You have watched it happen. Someone you consider less capable than you has moved ahead faster, been given more, been seen as more. The conclusion you have already reached is that it is politics: that the system rewarded the wrong person, that merit had nothing to do with it, that what happened was neither fair nor legitimate.
That conclusion may be partly right. But right now it is driving you toward one of two places. You retreat further, decide the system is broken, and put your head down and deliver, which is a choice with real consequences. Or the anger becomes visible, starts shaping how you show up in rooms, and begins to cost you in ways that compound quietly over time.
Before either of those happens, it is worth slowing down long enough to examine the conclusion itself. Because the question contains several assumptions that merit looking at closely.
Less competent at what, exactly?
This is the first assumption worth examining, and it is worth starting here.
Competence is not singular. When we say someone is less competent, we usually mean less competent at the thing we value most, which is typically technical delivery, domain expertise, or the quality of the work itself. But organisations, particularly at senior levels, promote for a much wider range of competencies than that.
Reading a room accurately, building relationships with the people who make decisions, giving those above you confidence in your judgment, being visible in the conversations that shape strategy before it becomes official, communicating ambition without triggering threat. These are competencies. They are learnable, they are measurable in their effects, and they carry increasing weight the more senior the role.
The person you are watching may genuinely be less technically capable than you. They may also be significantly more competent at the things your organisation is actually promoting for right now. Until you look carefully at what they did, rather than just where they ended up, you do not yet know which of these is true.
Performance is not as measurable as we think
There is a belief, widespread and deeply held, that performance is objective. That if you deliver, you will be recognised. That the system, for all its flaws, ultimately rewards the people who do the best work.
This belief is understandable. It is also incomplete.
In the knowledge economy, measuring performance is genuinely hard. How do you assess the contribution of someone who makes a difficult project survivable, versus someone who delivers a straightforward one on time? How do you measure the person who holds a team together through a leadership crisis, versus the person who had a stable team from the start? How do you account for the fact that some people are handed easy mandates and some are handed failing ones, and both are evaluated against the same criteria?
Where measurement is ambiguous, and it almost always is, perception and relationships fill the gap. Jeffrey Pfeffer's research at Stanford is unambiguous on this point:
Organisations do not reliably reward the best performers. They reward the people who are most visible to the people making decisions, who have the strongest relationships with those who hold influence, and who are best understood by those doing the evaluating.
Political skill, not performance alone, is the actual currency of advancement.
This is not purely corruption. It is the inevitable consequence of trying to measure complex, contextual, human work with tools that are not equal to the task.
Why less technically competent people sometimes get promoted
There is a consistent body of research that explains why this happens, and it points in the same direction.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has argued rigorously that organisations systematically confuse confidence for competence. People who display confidence, charisma, and comfort with self-promotion are consistently perceived as more capable, even when the evidence does not support it. The person who speaks first in the room, who takes up space, who projects certainty, is read as a leader, regardless of whether the substance behind the performance warrants it.
Herminia Ibarra's research on leadership identity shows that people who are seen as leaders early in their careers get more opportunities, which makes them look like stronger performers, which gets them more opportunities still. It is a self-reinforcing cycle, and it has very little to do with underlying capability. Visibility begets opportunity begets visibility.
And the halo effect means that once someone is perceived as high-potential, that perception colours how everything they subsequently do is evaluated. Mistakes become learning moments. Hesitation becomes thoughtfulness. The same behaviour that gets penalised in someone without the halo gets reframed in someone who has it.
And then there is bias
All of the above operates inside a system that is not neutral to begin with.
People promote in their own image. They are significantly more likely to extend trust, sponsorship, and opportunity to people who remind them of themselves, who share their communication style, their background, their way of moving through the world. This is affinity bias, and it operates below the level of conscious decision-making, which makes it particularly difficult to challenge.
If you are a woman, and particularly if you are a woman of colour, you have likely already experienced this. The behaviours that get men promoted often get women penalised. Confidence reads as arrogance. Ambition reads as aggression. Directness reads as difficult. The same act of self-advocacy that lands as leadership in one person lands as overreach in another, and the difference is rarely about the act itself.
Joan Williams's research identifies the specific patterns:
The Prove-It-Again problem, where women are required to demonstrate competence repeatedly while their male counterparts are assumed capable from the start. The Tightrope, where the range of acceptable behaviour is narrower, and the penalties for stepping outside it are steeper.
These are not anecdotes. They are documented, consistent, structural patterns.
Sometimes the person who got promoted did something you did not do, and understanding that gives you agency. And sometimes the system was simply not going to give you that promotion regardless of what you did, because of who you are. Both of these can be true. They are not mutually exclusive, and collapsing them into one explanation, in either direction, leaves you with less to work with.
The mirror: what did that person actually do?
Before you decide what to do next, look at the path, not just the outcome.
What did that person do differently in the twelve months before the promotion? Who did they build relationships with, and how? Where were they visible, and to whom? What did they make easy for the people above them? How did they talk about their work, and in what rooms?
This is not about copying them. You may look at what they did and conclude that you are not willing to do it, or that it would not be authentic to who you are, or that the cost is too high. Those are legitimate conclusions. But they are conclusions that are better reached after seeing clearly.
Right now, you have a theory about what happened. The full picture may be more complex. Political literacy is the capacity to find out, to read the landscape accurately enough to understand what actually drove the outcome, and then to make a deliberate choice about what you do with that understanding.
Frequently asked questions
Is it always politics?
Not always, but more often than most people assume. Technical performance matters, particularly at junior levels. As seniority increases, the political layer, relationships, visibility, stakeholder perception, becomes proportionally more significant in how decisions are made.
Can competence alone get you promoted?
At certain levels and in certain organisations, yes. But the research is consistent that at senior levels, competence is the baseline, not the differentiator. What differentiates is visibility, relationships, and the ability to be understood and trusted by the people making decisions.
What if I look at what they did and I am still not sure?
That is useful information in itself. It means the situation is more complex than it appeared, and that your initial conclusion may have been incomplete. Start with the people who were in the room when the decision was made. What did they value? What were they looking for? Whose endorsement did the promoted person have, and how did they build it?
What is the difference between political skill and manipulation?
Political skill, as defined by Gerald Ferris and colleagues, includes social astuteness, interpersonal influence, networking ability, and apparent sincerity. None of these require deception or working against others' interests. Manipulation does. The distinction matters, because conflating them keeps people on the sidelines of their own careers.
The promotion that went to someone else is data. It is telling you something about how this organisation makes decisions, what it values, and where the informal power sits. Political literacy is what allows you to read that data accurately, rather than through the distorting lens of anger or resignation. And reading it accurately is the only way to decide, with clarity and intention, what you do next.
The Organisation Politics 101 guide covers the foundational frameworks for reading how power moves in an organisation. The political literacy hub brings together the full body of work on this subject. And if career progression is the question you are sitting with, the Career Growth and Transitions coaching is built for exactly this. If the bias section of this article is what landed most, Why Smart Women Keep Shrinking at Work takes that thread further.