The Problem With Promoting People Who Are Good at Looking Busy

You’ve seen it. The colleague who always has a furrowed brow, a coffee in hand, and a calendar crammed with meetings that never seem to produce a single decision. They talk in urgent tones about bandwidth and alignment, yet the actual output is painfully thin. Then, one Tuesday morning, the announcement lands: they’ve been promoted. Again. This isn’t some quirk of your particular workplace. It’s a widespread organizational blind spot—the chronic overvaluation of performative busyness over actual, tangible contribution.

Organizational psychology gives this a name: the visibility bias. When managers don’t have clear performance metrics, they fall back on observable proxies—hours spent at a desk, how fast someone replies to email, or how smoothly they deliver a status update. The trouble is, those signals often correlate more closely with self-promotion skills than with the quiet competence that actually pushes projects forward. I’ve watched this dynamic play out across sectors, from Nairobi startups to London consultancies, and the pattern is remarkably consistent.

The Theater of Productivity

Back in 2018, a team at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business put numbers to a familiar suspicion. They ran a field study across project-based teams in five companies and found that managers consistently rated employees higher when those employees sent frequent, unsolicited status updates—even when their objective output was lower. The lead author, Constance Hadley, called it “the glorification of talk over action.”

Why is this theater so seductive? Part of it is cognitive ease. Judging the quality of actual work demands deep familiarity with the craft—reading code, understanding market research, evaluating design choices. Most managers, pressed for time and stretched thin across domains, don’t have that depth. So they substitute easier cues: presence, pace, and presentation. The person who talks fastest in the stand-up meeting sounds busier. The one who fires off emails at 10 p.m. looks more dedicated. These mental shortcuts feel efficient, but they systematically reward the wrong behavior.

There’s another pull at work, too—a psychological one. We gravitate toward people who seem to relieve our own anxiety. When a manager feels pressure from above, an employee who projects confidence and constant motion can feel like a safety net, even if that motion is mostly circular. The manager feels less alone in the pressure cooker, and the employee banks political capital. It’s a quiet collusion of comfort that has very little to do with the organization’s long-term health.

The Quiet Cost of Rewarding Noise

The immediate casualty is obvious: the deeply focused, low-drama performers who actually build the product, fix the bugs, or nurture client relationships. These people often work with a steady intensity that doesn’t translate well to the performative register. They might not interrupt a deep coding flow to chime in on a Slack thread. They might prioritize a difficult client conversation over attending a non-essential town hall. When promotions bypass them again and again, the message is clear: visibility trumps value. So they leave. Or they disengage. Or, worst of all, they start performing busyness themselves.

But the damage runs deeper than individual morale. When a company promotes people whose primary skill is looking busy, it plants the seeds of a culture built on symbolic work. Real analysis gets swapped for decks about analysis. Strategic thinking gives way to ritualized planning cycles that produce no real strategic shifts. I once consulted for a firm where the leadership team spent four months crafting a “transformation roadmap” that was, in truth, just existing projects with fancier slide titles. The project lead—a master of the artful status update—got promoted to a new role before the roadmap was even piloted. The roadmap, predictably, gathered dust.

Research from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business backs this up. In a 2021 study on middle management promotions, analysts found that in organizations with fuzzy performance criteria, employees who engaged in “organizational citizenship behaviors” aimed at supervisors—like volunteering for visible but low-impact tasks—got promoted 23% faster than peers with equivalent objective performance scores. The behavior wasn’t citizenship toward the organization. It was citizenship toward the boss’s perception.

How We Got Here: The Measurement Vacuum

This problem isn’t new, but modern work structures have sharpened it. In manufacturing or sales, output is relatively easy to count: units produced, revenue closed. But in knowledge work—design, engineering, strategy, HR—the link between daily activity and long-term value is murky. Hours logged tell you nothing. Lines of code written tell you nothing if the code is junk. A marketing campaign’s success might take months to assess. Where good measurement is absent, bad measurement rushes in to fill the space.

The rise of hybrid and remote work has added another layer. When managers can’t physically see people working, their anxiety spikes—and with it, the hunger for visibility signals. The employee who is constantly online on Slack or Teams, who reacts to every message, who narrates their work in public channels, can seem more productive than the one who disappears for four hours to solve a gnarly problem and then logs off. The former gets noticed. The latter gets questioned.

This isn’t an argument against remote work. It’s an argument against lazy management that leans on proximity or digital presence as a stand-in for contribution. Managing for outcomes rather than activity takes more effort: you have to set clear, measurable goals, understand the work well enough to evaluate it, and have the discipline to resist the comfort of constant visible motion.

Redesigning the Signals That Matter

Shifting a culture away from rewarding performative busyness isn’t a quick-fix initiative. It takes structural changes in how performance is defined, evaluated, and talked about. Here are a few starting points I’ve seen work in teams that successfully recalibrated their promotion criteria.

Define Contribution, Not Activity

At the start of each quarter, every team should agree on a small set of concrete outcomes that would represent real progress. These should be things a reasonable person could judge as done or not done: “Reduce customer churn from 4% to 3.2%” rather than “Improve customer retention efforts.” The key is specificity—so specific that a busy-looking PowerPoint can’t be mistaken for achievement. When promotion decisions roll around, the primary evidence is the record of these outcomes, not the volume of emails sent in pursuit of them.

Separate Promotions from Performance Theater

Many organizations make the problem worse by lumping promotion readiness together with performance in the current role. A superb engineer who writes elegant, maintainable code and mentors juniors quietly is demonstrating high performance. That alone deserves strong compensation and recognition. Promotion into a lead role should require evidence of different skills—like technical strategy or people development—not just a louder performance of the current role. Decoupling these two things reduces the incentive to inflate visibility for its own sake.

Protect Deep Work and Measure Its Output

Managers need to actively defend uninterrupted time for complex cognitive work. That means no-meeting blocks, norms against trivial instant messages, and an explicit acknowledgment that “not immediately responsive” does not mean “not working.” More importantly, when evaluating people, managers should ask: What did this person produce that actually moved a metric or solved a persistent problem? If the answer is a list of meetings attended and documents circulated, that’s a red flag.

Call Out the Pattern, Gently

Changing norms also means changing conversations. When a team celebrates someone’s “hustle” or “responsiveness,” a perceptive leader can reframe the moment: “I appreciate the energy, but let’s talk about what customer problem we actually solved this week.” This isn’t about shaming individuals. It’s about gradually shifting the collective definition of what good work looks like. Over time, teams start to value deep dives over shallow sprints.

When the Performers Become Managers

Perhaps the most corrosive long-term effect is what happens when serial performers of busyness become managers themselves. They reproduce what they know. They hire and promote people like them, creating a thickening layer of activity-focused leadership that drifts further and further from the actual work. Decision quality declines because the people in power never built deep expertise; they built reputations.

A 2022 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology tracked promotion paths in a large multinational over five years and found something sobering: managers who had been promoted primarily on visibility proxies were significantly more likely to lean on those same proxies when evaluating their own teams. The cycle self-perpetuates. Breaking it takes intervention at the higher rungs of leadership—a willingness to look past polished presentations and ask uncomfortable questions about real impact.

I once interviewed a senior executive at a respected African fintech company who described her personal rule: “I never promote someone until I’ve seen them handle a quiet crisis—the kind that doesn’t make it to a steering committee slide but could sink a product if ignored.” Those quiet crises are where true capability shows up, often in people who would never think to broadcast the save.

A Personal Note on Staying Perceptive

This topic matters to me because I have been both the quiet contributor and, at times, the person who mistook movement for progress. Early in my career, I assumed that visible effort would be rewarded fairly. I learned, painfully, that it often isn’t—and that the disappointment can curdle into cynicism. But cynicism is a poor strategy. The better response is to build teams and organizations where the link between real contribution and recognition is as direct as we can make it.

That means, as a writer and observer, I pay close attention to the gap between what people say they’re doing and what their work actually changes. I look for the engineers who quietly refactor a brittle system without fanfare, the HR leads who resolve a toxic team dynamic without a town hall, the analysts whose insight prevents a bad acquisition. Their work doesn’t always photograph well, but it leaves a trace you can measure—if you bother to look.

FAQ: Recognizing and Reversing Performative Busyness

How can I tell if I’m accidentally rewarding performative busyness on my team?

Track your own attention. For two weeks, note which team members you praise or mention in leadership meetings and why. Are you citing concrete outcomes, or are you citing effort, presence, and communication style? Also, compare your list against the team’s objective performance data—project completions, error rates, client retention. If the names don’t align, you have a gap worth closing.

What if my company’s culture already celebrates “always-on” behavior?

Cultural shifts start with small, consistent acts. Begin by publicly recognizing a team member who delivered a key result with minimal noise. Explain why the result mattered. When someone sends unnecessary late-night emails, reply during your working hours and model boundaries. Over time, your team will notice what you choose to amplify. You can also introduce lightweight outcome-tracking tools that make real contributions more visible to higher management.

Isn’t some self-promotion just part of professional survival?

Yes, and there’s a legitimate difference between making your work visible and fabricating the appearance of work. The healthy version is sharing evidence of completed work in a way that helps the organization learn or decide. The unhealthy version is generating activity that creates the illusion of progress without the substance. Good performance systems should make the first easy and the second irrelevant.

How do I advocate for myself without becoming a performative busy person?

Focus on sharing finished outcomes, not ongoing effort. Instead of “I’m working on the Q3 report,” wait until you have a draft that surfaces a meaningful insight, then share that insight with context. Frame your updates around decisions you need or problems you’ve solved. When you do communicate, be specific and brief. The goal is to make your contribution legible, not to flood the channel with motion.