades of international experience who has managed complex projects and built cross-functional teams.

That doesn't have to be a problem. Age alone tells us little about leadership quality. And a university degree doesn't automatically make someone a good leader.

The problem starts when position is expected to substitute for leadership capability. When a manager can't recognize, use, or integrate the expertise on their team, the formal authority of the role may be all that's left. That's when management turns into administration and control where leadership is actually needed.

The Peter Principle: Promoted, but prepared for what?

In 1969, Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull described an organizational phenomenon that became known as the Peter Principle: People are promoted based on their performance in their current role until they reach a position whose demands exceed the capabilities that got them there.

That doesn't mean most managers are incompetent. The interesting part is the promotion mechanism: Strong performance at one level doesn't automatically demonstrate readiness for the next.

Someone can excel in an individual contributor role and be promoted into management without ever demonstrating that they can lead.

Leadership is a different job. It requires judgment, communication, self-awareness, decision-making, and the ability to recognize expertise and put it to work.

A title gives you authority. It doesn't automatically give you those capabilities.

The Dunning-Kruger effect in leadership

In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger showed that people with low ability in a particular domain can be prone to overestimating their own performance. Part of the problem is that some of the same skills required to perform well are also needed to accurately evaluate your own performance.

That doesn't mean the less someone knows, the more confident they are than an expert.

It means that people with limited competence in a domain may have difficulty accurately recognizing the limits of their own competence.

In leadership, that becomes a problem when confidence is mistaken for capability. An inexperienced manager can make decisions with great certainty while failing to recognize the expertise already sitting on the team.

The better response to your own lack of experience isn't more control.

It's better questions.

Research: Young doesn't mean ineffective

That's why an important correction matters: Young managers aren't automatically worse managers.

The authors themselves point to a potential selection effect: People who reach management before age 30 are often high-potential employees who have received significant development and support.

At the same time, the data revealed a specific challenge. Colleagues and direct reports didn't always trust the ideas and opinions of younger, less experienced leaders. Their judgment and experience were more frequently questioned.

That's where the real leadership challenge begins.

Age doesn't determine legitimacy. A young manager can be an excellent leader. But a title can't substitute for experience. When managers lack expertise themselves, they need to be able to recognize and use the expertise around them.

Positional power vs. expert power

In their classic 1959 analysis, French and Raven identified five bases of social power. Two are particularly relevant to leadership:

A manager doesn't need to be the leading subject-matter expert on the team. In many complex organizations, that would be neither realistic nor desirable.

But a manager does need to recognize when someone else knows more.

Fail to recognize that boundary, and formal authority can end up being used where expertise is what the situation actually requires.

Micromanagement: When control replaces leadership

Micromanagement can have many causes: insecurity, lack of trust, pressure, poor delegation skills, or an excessive need for control.

It becomes particularly problematic when a manager compensates for uncertainty about the work by imposing increasingly tight control over the process.

Who gets invited to which meeting? Who can communicate with whom? Who receives which information, and when? When does a task need another round of approval?

There can be legitimate organizational reasons for all of these questions. But when they're primarily used to control people rather than create clarity around outcomes, process management becomes an instrument of power.

For experienced employees, this can be especially problematic. They don't need an absence of leadership. But they do need leadership that makes use of their experience instead of constantly overriding it.

Someone who has led complex projects, worked across international markets, or built cross-functional teams may need a different kind of leadership from someone at the beginning of their career.

Good leaders recognize the difference.

What the numbers say

These figures don't prove that inadequate leadership capability alone causes turnover or low engagement. But they illustrate the economic significance that leadership, management quality, and employee engagement can have for organizations.

The asymmetry of loss

What does a company risk when it puts an experienced employee under a manager who neither recognizes nor uses that person's expertise?

• Institutional knowledge built over years
• Relationships and industry knowledge that don't exist in any process manual
• Pattern recognition that comes only from repeated experience
• The willingness of experienced employees to contribute beyond the boundaries of their job description
• The trust of other team members watching how expertise is treated

And what can the experienced employee lose?

Motivation. Autonomy. The willingness to contribute additional expertise. And eventually, perhaps, the willingness to stay.

What research on leadership failure tells us

Barbara Kellerman and Robert Hogan approach bad and failing leadership from different perspectives. Both bodies of work make clear that leadership failure doesn't begin only when results visibly collapse. Problematic behavioral patterns and interpersonal deficiencies can become apparent much earlier.

For decades, Robert Hogan has emphasized the importance of interpersonal competence in leadership. Intelligence and technical performance alone don't protect a manager from failure.

The answer isn't to keep young people out of leadership.

Quite the opposite.

Young managers can be excellent. But leadership shouldn't be awarded simply because someone performed well in a technical role, has been with the company long enough, or happened to be available when a management position opened.

Leadership capability needs to be developed, observed, and taken seriously.

And positional power shouldn't be used as a substitute for legitimacy.

Sources: Peter & Hull (1969), The Peter Principle · Kruger & Dunning (1999), Unskilled and Unaware of It, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77(6), 1121–1134 · Zenger & Folkman (2015), What Younger Managers Should Know About How They're Perceived, Harvard Business Review · French & Raven (1959), The Bases of Social Power · Gallup (2015), State of the American Manager · Gallup (2025), U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low · Gallup (2023), State of the Global Workplace · Kellerman (2004), Bad Leadership · Hogan & Kaiser (2005), What We Know About Leadership, Review of General Psychology 9(2), 169–180.

Published June 2026