Someone is repeatedly assigned work outside their expertise, and each resulting failure goes into the file, until the record justifies removal or demotion.
An example
Soon after taking over operations at a gas pipeline company, the new head inherited a regulatory affairs director whose relationships with the largest industrial customers made her hard to dismiss and whose views on pricing filings differed from his. In January he moved her off the filings to lead a billing system upgrade, saying the project needed someone senior. In April he added the integration of a newly acquired field services company. Both projects missed milestones in their first year. Each miss went into a memo to human resources, along with two complaints from field managers about slow decisions. Her midyear review rated her as needing improvement for the first time in eleven years. The filings team, now led by his former deputy, submitted a request she had argued against.
Why it works
Documented failures make removal easy, turning a contested decision into routine performance management. Each failure makes keeping the person look worse, discounting their reputation, knowledge, and tenure against the recent record. Keeping them becomes costlier, because anyone who does now looks complicit and exposed if something else goes wrong. The conditions are near-unilateral control over assignments, a review system that treats documentation as objective, observers who cannot see the mismatch, enough time to build a pattern, and a target who cannot refuse assignments without looking insubordinate.
The thinking behind it
Lee Ross Ross's The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (1977) named the fundamental attribution error, the tendency to explain someone's behavior by their traits while underrating the situation, even when it is plain. Work assigned outside a person's expertise produces failures that reviewers read as incompetence, and the assignment itself drops out of the account. A note written at the time of each assignment keeps it in.
Jonathan Baron Baron and Hershey's Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation (1988) found that people rate the same decision, made with the same information, as better and its maker as more competent when the outcome happens to be good. A file of bad outcomes therefore reads as a verdict on competence. Recording the conditions of each assignment gives reviewers a way to judge the decisions apart from the results.
Warning signs
Assignments keep falling outside the person's documented skill area, just before each negative review. Each one comes with a defensible reason, such as needing someone senior on it. Failures are written up promptly, and the mismatch is never mentioned. The person's former work is handed to someone else. A long record of good reviews ends abruptly.
How to defend yourself
Each assignment is defensible alone, and only the pattern shows intent, so build the counter-record while it is happening.
- When an assignment falls outside your expertise, write a note at the time: what you were asked to do, what skills it needs, what support you asked for, and what you received.
- Ask for the support in writing, so the request exists.
- Bring the pattern to a skip-level sponsor early, with the notes.
- Keep doing the parts of the work you do well, and record them.
Waiting until the file is thick means starting the counter-record after the decision is made.
How a leader shuts it down
Ask for a skill-fit memo for any cross-domain assignment of a senior person, and peer review when the assignment comes just before a performance review. In exit conversations, ask about assignment history. When a long record of good reviews breaks, look at what the person was assigned before looking at how they did.