1) You are wrong about them being incompetent
2) The person promoting them is also incompetent and has mistakenly promoted the wrong person.
I have literally never seen or heard of anyone promoting someone to limit the harm they can do. It's something bitter people tell themselves to help them feel better about being passed over. It's not the explanation you are looking for.
The older I get, the more I recognize how often these takes are just sour grapes from watching other people succeed.
It was most obvious when I was doing volunteer mentoring for early-career cohorts. A lot of people will comfort themselves by imagining that the real reason they didn't get a promotion or a job was because the company was doing something stupid: Peter Principle, Gervais Principle, Dilbert Principle. Some people would read an article about one of these things and for the next 5 years use it to explain every time they didn't get their way.
The saddest examples were when people would be passed over for a job and then spend the next month stalking the person who got the job across LinkedIn and social media, theorycrafting explanations for why that person was less qualified and why the company made a big mistake hiring them. They had no idea what the person was like but they'd be convinced it was nepotism or some other -ism that lost them the job, not their interview performance.
That said, I have worked at a couple companies where promotions into management had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with selecting people who were in the right social circles or, in one case, part of the right religion. When you're at a company like that, sadly the only solution is to leave. You're never going to win it from the inside.
It's extremely difficult in my country to fire people in government. Managers want them out of their team but have no way to shift them. They are taking up one FTE in a key area but the person is just swinging the hammock doing just enough to keep from any proceedings.
Finance won't give them more headcount.
So they promote them to another useless department instead. Done.
I know it's been done because I have been to drinks with the senior managers who did this a decade ago when I asked what the deal was with XYZ manager that had been there for years and was truly one of the worst managers I've ever heard of. They intimated a few others were the same across the org.
Off topic - the manager mentioned was comically hilarious in laziness and lack of care. He once invited a new hire to a meeting, and attached the minutes of the meeting including the conversation that had not happened yet (they'd never even met yet) with statements like "Joe Foo agrees to let manager know if work is too much" etc etc.
It was a template he sent out and he never even came to those introductory meetings. Just you agree and then neither of you actually meet.
Government can be a different world so I understand when people think people are just inventing insane theories to justify their own ego, but these things really do happen in certain industries and types of companies.
They move to a nominally higher level role in a different department, often a cost centre, generally to some role which serves the organisation just by existing (e.g. a legally required role, or something that serves some certification purpose, or so that sales teams can say 'we have a dedicated person in our X office for doing that').
Better of course to engage with such people enabling them being productive. Or just buy them out of the contract.
To add an anecdote to the list, the best development leads I've worked with weren't the best developers on the team.
Developers love to act like they understand every other profession and skillset, just by intuition. It’s not incompetent to do things that you wouldn’t do, or to do things that upset you, or to do things that don’t put your desires first.
I've seen a few senior developers who weren't great programmers, but could communicate effectively, manage up and down, etc. So long as they were willing to defer to others on harder technical topics, they usually made pretty good team leads when/if promoted.
He couldn't design or write software solutions. He then stole source code I wrote along with product designs I created and went to the competition. Was taken to court and settled. Competitor never hired him. Schadenfreude!
Never underestimate ass kissers and yes-men. It works wonders on narcissistic people.
For example, a software engineer might be fairly mediocre at programming, understanding systems, debugging, etc, but might have really good people skills and be great at effecting change in the organisation, and that person might be worth promoting into management.
A learning experience for me was working with people nearly twice my age with decades of experience yet who were at my level, or much less experienced people who were at my level. Promotion and level are not a judgement of skill as an engineer in an abstract sense, they're a judgement of value to the company – you can be great, but if you're not using that in your current role your level may not reflect that.
I resigned the next day and since the company had a mandatory gardening leave period by boss couldn’t override, that project went back off the tracks.
Making that decision was stupid but I can understand why they’d arrive at it, telling me was the true fuck up, they could have just said we decided to go with someone else and I’d have brushed it off, I didn’t mind what I was doing in the role I was in.
Whatever people skills really are that guy did not have them.
I understand the thinking but if you tell someone that, you have to offer something in lieu of upward mobility. Money, perks, status, something.
You definitely don’t tell them (as happened here) how critical they are to your business and at the same time tell them you want to cut their bonuses.
So; instead of having a competent VP leading a team of absolute incompetents and changing the direction and capabilities of that entire org, we lost a capable leader to another company.
Leadership politics and maneuvering is fucking stupid.
I suspect there is a lot of bias in action, for example extraverts genuinely believing that other extraverts are competent even if they are not.
Someone in management who has failed to meet goals will often have a position created for them with no reports. This is normally an advisory role to not impact them negatively for future roles and to give them runway to leave.
I’ve seen it twice and only in higher level roles.
I feel bad for him to be honest, would be a very tough spot/role to be in anyway and he seems not be able to enable himself being actually productive.
Perhaps the most common is to “promote” a CEO to vice chairman of the board.
Always asking dumb questions. Asking other people to create "sample projects" for her.
She is now a principal PM manager where I work now. She has no idea I know her from our prior company 20 years ago, but surely it is the same person. You do not get to that level without what it takes.