She’s been reporting to someone for two years and still can’t explain what he does.
She’s asked. Colleagues have noticed. She’s not the only one who can’t pin it down. There’s always movement, meetings, urgency, noise. But when she looks for the work underneath, she can’t see it.
Now she’s been asked to act up for a week. She’s thinking: Here’s my opportunity to find out for sure.
A handover in name only
He gave her thirty minutes.
Most of it was him telling her which meetings she didn’t need to attend. No reasoning. No context. Just a list.
When she asked what decisions might come up, the answers were vague. Same old same old. Still no clearer about what he actually drives.
She walked out with the acting title and no sense of the work or what might be asked of her.
Access to the layer above
The best part of the week is that she gets access to a layer she’s only ever observed from below.
She can walk into rooms she’s been kept out of. See who brings what. Watch what lands and what doesn’t. Test her instincts against reality instead of inference.
The role probably isn’t hollow. Most senior roles aren’t, even when they look that way from the outside.
What’s more likely is that the work happening in those rooms doesn’t connect clearly to what the business actually needs. If that’s the case, nobody has said so. He’s been doing it for years. It’s become the norm. The system has organised itself around him.
That’s even more uncomfortable than an empty role.
The audit week
A week won’t show her everything.
But if the role has substance — real decisions, real relationships, real things moving because of his presence — she’ll see it. She might disagree with how he does it, but she’ll know it matters.
If the role is focused on the wrong things, that will show too. Meetings that feel important but don’t connect to anything. Relationships that exist for their own sake.
Sometimes roles orbit work that no longer moves the business forward.
Sometimes they reflect what the system can currently sustain. Capability gaps. Risk tolerance. Politics. History.
Those are two very different problems.
And she’s in a rare position to see which one she’s dealing with.
Is this where she wants to grow?
The harder question — the one she turns a blind eye to most of the time — is what this means for her.
She cares about doing good work and growing into roles that matter. That’s hard when the layer above you isn’t modelling anything you aspire to. It’s even harder when you suspect the organisation has stopped noticing.
Maybe it’s organisational bloat.
Maybe the role is simply too politically or financially costly to change.
Both happen.
She’s secretly hoping she sees something she couldn’t see from below. That it isn’t incompetence. It isn’t bloat. That it’s constraint.
That would make it easier to stay.
By Friday, she’ll know
She won’t fix any of it in a week.
But she will see it clearly.
Acting up doesn’t just clarify the job.
It clarifies the compromises.
Even then, it can take longer to work through properly. That’s where executive coaching can help.
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