The people who rise fastest in most organisations are rarely the most competent, they are simply the most confident, and decades of research suggests we are almost incapable of telling the two apart.

And when the promoted person eventually reaches a level of responsibility their actual abilities cannot support, the organisation is genuinely surprised. What the accumulated research has established is not that competent people are being deliberately overlooked. The finding has been replicated many times, refined in various directions, and generalised beyond the specific undergraduate populations Kruger and Dunning originally studied. Which produces, at the level of the organisation, the pattern that everyone recognises but few organisations know how to correct. The organisations that promoted them do not, on average, have a reliable way of telling the difference.