Basic Trope: Characters are promoted up to a level where they are no longer competent at what they do, and stay there.
- Straight: Alice gets promoted up to an upper-middle-management position at Trope Co. She finds that she is stressed, overwhelmed, and can no longer meet deadlines.
- Exaggerated: So many people have been promoted to positions for which they are not suited that it turns into Incompetence, Inc.
- Downplayed:
- Alice was a decent corporate vice president, but is a failure as a CEO.
- Alice goes from a middle manager to a small business owner. She does a decent job, but the lack of oversight results in her making poor decisions that would have been repealed at her old job.
- Justified:
- Alice's aggressive, micro-managing approach worked wonders for grunt labour, but as a manager it intimidates and alienates the people under her.
- Alice is not used to seeing the bigger picture. She focuses on micro-managing her employees and fails to see the poor direction her department is going.
- Alice's position did not involve leadership.
- People were more willing to overlook the bunny ears she wears 24/7 when Alice was just a regular employee and Marketing could present her as "we foster employees expressing themselves". Now that she is one of the faces of the corporation, it's embarrassing.
- When Alice has the fear of supervisors reprising her, she achieves a good balance of boldness and meekness. In a supervising position, with less (or no) oversight, the power inevitably gets to her head.
- The bosses of Alice's job give her a raise as a reward for saving them from a terrorist attack. It was considerate of them to reward her, but they gave no further thought about certain details such as, well, her capacity to function there.
- Inverted:
- Alice was completely incompetent in her old job, but somehow gets promoted, and (much to everyone's surprise) not only manages to survive in the new position, but thrive.
- Alice gets demoted because of her incompetence and does much better in that position.
- Alice gets demoted because she's too good at what she does and ends up doing poorly in her lower position.
- Subverted: Alice initially struggles with her duties but quickly gets the hang of things.
- Double Subverted:
- She is promoted again, and this time begins to fail.
- The extra workload is too much for Alice, and she becomes disengaged as she begins to feel overworked and underappreciated. And soon enough, it begins to show in the quality of her work.
- Parodied:
- Alice is on the cleaning staff. A Wrong Genre Savvy observer who thinks she must be too capable for her title successfully lobbies to get her promoted to the leadership team, where she touches off Disaster Dominoes that cause Trope Co.'s collapse.
- The company pays to have a brick wall built in every newly promoted employee's office.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Some people do well when they're promoted, others don't.
- Alice messes up at first, then works her way toward getting the hang of her new job until a new wrinkle arises that she doesn't know how to resolve at first, but then she works her way through it and makes the situation even better than before.
- Management's responses to Alice's failures at management but excellence at sales is to side-grade her into being a teacher for other salespeople and an advisor for an actual manager.
- Averted:
- Alice handles her new position well.
- Alice does not get promoted.
- Lampshaded: "I am just not cut out for this whole 'management' thing..."
- Invoked: Alice begins Obfuscating Stupidity, so that management will have to demote her or fire her, because she didn't want this position in the first place.
- Exploited: Alice is Promoted to Scapegoat.
- Defied:
- Alice's new manager fires or demotes her for her incompetence.
- Alice does what she can to learn the skills needed for the new job, and soon enough, she can hang with the best of 'em.
- Alice quits.
- Alice knows she doesn't have what it takes to do this job, so when she's offered the promotion, she turns it down, and explains in great detail why she does so.
- Alice's employers reward her skill with a simple wage raise rather than a promotion.
- Management has a standing policy that calls for undoing a promotion if somebody isn't competent in a new position without shame or risk of job loss and return them to their prior role, taking a different career trajectory.
- Discussed: "Oh, that explains why I hate working for her. Alice is one of those brilliant salespeople that have no idea how to manage other salespeople."
- Conversed: "See, if Trope Co. were a real company, they'd never succeed, because they keep promoting people into management who really don't know what they're doing."
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