The Invisible Trickle Down Effect of Incompetence
- Ibrahim Albuainain
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Most organizational problems start at the top.
AUTHOR Ibrahim Albuainain - November 2025
Most problems in any organization start from the top. It’s rarely about the system or the process; it’s about the people leading them.
When a senior person lacks competence but holds authority, the damage doesn’t happen overnight. It spreads slowly, through the choices they make, especially when it comes to building their team.
Instead of surrounding themselves with capable and ambitious people, they choose the opposite, individuals who pose no threat to their position.
ILLUSTRATION BY Ibrahim Albuainain. When teams are weak, clarity disappears.
The logic is simple: if no one around them is better, their weaknesses stay hidden. What follows is an invisible trickle down effect that erodes quality, performance, and morale across the entire department.
The Slow Erosion of Standards
At first, everything looks fine on paper. Deadlines are met, reports are written, and meetings continue as usual. But underneath, something shifts.
The team stops growing. Conversations become predictable. New ideas fade.
Each hiring round brings in people who are slightly less skilled, slightly less curious, and far more compliant.
Soon, the department becomes a comfort zone. No one challenges the leader. No one asks difficult questions. And when challenges arise, mediocrity becomes the accepted response.
What was once a team built to solve problems turns into one that avoids them.
When Leadership Protects Comfort — Wells Fargo
A striking example of this invisible decay appeared at Wells Fargo. For years, leadership celebrated sales figures above all else.
Unrealistic targets pushed managers to hire and promote people who would meet numbers rather than question them.
The result was predictable: employees opened millions of fake accounts just to hit goals. In 2016, the truth surfaced. The bank paid billions in fines, its reputation collapsed, and the CEO resigned.
The real failure wasn’t a few bad employees; it was a leadership system that rewarded loyalty to metrics over integrity.
The leaders created an environment where ethical behavior felt risky, and compliance felt safe.
Lesson: When senior management hire and promote those who mirror their comfort zone, the organization eventually mirrors their blindness.
Sources:
When Leadership Enables Growth — Microsoft
Contrast that with Microsoft under Satya Nadella. When Nadella became CEO in 2014, the company was rigid, competitive internally, and losing relevance in innovation.
Instead of protecting hierarchy, Nadella changed it. He redefined leadership around one idea: a growth mindset.
Leaders were asked to hire people smarter than themselves and to measure success by collective progress, not personal control.
Departments that once guarded information began sharing it. Engineers collaborated across teams. Within a few years, Microsoft’s culture transformed from defensive to adaptive, from knowing to learning.
This shift not only restored innovation but rebuilt morale. Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft’s market value and employee satisfaction surged, proving that when leaders create space for competence to rise, progress follows naturally.
Lesson: Strong leaders surround themselves with people who challenge them, not protect them.
Sources:
Why It Happens
This pattern, whether destructive like Wells Fargo or constructive like Microsoft, stems from how leaders view capability.
Insecure leaders see talent as a threat; secure leaders see it as leverage. One protects their seat; the other protects the mission.
The invisible cost of insecurity is stagnation, and the visible reward of empowerment is growth.
Some Ideas to Break the Cycle
1. Institutionalize Peer Review in Recruitment
No hiring decision, especially for key positions, should rest solely on one person. Introduce a peer review system that includes feedback from multiple departments. Shared selection reduces bias and makes it harder for one leader to filter out stronger candidates.
2. Evaluate Leaders by Their Team’s Growth, Not Compliance
Leadership performance should reflect how much their teams improve, not how “quiet” or “loyal” they appear. Track internal promotions, innovation metrics, and learning progress. A capable leader produces capable successors.
3. Reinforce a Culture That Welcomes Challenge
Normalize constructive disagreement. Encourage open discussions, reverse mentoring, and safe feedback channels where employees can question decisions without penalty. The healthiest cultures are not those without conflict, but those that use conflict to refine ideas.
Conclusion
The trickle down effect of incompetence is one of the most damaging, yet least visible, threats inside any organization. It starts quietly at the top and spreads through hiring, culture, and daily decisions.
Breaking it requires courage: to hold senior people accountable, to redefine what good leadership looks like, and to value competence over comfort.
True leadership isn’t about control. It’s about creating an environment where everyone — including the leader — can be challenged and improved.
Because when competence flows downward, progress does too.
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