There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from looking upward in an org chart and realizing that multiple layers of leadership are staffed by people who are clearly intelligent, clearly skilled, and clearly wrong for their roles. Your direct manager rewrites your proposals. Their manager cannot make a strategic decision without a committee. The VP above them treats every product conversation like a sales pitch because that is what got them promoted fifteen years ago.
None of them are lazy. None of them are malicious. They are simply operating with toolkits built for jobs they no longer have. And the compounding effect across multiple levels is what turns a manageable annoyance into a systemic blocker.
The Promotion That Breaks Everything
The pattern is predictable at every level. Your excellent engineer becomes an engineering manager who schedules daily standups to review code. Your strong engineering manager becomes a Director who still thinks in sprints instead of quarters. Your sharp Director becomes a VP who solves organizational problems by adding process, because process is what they understood two roles ago.
Laurence Peter described this as inevitable incompetence in 1969, but he undersold the damage. The problem is not one misplaced leader. It is that promotion-based hierarchies tend to stack misplaced leaders on top of each other. Each level inherits the limitations of the level above it. A PM dealing with one Peter-Principled manager has a relationship problem. A PM dealing with three layers of it has a structural problem.
The core issue is always the same: promotion rewards past performance instead of future capability. The skills that made someone successful as an individual contributor or a first-line manager (deep expertise, individual execution, technical problem-solving) are fundamentally different from what senior leadership demands: organizational thinking, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to lead through others rather than doing the work yourself.
And because these leaders were excellent at their previous jobs, they often do not see the gap. They believe they are maintaining quality, adding value, or keeping standards high. From below, it looks like they are blocking progress at every turn.
Three Patterns That Stack
The Peter Principle does not produce one type of misplaced leader. It produces at least three distinct patterns. In many organizations, you will find all three at different levels of the same reporting chain.
The Solver
The Solver built their reputation on being the person who could fix anything. Promoted into management, they never stopped fixing. Promoted again into senior management, they still cannot stop.
At the direct manager level, the Solver rewrites your proposals. At the Director level, the Solver overrides their managers’ decisions on technical details. At the VP level, the Solver pulls entire teams into fire drills because they spotted a problem three levels below their pay grade and could not resist jumping in.
The compounding effect: when Solvers exist at multiple levels, every decision gets solved and re-solved on the way up. A PM’s recommendation gets rewritten by their manager, then adjusted by the Director, then questioned by the VP who “just wants to take a quick look.” By the time the decision comes back down, it belongs to nobody and satisfies nobody.
The Expert
The Expert cannot delegate because they believe (often correctly) that they know more about the subject than anyone below them. At every level, this creates the same bottleneck: everything must pass through their review.
At the manager level, this means slow document turnaround and excessive feedback loops. At the Director level, it means cross-team initiatives stall because one person insists on reviewing every workstream. At the VP level, it means strategic decisions get delayed for weeks while the Expert requests “just a bit more data” on details that should have been delegated three levels down.
The compounding effect: when Experts stack, the organization develops a culture of over-documentation and under-decision. Teams learn that nothing moves without exhaustive preparation, so they spend more time preparing for reviews than doing actual work. Velocity drops across the board, and nobody can point to a single cause because the bottleneck is distributed across multiple levels.
The Avoider
The Avoider was good at execution by controlling variables, but leadership at every level means making calls with incomplete information. They respond to conflict by scheduling more meetings, seeking broader consensus, or pushing decisions back down to people who do not have the authority to make them.
At the manager level, the Avoider answers your questions with “What do you think?” At the Director level, the Avoider forms a working group. At the VP level, the Avoider commissions a strategy review. The decision never gets made. It just gets surrounded by more process.
The compounding effect: when Avoiders stack, the entire organization becomes allergic to commitment. Deadlines turn into suggestions. Priorities turn into wishful thinking. Someone has to make the trade-offs, but at every level, the person with the authority to decide is looking for someone else to go first.
What Actually Works
Generic advice does not help here because each pattern responds to different triggers, and dealing with multiple layers requires a different approach than managing a single relationship.
Against the Solver (At Any Level): Control the Entry Point
The Solver rewrites work because a finished document triggers their “I would have done it differently” reflex. This is true whether they sit one level or three levels above you.
For your direct manager: present work at 60% completion with two or three options and a clear recommendation. Frame it as “I would like your input before I finalize this.”
For senior leaders above your manager: control what reaches them and in what form. Work with your manager to agree on what gets escalated and what does not. When something does go up, make sure the framing gives the senior Solver a constrained choice (“Option A or B, here is my recommendation”) rather than an open canvas to redesign.
The principle is the same at every level: reduce the surface area for rewriting by involving them at the right moment in the right format.
Against the Expert (At Any Level): Ask for Priorities, Not Approval
The Expert bottleneck breaks when you change the question from “Is this right?” to “Which of these things matters most?”
For your direct manager: ask “Which of these three things should I work on first?” Experts cannot resist ranking. You shift the relationship from gatekeeper to advisor.
For senior Experts above your manager: package decisions so that their review is scoped to the part where their expertise genuinely adds value. Instead of sending a full strategy document for review, send a targeted question: “We are choosing between vendor A and vendor B. Based on your experience with integration complexity, which would you lean toward?” You give them what they need (acknowledgment of their knowledge) while limiting the review scope to something that takes five minutes instead of five days.
Against the Avoider (At Any Level): Create External Pressure
Internal deadlines do not work for Avoiders at any level because they will simply push them. The fix is the same whether the Avoider is your manager or two levels above you: connect decisions to external events nobody can control.
“Legal needs our position by Thursday for the filing.” “The API partner’s migration window closes March 15th.” “The auditor arrives on-site next week.” “The regulator’s comment period ends in ten days.”
For senior Avoiders you do not interact with directly: work with your manager to frame escalations around external deadlines. Make the external consequence visible enough that the Avoider at the top does not need courage to decide. They just need the cost of inaction to be more visible than the cost of being wrong.
When Multiple Patterns Stack
The hardest scenario is when different patterns exist at different levels. Your manager is a Solver, their Director is an Avoider, and the VP is an Expert. Each layer requires a different approach, and the approaches can conflict (involving the Solver early while limiting what reaches the Expert while creating urgency for the Avoider).
In these cases, focus on the level that creates the biggest bottleneck for your specific work. You cannot fix every layer simultaneously. Identify which misplaced leader is currently your primary blocker, apply the matching strategy, and accept that the other layers will create friction you manage around rather than resolve.
When None of This Works
Sometimes the gap between the roles and the people filling them is too large for relationship management to bridge. The Solver cannot stop solving. The Expert cannot stop gatekeeping. The Avoider cannot stop avoiding. And when these patterns are stacked three levels deep, no amount of tactical skill from a PM can compensate for a leadership structure that is fundamentally misaligned with the work.
The honest question at that point is not “How do I manage this better?” but “How long should I stay?”
A misplaced leadership chain is not a personal failure you need to fix. It is a structural reality you need to navigate, and sometimes navigating means leaving. Document what you have learned, build the case studies, and move on before you internalize the dysfunction as normal. The most dangerous version of the Peter Principle is not the leaders above you getting stuck. It is you getting stuck underneath them and not noticing that your own growth has stopped.
The Reframe
It is easy to resent the people above you who block your work. It is harder, and more useful, to see them clearly: skilled people doing their best with the wrong tools in the wrong roles, stacked in a hierarchy that nobody designed on purpose.
That does not mean you accept the situation. It means you stop expecting them to change and start adapting your approach to the specific patterns in front of you. Constrain the Solver’s canvas. Scope the Expert’s review. Create external deadlines for the Avoider. And know when none of it is enough.
The best PMs I have worked with do not just manage their product well. They manage the organization around their product with the same discipline, the same pattern recognition, and the same willingness to face what is actually in front of them instead of what the org chart says should be there.
That is not a workaround. That is the job.