Neither reason is fair. You cannot change how your company promotes, but you can change how much of your work the deciders can see.
That picture is a joke, and it is also uncomfortably close to a performance review. Walt's folders are excellent.
The anglerfish at the podium has a spotlight, and he grew it on his own head. Somebody in a position to promote you walks past, and their eyes go where the light is.
Is it true that less qualified people get promoted?
Sometimes, yes. The more careful answer is that "less qualified" hides two different things, and the research treats them differently.
The first is the person who is not very good at the job you can see. Appearing competent and being competent are not the same thing, and in the studies below, groups rewarded the appearance.
The second is the person who was excellent in the old role and gets promoted into a role that needs different skills. They are qualified for the job they had.
They are not necessarily qualified for the one they got. That is a quieter version of the same problem, with fewer villains in it.
Here is the view I know from the inside, as an individual contributor. You say to yourself: I started this job before they did.
I put together the ROI numbers on my work this year, and they were significant. I built a whole presentation and worked around the clock, after hours, everything. It didn't matter.
The people who got ahead did work hard, of course. But they spoke with confidence, they were more charismatic, and they were closer to the real company decision makers.
They told stories, and in my experience they were often more open and vulnerable. They started on the right foot by showing great work, then backed it up with leadership. All I did was the great work.
My own move went from a position in management to an individual-contributor role in a different department. It was a lateral move. I am not writing from the top of anything.
I am writing from the same side of the table as you, and I have no results to report from my own career yet, so weigh my advice for what it is.
What does the research say about confidence and promotion?
The most useful study I found is "A Status-Enhancement Account of Overconfidence" by Cameron Anderson, Sebastien Brion, Don Moore and Jessica Kennedy, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It reports six experiments.
In one of them, 242 MBA students working in project teams rated how familiar they were with real historical names, events and books, mixed in with made-up ones. The people who claimed to recognise the most invented items were counted as the most overconfident.
At the end of the semester, those same people had the highest status in their groups. The researchers say the most overconfident people were not seen as narcissistic. They were, in the article's words, considered the most beloved (Berkeley Haas summary (opens in a new tab)).
In a later experiment, groups worked together on video while researchers recorded body language, vocal tone and participation. The overconfident people spoke more, sounded more confident, gave more answers and seemed calmer, and they were more convincing than people who were actually more competent.
The authors suggest this may partly explain why less competent people are sometimes promoted over more competent peers. That is a suggestion from the researchers, and not a proof about workplaces in general.
The summary I read does not give sample sizes for most of the experiments, so I will not pretend the evidence is bigger than it is.
An earlier study points the same way. In 2009, Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff put 68 students into 17 teams of four. In that first experiment, the most dominant members were rated highest for general intelligence. In a second experiment, on math problems, the people who spoke up more were seen as leaders whether or not their answers were correct (Berkeley Haas (opens in a new tab)). These were students in short sessions, so the limit is the same one: a classroom is not a company.
Put those together carefully and you get a modest claim. In small groups, confident delivery makes people look more competent than they are, and it earns status.
That is a mechanism for how a less qualified person can get ahead. It is not a law.
Do companies promote the wrong people on purpose?
Not on purpose, but often by habit. Two sources are worth reading.
Gallup attributes that figure to its own analytics, built on talent-based assessments of 341,186 applicants and cross-checked with a sample of 5,157 panelists. The same article reports that 18% of current managers show high managerial talent, and that managers asked why they got the job commonly cited success in a previous non-managerial role (Gallup, updated February 2026 (opens in a new tab)). Be careful with that 82%. It is Gallup's estimate from its own tests, about managerial talent, and it does not say that the winners were less hardworking than the losers.
The academic version is a 2019 paper by Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. They studied sales workers at 214 firms and found evidence that firms lean on current job performance when they promote, at the expense of other traits that better predict who will manage well. The authors estimate that the cost of promoting people with lower managerial potential is high (NBER (opens in a new tab)).
Read that one twice, because it cuts against the villain story. In that data, the person promoted was often the stronger performer.
The problem was that being great at selling does not tell you whether someone will be great at managing sellers. If you have ever watched your best engineer become a mediocre engineering manager, you have seen the finding in the wild.
Management is a skill, and it takes time. I'm surrounded by great leaders, and I watch how they lead compared to what I was doing, and compared to how some others in management positions behave. Communication is one thing.
Leadership is another, and it's a practiced skill: listening, coaching, trusting others, fighting for them, often more than for yourself, showing you care personally and professionally, and doing what you can to help them succeed.
So the skill doesn't always transfer. If you can lead a great meeting, it helps. But in my experience, leadership comes second, or with a lot of practice and experience.
So here is the uncomfortable summary, and I mean it kindly. Sometimes the less qualified person is promoted because they look the part. Sometimes the person promoted over you is simply the one the company already knew how to see.
And sometimes the best performer is promoted into a job that needs a different set of skills. All three happen. Which one happened to you is a fact you can usually find out, and it changes what you should do next.
What actually decides who gets promoted?
There is no single answer, and no study I found ranks these. What follows is my own synthesis of the sources above plus common sense, not a research result. It lists what the people deciding probably see, from most visible to least:
- How you sound in the room. Pace, clarity, whether your statements land or drift upward into questions.
- How easy you are to describe. Can your manager's manager say what you did in one sentence?
- Who knows your work. A person with no view of your work cannot vouch for it.
- Whether you look ready for the next job. Not whether you were great at this one.
- The actual quality of your work. It counts, and in the Benson data it counted a lot. It just rarely announces itself.
Notice that only the last item is "the work." The rest are about how the work reaches people. That is the gap, and it is the gap you can close.
I believe, and I will keep saying it, that the skills of speaking well, getting organized and communicating clearly are learnable by practice, and are the highest ROI skill you can learn. Nobody is born with a podium.
What can you do about it?
Five moves, in the order I would try them. None needs permission or a new title.
1. Put your work in front of people on a schedule
I would start with a short weekly update to your manager: three lines on what shipped, what is stuck, and what is next. It is the dull cousin of self-promotion, and it gives someone a written record they can forward.
A folder that nobody opens does not count as visibility, however neat the folder is. For the full plan, including what to say when you get ninety seconds with someone senior, see how to get noticed by leadership as an individual contributor.
2. Lead the room you are already in
Open the meeting, close it, and send the takeaways. It is one of the cheapest forms of visible leadership I know, and I wrote the whole playbook in how to lead a meeting when you're not the manager.
Short version:
Open
say what the meeting is for.
Assign
say who owns what by when.
Follow up
email it the same day.
3. Learn how people above you describe the next job
Ask your manager what the next role needs that this one does not. Then ask someone already in it. Their answers will name skills like "can run a room" or "can tell a story about the numbers," and those are not the skills most of us are being graded on today.
If you only ever ask what you should do better in your current job, you will get better at the job you already have.
4. Get one person to know your work
In a study of 448 employees, Scott Seibert, Maria Kraimer and Robert Liden found that the effects of social resources on career success ran through three network benefits: access to information, access to resources and career sponsorship (abstract (opens in a new tab)). The abstract does not say how career success was measured, so I will not claim a specific payoff. My reading, which is my interpretation and not the paper's claim, is that it helps to have someone who speaks for you in rooms you are not in. You do not need a mentor in a formal sense. You need one person who can say your name and one specific thing you did.
5. Practise sounding like you mean it
Confidence is not the villain here. Fake confidence is. The research above is about people who were overconfident, which is a different thing from being clear, calm and specific. You can sound sure about things you actually know, say "I don't know yet, I'll find out by Thursday" about things you do not, and let your sentences land instead of trailing off. That is calibrated confidence, and it can be rehearsed. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran's 2006 meta-analysis of 94 tests found that "if-then" plans, where you decide in advance when, where and how you will act, had a positive effect of medium-to-large size (d = .65) on reaching goals (abstract (opens in a new tab)). It was a study of goals in general, not promotions, so I offer it as a reason to rehearse and not as a promise.
An if-then plan for this problem might read:
Say it out loud ten times. It will feel ridiculous and then it will feel normal.
Telling myself "I am confident" is not rehearsal exactly. But it can help put me in a mindset of confidence at times. The problem is, your so-called ‘confidence’ disappears at the first ‘um.’
That's why I built SpeakWings: saying "I am confident" to yourself is not a winning strategy, so rehearse the actual sentence instead.
Should you be angry about this?
A little, and then you should be useful with the anger. I was angry at first, admittedly. But I was also curious how they did it, and how I could do the same.
Eventually I figured out that the difference was how I communicate. The suspicion that quality of work is not the only thing that decides promotion is not paranoia.
The research says visibility, delivery and the way companies pick managers all matter. Being annoyed is a reasonable reaction.
But staying annoyed is a strategy with no upside that I can find. The version of you that sends the weekly update, runs the meeting and practises saying one clear sentence is the version that can be seen, and being seen is not a character flaw.
And one more honest line, because I would rather be accurate than flattering. Practising your delivery will not guarantee a promotion.
It improves your odds of being seen accurately, which is the part you can control. The rest is timing, budgets and the mood of whoever sits above your manager that quarter.
Questions people ask
Why do less qualified people get promoted over harder workers?
Often because promotion decisions rely on what decision makers can see, and confident, organised communicators are easier to see. Research on groups finds that people who appear more confident are rated as more competent and gain status, even when they are not more competent.
In other cases, the promoted person was a strong performer in the old role who gets a job that needs different skills.
Is it office politics or is it communication?
Mostly communication, though the two overlap. Office politics is partly about who knows what you did, and that is a communication problem you can work on.
Great leadership qualities help, and so do good relationships with the decision makers. Both can only help your odds.
Some of it is real favoritism, which you cannot fix by speaking better. A useful test is to ask what the person who was promoted did visibly that you did not.
Does working harder help you get promoted?
It helps, and in the Benson, Li and Shue data, strong current performance raised the odds of promotion. It is probably necessary and not sufficient. Doing excellent work that nobody can describe is a common way to be passed over.
How do you get promoted if you are quiet?
Use writing and small structure. A weekly update, a clear meeting follow-up email and one well-prepared comment per meeting make you visible without turning you into a different person.
The ruleQuiet is not the problem. Invisible is the problem.
What should I say to my manager if I think I was passed over?
Ask what the person who got the role could do that you could not yet show, and ask for two concrete things to demonstrate in the next six months. Keep it a question about the next role and not a complaint about the decision.
Practise it out loud
Reading about this is the easy part. If you want to hear how you sound before it counts, the free 60-second voice scan measures your pace, your ums and your pauses on your device.
The leadership practice page lets you rehearse the conversations that matter, like making your case for the next role, out loud, with someone who pushes back. And the free confidence language checker marks the soft words in your next email to your manager, before you send it.