The thin layer problem
Outperforming your manager without getting fired
Few things frustrate A-players more than being stuck behind someone they do not see as competent enough to deserve the seat. You are itching to move forward, but the lane is blocked, and you are stuck there.
This is, of course, the case for any org structure, but when competence is questioned, it hits differently. You tell yourself: I am better than this person, why am I reporting to them? Am I wasting time and growth potential stuck behind this?
Before jumping the gun and slapping the “incompetent” label on your boss, you can do a sanity check: is it actual incompetence, or just your perception?
Sometimes managerial work is not as visible as IC work. Negotiating with other departments or the leadership chain, shielding the team from political nonsense and randomization … all this does not materialize in git commits or shipped dashboards, and it could look like pretend work. There is infinite debate about whether managers are needed or not, but let’s assume here that we agree that it makes sense for human organizations of a certain size to not be flat-shaped. Charity Majors explains it well here.
If you are on the manager track, you should be aware of all the above, and you have to rule out the possibility that what you are interpreting as incompetence is actually a lack of visibility.
If you are asking yourself how someone like that ends up in the role in the first place, the short answer is luck. Organizations are not perfect meritocracies, hiring is hard, promotions happen because a budget cut forced a consolidation, or because the VP’s favorite initiative needed a loyal body to lead it. Timing is often a decisive factor, together with randomness and compounding effects. From my previous post:
If you have a company with a strong brand on your CV, it changes how the next recruiter sees you, which increases the possibility of getting another strong brand. Once you start having two or more of these, you enter “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM” territory, and recruiters give you a ton of benefit of the doubt.
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Managers have incentives to avoid admitting they hired badly. Time passes, many attempts are made, and when the inevitable comes, this person has at least one year under their belt at Big Name in Tech. Once you have that, you can go chase the next role, and you’re ahead of the competition, even if your competitor is 10x better than you but at a Small Name That Nobody Knows.
OK, so let’s assume that you did your due diligence, and … yes, your boss is a lucky thin layer of nothingness. What now? It is a situation where the fuel of career progression and the reality of power dynamics clash.
Plain incompetence and luck hurt, a lot. A-players naturally want to be led by people they look up to and can learn from. If that is not the case, they start to calculate the half-life of their career. That anxiety is not paranoia, it is the internal engine that drives them forward. The cost of staying too long under an incompetent boss is very real.
That is why ambitious people eventually face a hard decision: do I grind it out and hope the system self-corrects, do I change lanes entirely, or do I try to overtake?
Option 1 and 2 depend on how much time you give yourself to wait and see. They are actually two phases along the same path: I am going to give it some fixed amount of time, and if things do not change, I will start to look elsewhere, within the company or outside.
My advice in this case is the inverse of the planning fallacy: if you think you can wait N months, commit to leaving after N/2 months of no hope of change. You do not want to start looking at other options when you cannot take one more day. Finding another role takes time, and if you are already in “desperate for change” mode, you will most likely accept suboptimal options that might hurt your career.
Option 3, overtaking, is a non-starter, do not even think about it. Even if you are right about your boss’s incompetence, you cannot just blow past them. In fact, trying is one of the fastest ways to crash your career.
Every hierarchy, from corporate orgs to military chains of command to sports teams, runs on the same universal truth: you cannot make yourself a threat to your direct manager. Hierarchy always wins over skill, at least in the short run. Rule number one of the corporate fight club is to make your manager successful: become the person they cannot live without, anticipate problems before they do, deliver consistently so that their life gets easier because of you.
This is an incredibly hard task for A-players under an incompetent thin layer. First of all, it is very hard to swallow the mere unfairness of all this. But the very same skills and ambition that make you valuable also make you visible. Secure and competent managers can handle it. They actually promote and amplify it, because they feel part of it, they are the enablers of it: look at this fantastic high-performing organization that I built.
Insecure ones, on the other hand, activate their threat detection radar at maximum sensitivity. They are nervous if you have a meeting with your skip-level, if you speak with too much authority in a meeting, if a stakeholder praises you directly.
I learned to grind through this in my career, luckily only once. I wrote about it here. A few years ago, I had a peer who got promoted into the manager role above me. When our skip had to consolidate under budget pressure, he picked my colleague for that role because of higher seniority and necessity. It was not merit-based, just circumstance and luck.
From the start, the gap was obvious. My new boss leaned heavily on me, but in stealth mode. I would do the substantive work, he would control the narrative. He depended on me to represent the function upward, but never gave me the full picture back, preserving the illusion that he was in the driver’s seat.
For a couple of years I played the good soldier: I had to support him, but it was maddening. The only positive was that, at least on a personal and human level, he was a decent person.
My growth path was chained to someone who did not actually understand the work very well. I was tempted, many times, to bypass him and “go rogue” with stakeholders and my skip, but I never did that.
Then a window opened. My skip started noticing the dynamic and began asking me for more input directly. Slowly, the reality became visible upward. I leaned into that window, not by undermining my manager, but by delivering clearly and consistently whenever I was asked. No drama, no plotting, just competence. It still took six months, but eventually the gap was undeniable, and he was removed.
The temptation to go rogue had been real, but resisting it was the right decision. Patience (a lot of it, to be honest) paid off, and the system corrected itself. But that is not always the case, and at some point you have to give up, and changing lanes becomes the only option.
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