Failing Up: The Unlikely Path to Success

Published on 10 July 2025 at 13:31

We've all seen it happen: the manager who consistently misses targets gets promoted to director. The executive who oversaw a major project failure becomes a vice president. The leader who struggled with team management suddenly finds themselves running an entire division. Welcome to the phenomenon of "failing up"—where mediocre or poor performance seemingly gets rewarded with greater responsibility and higher positions.

While this pattern might seem counterintuitive, it's surprisingly common in organizations across industries. Whether due to political maneuvering, the Peter Principle, or simply being in the right place at the right time, some individuals find themselves thrust into roles they may not have earned through traditional measures of success.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: if you've found yourself in this position, you have a choice. You can either justify your promotion and continue the patterns that defined your previous performance, or you can use this unexpected opportunity as a catalyst for genuine transformation.

The Reality Check: Why Failing Up Happens

Before thinking about solutions, it's worth understanding why organizations promote underperforming individuals. Sometimes it's to remove them from roles where they're causing immediate damage. Other times, it's the result of limited talent pools, office politics, or the assumption that leadership skills will somehow magically emerge with a new title.

The problem intensifies when these promotions occur during periods of organizational crisis. When companies face budget shortfalls, declining morale, or reputational damage, placing an unproven leader at the helm can accelerate the downward spiral. The stakes are higher, the scrutiny is intense, and the margin for error is virtually nonexistent.

The Transformation Imperative

If you recognize yourself in this scenario, the first step is to be brutally honest. Acknowledge that your track record may not justify your current position, but that doesn't mean you're doomed to fail. Many successful leaders have rocky beginnings, and some of the most effective executives learned their most valuable lessons from early failures.

The key difference between those who ultimately succeed and those who continue to stumble lies in their willingness to fundamentally change their approach to leadership.

A Roadmap for Redemption

Become a Learning Machine

Your first priority must be education, not just formal training, but also aggressive and continuous learning about your role, your industry, and leadership itself. Read voraciously, seek out mentors, attend workshops, and find executive coaches. Most importantly, study the leaders you admire and understand what makes them effective.

Don't try to fake expertise you don't possess. Instead, become genuinely curious about your organization's challenges and opportunities. Ask questions, even if they reveal gaps in your knowledge. Intellectual humility is far more valuable than false confidence.

Surround Yourself with Excellence

One of the fastest ways to elevate your performance is to hire and retain people who are more intelligent and more capable than you in key areas. This requires suppressing your ego and recognizing that your job isn't to be the smartest person in the room—it's to create an environment where those people can do their best work.

Delegate meaningfully, not just the tasks you don't want to do. Give your talented team members real authority and decision-making power. Create clear expectations, provide necessary resources, and then get out of their way. Your success will increasingly depend on their success.

Master the Art of Listening

Many leaders who fail up have spent their careers talking their way into positions rather than listening their way to understanding. Reverse this pattern immediately. Spend your first 90 days in any new role primarily listening to employees, customers, stakeholders, and data.

Conduct skip-level meetings with employees several layers below you. These conversations often reveal organizational realities that may be filtered out by the time they reach your level. Ask open-ended questions and resist the urge to provide immediate solutions.

Focus on Systems, Not Just Results

While results matter enormously, leaders who have failed up often focus solely on short-term outcomes without building the systems and processes that create sustainable success. Invest time in understanding and improving the fundamental operations of your organization.

Look for processes that are broken, communication channels that are clogged, and decision-making bottlenecks that slow progress. Sometimes, the most impactful thing a leader can do is remove obstacles rather than add new initiatives.

Overcommunicate with Radical Transparency

Given your track record, you'll face skepticism from employees, peers, and superiors. Combat this by overcommunicating your plans, progress, and setbacks. Share your learning journey openly. Acknowledge past mistakes and explain how you're working to avoid repeating them.

Regular all-hands meetings, detailed progress reports, and accessible leadership office hours can help rebuild trust and foster a sense of transparency. Be specific about goals, timelines, and metrics. When you miss targets, explain why and what you're doing differently.

Embrace Short-Term Wins While Building Long-Term Capability

You need to show progress quickly to buy time for more profound organizational changes. Identify a few achievable wins that can demonstrate momentum and build confidence in your leadership. These include resolving a persistent operational issue, improving a key customer relationship, or implementing a simple process improvement.

However, don't sacrifice long-term health for short-term gains. The quick fixes that got you promoted before won't sustain you in a more responsible role, especially during challenging times.

The Mindset Shift

Perhaps the most crucial transformation is moving from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. Leaders who fail up often operate from fear—fear of being exposed, fear of making mistakes, fear of admitting ignorance. This fear drives defensive behaviors that ultimately undermine their effectiveness.

Instead, adopt the mindset that there's enough success to go around. Celebrate others' achievements, share credit generously, and take responsibility for failures. This approach not only builds stronger teams but also creates the psychological safety necessary for innovation and risk-taking.

When Success Isn't Possible

Sometimes, despite best efforts, the gap between current capabilities and role requirements is simply too large to bridge quickly enough. Organizations in crisis often can't afford the luxury of extended learning curves. In these situations, the most ethical and personally beneficial choice might be to step back into a role where you can be genuinely effective.

This isn't failure—it's a strategic approach to career management. Better to succeed in a smaller role than to fail spectacularly in a larger one, potentially damaging your long-term career prospects and the organization you're supposed to serve.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Success

The reality is that some people who fail up do eventually become effective leaders, but it requires a level of self-awareness, humility, and commitment to change that many find difficult to sustain. It's not enough to work harder using the same approaches that led to previous mediocre performance. Fundamental transformation is required.

Success in this situation isn't guaranteed, but it is possible. The leaders who make this transition successfully share several characteristics: they're brutally honest about their shortcomings, they invest heavily in learning and development, they build strong teams around them, and they're willing to make difficult decisions even when those decisions are personally uncomfortable.

Moving Forward

If you've found yourself in a leadership position that you may not have traditionally earned, you have a unique opportunity. You can either prove the skeptics right by continuing patterns that led to underwhelming performance, or you can use this chance to completely reinvent your approach to leadership.

The choice is yours, but remember that with greater responsibility comes greater impact, both positive and negative. The people you lead, the customers you serve, and the organization you represent all deserve leaders who are committed to excellence, regardless of how they arrived in their positions.

Your past performance doesn't have to define your future leadership, but changing that trajectory requires more than good intentions. It demands sustained effort, genuine transformation, and the courage to admit when you're out of your depth. For those willing to put in the work, failing up can become the catalyst for becoming the leader your organization truly needs.

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