This is a pretty common view and flawed in my experience because people assume that excellence in “big role X” actually maps to “best at X.” In practice, the job of being “in charge” is often about navigating organizations, exacting meaningful change within the constraints of that environment and building trust with the other people at that level to enable your teams to have impact.
That sounds a lot like “fake” work, but that’s only because we (the society we) tend to assume that all that is required to achieve things is to put a bunch of great people together and the rest takes care of itself. In practice, this is almost never true. People have individual motivations, feelings, and goals that contradict each other - the role of people in leadership is to recognize this and help find the midpoint.
Finally, it’s worth noting that most individuals value significant autonomy over their work. So while people often hold leadership accountable to excellence in X, the thing they actually want from people is for them to get out of the way so they individually can do X the way they want. Such is the paradox of leadership.
It’s probably a feature that there are some people who are willing to do these jobs and that most people aren’t vs assuming it’s a bug and that “many” are serial fakers.
That sounds a lot like “fake” work, but that’s only because we (the society we) tend to assume that all that is required to achieve things is to put a bunch of great people together and the rest takes care of itself. In practice, this is almost never true. People have individual motivations, feelings, and goals that contradict each other - the role of people in leadership is to recognize this and help find the midpoint.
Finally, it’s worth noting that most individuals value significant autonomy over their work. So while people often hold leadership accountable to excellence in X, the thing they actually want from people is for them to get out of the way so they individually can do X the way they want. Such is the paradox of leadership.
It’s probably a feature that there are some people who are willing to do these jobs and that most people aren’t vs assuming it’s a bug and that “many” are serial fakers.