By Michael Nagorski, Founding Partner, Double Loop Performance
There’s a conversation that happens in leadership teams with uncomfortable regularity. Someone gets passed over for a promotion they believed they’d earned. The person who got it instead is, by most measurable accounts, not obviously more qualified. They may not even be finishing what they start.
And yet, there they go.
When leadership offers an explanation at all, it usually sounds something like: they showed initiative, or they were ready, or the most revealing one — they were in the right place at the right time. What goes unsaid is the real story: this organization doesn’t promote on merit. It promotes on proximity.
The Numbers Aren’t Flattering
Most leaders will tell you, sincerely, that their organization rewards performance. Most of those same leaders would struggle to define what “performance” means for a given role, beyond hitting a number or staying out of trouble.
This isn’t conjecture. Employees with executive sponsors are 23% more likely to get promoted than equally performing peers without them. The sponsorship relationship isn’t a measure of work quality. It’s a measure of access.
MIT Sloan professor Emilio Castilla spent decades studying how organizations make promotion and pay decisions and published the conclusion in 2025. Organizations that explicitly emphasize meritocratic values produce more bias in reward decisions, not less. When managers believe the system is fair, they stop auditing their own judgment. Feeling objective, they aren’t. The organization says it promotes on merit. The organization believes it. And the organization keeps rewarding whoever showed up to the right meetings.
What Half-Finished Work Looks Like From the Top
Leaders who are spread thin, which is most leaders, are more likely to reward the person filling the air around them with activity than the person who delivers without requiring management attention. Half-complete projects look like initiative if no one follows up. Consistently missed goals read as ambition if the person is energetic about the next one.
Showing up for work a leader will see but not inspect is a learned skill. Some people are very good at it. And when those people get promoted, everyone else in the organization is watching.
When an organization promotes someone with documented shortcomings — unfinished work, missed targets, accountability gaps — it doesn’t just reward that individual. It tells every person watching what success looks like here. High performers who have been delivering without fanfare start doing the math. They adjust, disengage, or leave. The people who stay may be the ones most comfortable in the pattern. Toxic culture doesn’t arrive from the outside. The organization builds it, decision by decision, in the promotion cycle.
Then You Hire the Same Person Again
Here’s where it compounds.
Organizations that have promoted their most visible performers now ask those same performers — and leaders shaped by that same environment — to hire. And they hire what they know. They hire confidence. They hire the polished answer. They hire the candidate who walks in sounding like they’ve already mastered the job.
When hiring leaders perceive expertise as a pinnacle — a state of completion — and select candidates based on that projection, they are guaranteeing a stagnant culture. Consider what happens when someone hired for the appearance of mastery hits a real problem, makes a meaningful mistake, or reaches the edge of what they know. There’s a period of paralysis. Then an exit from accountability: through deflection, through scapegoating, through the burial of an error that no one wants to own.
You hired certainty. You got fragility.
Research on elite professional service firm hiring found that employers weigh cultural similarity — shared backgrounds, interests, self-presentation style — as heavily as technical qualifications. They call it “fit.” What they’re often measuring is familiarity. And familiarity, compounded over years of hiring cycles, produces homogeneity, not excellence.
Why the Loop Is Hard to Break
In an organization where visibility is currency and imperfection gets you passed over, people stop taking risks. They manage impressions rather than improve performance. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety identifies the precondition for high-performing teams as the belief that speaking up, flagging problems, and acknowledging gaps will not be penalized. Promotion and hiring cultures that reward actual output create that condition. The ones described above dismantle it.
You cannot ask people to be candid about problems while simultaneously showing them that candor doesn’t get you promoted. They will choose self-preservation — and when you hire the person who has spent years projecting mastery and managing around error, you’ve imported that behavior into the next generation of the organization.
The loop isn’t malicious. It’s a system doing what it was designed, implicitly and over time, to do.
The Candidate Worth Taking a Risk On
The candidate who says ‘I don’t know everything about this, but here’s how I think about learning it’ is not less qualified. They’re telling you how they’ll handle the next problem, and the one after that.
Curiosity isn’t the absence of competence. It is the engine of it. A candidate who can explain what they know, acknowledge what they don’t, and describe how they close that gap is demonstrating something no rehearsed answer can manufacture: intellectual honesty under uncertainty. That is the profile that builds a culture capable of learning. Not the perfect resume — the person who treats errors as information rather than exposure.
Most managers will say they want that person. Then they circle the candidate who sounded the most complete.
The Aim and the System Are Not the Same Thing
Put these two patterns together — a promotion culture that rewards proximity, and a hiring culture that selects for projected mastery — and you get an organization that regenerates itself reliably, and not in a good way. Leaders who survived on visibility hire people who perform confidence. Those hires get promoted for occupying the right rooms. They hire in kind.
Most managers would say that isn’t the aim. So why does it keep happening?
Because the aim lives in the values document. The system lives in who got promoted last quarter, and who you hired to replace them.
That gap doesn’t close without someone willing to ask, in the rooms where decisions actually get made:
- What specifically did this person finish?
- What did we say we valued, and does this promotion reflect it?
- Are we hiring someone to grow this culture, or to preserve it?
Talent acquisition and promotion culture aren’t separate HR functions. They are the operating system of organizational health — or the engine of organizational dysfunction. Which one they become is a choice. Most organizations are making it without knowing they are.
Double Loop Performance works with leaders ready to close the gap between the culture they describe and the one their decisions are building.
About The Author
Michael Nagorski is the Founding Partner of Double Loop Performance, an organizational development and leadership consulting practice based in Newark, Delaware. He works with executive teams, change leaders, and facilitators who are tired of talking about the right things and ready to actually do them.
Michael has spent more than 15 years helping organizations at inflection points — when they need to move differently without losing what made them good. That has ranged from designing decision-making frameworks for Fortune 500 sales organizations to building facilitation systems for senior leadership teams navigating strategy execution, technology adoption, and culture change.
His work lives at the intersection of facilitation design, behavioral science, and organizational accountability — with a strong bias toward the practical over the theoretical.
He holds graduate degrees from the University of Delaware in Organizational Development and Change and Business Administration, and is the developer of the MEET Funnel methodology for structured decision facilitation.
Contact Double Loop Performance or contact Mike directly through LinkedIn.