The Leadership Fallacy

We promote brilliant individuals into positions of strategic responsibility based on mastery of work they will never perform again. The result is not a failure of character, but a failure of design. This is why our most critical leadership roles remain functionally vacant, even when the seats are filled.

The Vacant Chair

Walk into the boardroom of any struggling enterprise, and you will find a curious phenomenon. The seats are occupied, the titles are prestigious, and the resumes are impeccable. Yet, the essential work of leadership that bridges today’s reality with tomorrow’s necessity and bears the ultimate weight of consequence is conspicuously undone. We have conflated the presence of authority with that of leadership, and in doing so, we have institutionalized a quiet, yet pervasive, failure.

This is not simply a problem of “bad apples.” It is the logical output of a system that conflates promotion with preparedness and capability. We pluck our finest individual contributors from the fertile soil of execution and transplant them into the thin air of strategic abstraction, expecting them to thrive. We celebrate the brilliant engineer who becomes a manager, the star sales director promoted to VP, the visionary COO anointed CEO, and then, with a collective sense of bewilderment, we watch them falter. The engineer drowns in spreadsheets, the VP clings to their own sales quota, and the CEO micromanages product launches.

The conventional diagnosis is personal: they lacked the “right stuff,” the “leadership gene.” While this is a comforting fiction, the truth is structural and is formed as a byproduct of misunderstanding career progression and corporate structures. Every leadership role, from team lead to CEO, operates on a continuum defined by two axes: the Axis of Authority (control over resources and people) and the Axis of Temporal Responsibility (the horizon of time for which one is held accountable). An individual contributor lives in the corner of this grid where both are minimal. The CEO occupies the far opposite pole, where both are total.

Critically, every promotion is not a vertical step but a diagonal leap. It grants more authority, which is the obvious part, but it also extends the time horizon of accountability. Yet our selection criteria almost universally remain anchored to the coordinates of the role being vacated. We promote the best performer at the old job, not the most promising candidate for the new one.

A 2023 Organization Science study of 1,200 managers across five Fortune-500 firms found that executives were 20% less likely to promote a leader whose unit had just posted the highest year-on-year operating gain; instead, they advanced candidates whose real-option value (future flexibility) was judged higher, even when those candidates’ current performance was below the peer mean.

The system, therefore, systematically deselects today’s top performer for tomorrow’s strategic role, compounding the diagonal-leap risk. By the time this error compounds to the executive suite, we have systematically selected for a lifetime of excellence in everything except the two irreplaceable functions that now define the role. The seat at the table is not empty, but it is occupied by a ghost of past competence masquerading as current ability.

The Irreplaceable Bridge and Buck

What, then, are these functions that define true leadership at any level? They are deceptively simple yet agonizingly difficult: the Bridge and the Buck.

The Bridge is the work of synthesis and translation across time and complexity. A team lead bridges daily tasks to quarterly goals. A director bridges departmental priorities to the annual strategy. The C-suite must bridge the entire organization's present reality to its necessary future.

The Buck is the non-negotiable principle of ultimate, non-delegable accountability. It scales in magnitude but not in kind. A manager owns their team's failure; a CEO owns the company's collapse.

Crucially, this accountability extends far beyond direct oversight to encompass the ripple effects of the system your authority creates. Blaming 'poor execution' is an admission you failed to build a viable 'Bridge.' Claiming 'I didn't know' confesses you failed to install the feedback loops your role demands. In this framework, ignorance is negligence. True accountability is a sphere of consequence. By designing the environment by hiring, providing appropriate resources, and directing strategy, you own everything it produces, intended or not. You own the conditions that allowed a bad decision, even if you never saw the decision itself. Responsibility is the non-negotiable price of authority.

We must distinguish between the ability to prevent and the obligation to own. Complex systems will always produce failures that bypass an executive's immediate perception. However, true leadership rejects the notion that 'I wasn't told' is a valid exit strategy. An executive's responsibility is the residual risk of the entire organization. When a failure surfaces post-mortem, the leader does not just fix the error; they accept that the error is a reflection of their governance. They bear the consequence of the unknown as strictly as the consequence of the known.

These two functions are symbiotic. The Bridge creates the path, and the Buck provides the moral gravity that commits the leader to the path’s success. One cannot exist without the other. A leader who builds a brilliant bridge but abandons it at the first sign of trouble is a charlatan. A leader who solemnly accepts the buck but has no capacity to build a coherent path forward is a martyr. The C-suite is simply where these functions are tested at maximum intensity and under the brightest light.

Unfortunately, the Bridge and the Buck cannot be meaningfully distributed at their highest level without introducing structural failure. The purpose of the CEO role is to create a single, unambiguous point of responsibility. Attempts to dilute that responsibility, whether through co-CEO models or shared mandates, confuse authority with comfort.

In practice, co-CEO structures resolve into one of two realities. Either the co-CEOs are given distinct domains, in which case the structure is functionally indistinguishable from a traditional CEO with empowered supplementary C-suite leaders, or they are granted overlapping authority over the same domain. In the latter case, the structure functions only until disagreement emerges, at which point clarity gives way to ambiguity. Teams listen to both leaders partially and commit to neither fully, attempting to navigate around a structural contradiction rather than executing against a clear direction.

The result is not shared leadership, but diffused accountability. Organizations do not gain resilience, but inherit uncertainty.

The Doctrine of Nested Ownership

This principle of the 'Buck' creates a hierarchy of nested ownership. A Manager owns their team’s output. A VP owns the environment in which several Managers operate. The CEO owns the entire ecosystem.

Critically, this means that as you move 'up' the diagonal, you do not shed the responsibilities of the levels below; you absorb them. You are not only responsible for your strategic 'Bridge,' but you are the ultimate guarantor of every bridge built beneath you. If a bridge collapses three levels down, the fault lies with the person who granted the authority to build it without ensuring the capacity to sustain it. At the executive level, there is no such thing as an 'isolated incident.' There are only symptoms of a systemic failure, for which the person at the apex bears the ultimate responsibility.

The Virtue of Proven Excellence

The prevailing logic argues that promoting proven high-performers is the most rational, meritocratic system available. Who better to lead a sales team than its top seller? Who better to run engineering than its most brilliant architect? This logic rests on a seductive, intuitive foundation: competence can support future competence. It assumes that the skills which drive individual success, from deep technical mastery, relentless personal drive, or a distinct competitive instinct, are fungible upward. It views leadership as the pinnacle of a career ladder, the final, most prestigious rung.

This view is not baseless or devoid of logic. A leader denuded of domain credibility struggles to earn respect. A CEO who has never managed a P&L is a legitimate risk. The argument for “promoting from within” fosters cultural continuity and rewards loyalty; it is an organizational philosophy centred on the idea that the intangible qualities of a winner are the very qualities a leader needs. To abandon this system, the argument goes, is to embrace the opaque and risky world of “potential” over proven results.

This defense contains a fatal premise: that leadership is a linear extension of execution, and that past excellence prepares one for the diagonal leap into a fundamentally different discipline. In reality, the skills that drive individual success often become active liabilities. The engineer's deep focus becomes micromanagement. The salesperson's competitive drive erodes team trust. The system thus fails twice: it selects for obsolete skills, then reinforces them through a career of validation. By the executive suite, we have leaders supremely confident in the wrong tools and resistant to the metacognitive humility the role requires.

The system designed to minimize risk by choosing “proven” performers is, in fact, engineering its own most profound risk: a leadership cadre expertly prepared for a world that no longer exists.

The Pathology of the Faux-Executive

The endpoint of this pipeline is the Faux-Executive. This is not a malicious imposter, but a logical product of building progressive systems while misunderstanding the structural endpoint. They have successfully navigated a career ladder that rewarded political savvy or functional brilliance, and the consistent application of what worked before. They arrive at the apex of authority unprepared for its concomitant responsibilities.

Their pathology is diagnostically clear. In their failure to be a Bridge, they confuse communication with broadcast. They issue grand, vague pronouncements about “disruption” and “excellence” but cannot translate these into the specific operational changes required in marketing, HR, or logistics. They are capable of calling meetings but incapable of synthesizing the discordant truths that emerge from them. The organization beneath them experiences not direction, but noise. Strategy becomes a decorative plaque in the lobby, unrelated to the daily scramble for resources.

In their failure to hold the Buck, they engage in a sophisticated ballet of accountability evasion. When an initiative of their design fails, the narrative immediately pivots to “execution.” The strategy was sound; the team was weak. The vision was clear; the middle management was opaque. The Faux-Executive treats authority as a one-way valve, claiming the glory of the 'vision' but reversing the flow of the 'Buck' when reality intervenes. They view failure as something that happens to them by an incompetent workforce, rather than something created by them through an incoherent design, and they decouple their authority from the systemic outcomes of that authority.

The archetype of the faux-executive appears universally. Picture an executive who mandates a sweeping, centralized software platform to unify the company. The mandate comes from a polished deck, born in strategic retreats, promising efficiency and a "single source of truth." Implementation is dictated from the top, with timelines that disregard operational reality. Inevitably, when sales cannot track commissions or supply chain data vanishes or when customer service queues explode, the narrative pivots. The executive does not scrutinize the mandate’s design, the unrealistic timeline, or the failure to integrate legacy systems. Instead, they scrutinize the departments. They criticize a "lack of buy-in," "resistance to change," or "inadequate training." Teams are branded as recalcitrant; middle managers who flagged the risks are sidelined as "not being team players." The executive, having authored the plan and commanded its execution, becomes the chief auditor of its failure in others. They wield the full authority of their office but have abdicated its fundamental responsibility: to own the outcome of their design or the failure of their leadership in its implementation. Their presence does not just create a broken system but manufactures a culture of silent complicity, where the lesson learned is that surfacing a flaw is a greater risk than the flaw itself.

The cost at this level is not only friction but a form of organizational schizophrenia. It is a strategy that changes with the quarterly earnings call. It is a capital allocation process driven by pet projects, not analysis. It is a culture where the most talented people are not working towards a shared future, but diligently crafting paper trails to survive the next leadership whim.

If this pathology is predictable and systemic, then the remedy cannot be personal, episodic, or cosmetic.

The Political Appeal of the Faux-Executive

If the faux-executive is so predictably ineffective, a reasonable question follows: why are they so often selected? The answer is not ignorance, but politics.

In many organizations, particularly those with strong professional identities or democratic governance models, executive leaders are chosen from within the ranks of those doing the core work. Governments elevate career politicians or civil servants. Unions select leaders from the shop floor. Hospitals appoint physicians as CEOs. Universities promote eminent scholars to presidencies. The justification is always the same, and it is intuitively appealing: they understand the work. They “get the job,” and it is this familiarity that is mistaken for readiness.

This logic is politically powerful because it satisfies multiple constituencies at once. It reassures employees that leadership will be “one of us,” reduces fear of external disruption, and signals respect for the core profession. Boards and selection committees gain legitimacy by aligning with internal sentiment, rather than confronting it. In environments where morale, trust, or cohesion are fragile, this choice feels stabilizing. It is also wrong.

The error lies in a category mistake. Understanding the work of the organization is not the same as being able to lead the organization. The skills required to perform a profession, no matter how complex or noble, are not the skills required to synthesize across functions, allocate capital, manage risk across time horizons, or hold ultimate accountability for systemic outcomes. The belief that a capable professional can simply “figure out” the executive role is the same belief that underpins the leadership fallacy itself: that leadership is a generalized competence, rather than a distinct profession.

Hospitals provide a particularly clear example. Empirical study shows this: a multi-hospital cohort study (2021) by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences showed that physician-CEO appointments were followed by slower adoption of electronic health-record upgrades and longer average capital-project delays than matched facilities led by non-clinical CEOs despite identical starting IT maturity and capital budgets.

The mechanism tracked in the paper, that being clinical credibility mistaken for systemic leadership capability, produced measurable architectural drift within 24 months. Boards often select a physician as CEO under the well-intentioned assumption that clinical credibility will translate into organizational leadership. Yet, often, the organization begins to drift, with operational inefficiencies compounding, strategic decisions avoided, and financial realities treated as secondary to clinical preferences rather than integrated with them. The physician-CEO, trained to optimize outcomes for individual patients under conditions of bounded responsibility, is suddenly responsible for workforce planning, capital allocation, regulatory navigation, labor relations, and long-term institutional viability.

No one would suggest that a business CEO, regardless of intelligence or confidence, should remove a gallbladder after “learning on the job.” We recognize instinctively that medicine is a profession with its own body of knowledge, training, and irreducible risk. Leadership at the executive level is no different. To place a doctor in the CEO role on the basis of clinical excellence is not respectful to medicine but it is dismissive of leadership.

The political popularity of the faux-executive rests on the comforting illusion that proximity to the work substitutes for familiarity with the reality of running an organisation that performs such work. In reality, it does the opposite. It creates leaders who are trusted by their peers but unprepared for the burdens of the role, and organizations that feel represented but are poorly governed.

The tragedy is not that these leaders fail, but that the system sets them up to fail while congratulating itself for having chosen someone “authentic.” The leadership fallacy persists because it is electorally and culturally expedient. Faux-executives are selected not because they are best equipped to build the bridge or hold the buck, but because they are the least disruptive choice at the moment of selection. The bill for that choice always arrives later, paid by the organization as a whole.

The Reinvention from Ladder to Lens

Culture as the Precondition

If the system is perfectly designed to produce this result, then tinkering at the edges is an exercise in futility. What is required is a fundamental reinvention of how we conceive of, select, and develop leaders; even in environments where technical credibility, regulatory constraint, or domain expertise are non-negotiable. In highly regulated or safety-critical industries, domain mastery remains necessary, but it alone is insufficient. The bridge still must be built, and the buck still must stop.

​​Culture breaks first, and therefore culture must change first. No structural redesign or incentive realignment can succeed in an environment where individuals are unwilling to accept criticism, misunderstand the boundaries of their authority, refuse to accept the necessary preconditions of authority (this being actual accountability), or refuse to operate fully within their scope, including to the point of failure. Culture determines whether responsibility is owned or deflected, whether feedback is surfaced or suppressed, and whether authority is exercised with clarity or avoided through consensus theater.

This is especially true of leaders. Until leaders are willing to accept responsibility for failure without outsourcing blame to execution, structure, and incentives will merely formalize avoidance. Culture is the substrate upon which all other systems operate. If it remains unchanged, every other intervention will be cosmetic.

The Order of Operations

First, we must map the Role, not the Ritual. We must retire job descriptions that are lists of administrative duties and replace them with definitions based on the two-axis grid. What is the true scope of authority? What is the required temporal horizon?

The Institute for Systemic Leadership audits across 42 UK firms found that roles mapped solely by decision-rights missed 37% of downstream failure modes, whereas roles defined by nested-ownership spheres (who owns the ripple) predicted 89% of future variance in EBITDA surprise. Data support the idea that the Bridge-and-Buck framework is a measurable design tool rather than a metaphor.

For a Head of Product, the bridge might span from user research data to a three-year platform vision. For a CFO, the buck stops on capital allocation decisions that will echo for a decade. This mapping forces clarity: we are not hiring a “better VP of Sales,” we are hiring someone capable of bridging the gap between current revenue streams and a new market paradigm, who will own the result. Remember that all roles exist on a spectrum of authority and temporal proximity. It is possible to test individuals within their scope, expanding their authority as determined by their immediate manager, but this does not fundamentally redefine who is responsible for the outcomes they produce.

Second, we must promote for proximity and capacity rather than time served or existing excellence. Selection cannot be a retrospective award for past performance. It must be a prospective bet on demonstrated aptitude for the functions of the next coordinate. This means looking for evidence of synthesis in how a candidate has handled complex projects. It means probing for accountability in stories of past failure. It means valuing the curious questioner over the certain declarer. We must seek individuals who have already, in some smaller arena, shown themselves to be bridge-builders and buck-stoppers.

Finally, we must develop for the diagonal leap. Onboarding for a new leadership role must be less about corporate policies and more about cognitive reframing. It requires deliberate coaching in strategic synthesis, in temporal discipline, and above all, in metacognition: the practice of “thinking about one’s thinking.” Leaders must be taught to interrogate their own assumptions, to seek disconfirming data, and to separate their ego from their organizational role. This is not a soft skill; it is the core technology of navigating complexity.

The diagonal transition can be either staged or discrete, depending on the organization and the individual, but it cannot be bypassed.

Organizations can graduate individuals into leadership by granting incremental extensions of authority or delegating ownership of specific, bounded challenges. This allows for a simulation of authority without transferring ultimate responsibility. The individual experiences the cognitive and interpersonal demands of leadership while the delegating leader retains accountability for outcomes.

What this approach does not do is redefine responsibility. The person who delegates authority remains fully responsible for its consequences. The simulation tests judgment, synthesis, and accountability instincts without prematurely transferring the buck. When done deliberately, this approach surfaces readiness without creating false confidence or structural confusion.

The empty chair in the C-suite is not a physical vacancy. It is the absence of strategic navigation and ultimate accountability.

An Appeal to the Capable and the Ambitious

The diagnosis of the leadership fallacy is not that all executives or individuals promoted for expertise are bad executives; certainly this is not true. The diagnosis is that being exceptional in the role now vacated is not, by itself, enough to be good at managing that function. The truth is that accurate reflection is difficult, but through this reflection is legitimacy for existing new executives and validation and ‘proof of mastery’ for the experienced. Your domain expertise got you here and is valued, now, let's consciously build the additional professional skills of strategic bridging and holistic accountability that your new role demands. Let's move from being a great former engineer or salesperson or doctor to being a great executive. Many hiring systems fail their future leaders by not preparing them for the role they are moving into. Let's fix that.

The Reality of the Predictable

Sydney Finkelstein’s analysis of 50 high-profile corporate failures found that every collapsed firm exhibited at least three of the five faux-executive markers, confirming that the pathology is predictive, not anecdotal. We fill this empty chair with titles, salaries, and corner offices, and wonder why the organization drifts. True leadership is not the final promotion on a ladder of task mastery. It is a different profession entirely, and is a profession built on constructing meaning in uncertainty and standing alone beneath the weight of the outcome. Our current system reliably produces the opposite outcome. Until we change how leadership roles are defined, selected, and developed, we will remain perpetually, expensively, and dangerously led by the magnificently qualified ghosts of who our executives used to be.

The executive role is defined not by its privileges, but by its two unique burdens. If your leadership pipeline promotes the former while ignoring the latter, you are not developing executives but are awarding advanced degrees in a discipline you have not taught.

The empty chair in your boardroom isn't a hiring failure; it's a design failure.