Management by Counterfeit

Your manager's email lands and you feel that familiar dread. The turgid pseudo-corporate speak that tortures meaning. The contradictions tied in knots. The redundant flourishes. The email that slimes your project plan with the performance of competence and will delay any and all actual work.

This is the manager who counterfeited their way into the job through a combo of gob-smacking self-belief and near-total lack of insight.

The counterfeit manager is not stupid. That's the first thing to understand. Stupid would be easier. Stupid can be worked around. The counterfeit manager is something harder: someone who has learned to occupy the space where knowledge should be without actually possessing it.

They speak fluently. They reference the right frameworks. They arrive having done just enough preparation to sound like they've done all of it. In organisations that reward confidence over competence — which is most of them — this is a highly transferable skill.

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Definition

The counterfeit manager is someone whose apparent competence is constructed from the performance of competence — through language, confidence, process, and increasingly, technology — rather than from knowledge, experience, or genuine understanding of the work they are managing.

They are not lying, exactly. They believe in their own performance. That is part of what makes them so difficult to challenge and so comfortable in post.

They are found at every level. In every sector. In every organisation that has confused the ability to manage upward with the ability to lead. Which is, to be honest, most of them.

You have met one. You knew it before you had the words for it.

Now you do.

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The counterfeit manager is not an aberration. No. They are a product.

Modern management culture has spent decades perfecting conditions in which performed competence outcompetes the real thing. Appraisal systems that measure outputs but not understanding. Promotion criteria that reward visibility over rigour. Meeting cultures that mistake fluency for analysis. Organisations that need someone to hold the position more than they need someone to know the territory.

Into this, add AI. And the counterfeit just got cheaper. The turgid email that once required effort — the pseudo-corporate scaffolding, the strategic-sounding framework around an absence of actual strategy — can now be generated in nano-seconds. You don't need to understand the brief. You just need to paste it somewhere and press a button.

But AI is only as good as its operator. What it cannot do is know. It won't correct its own mistakes nor will it fill those yawning gaps in your understanding. It is limited by you. Limited by the glimmer of the counterfeit manager.  

But the organisation, increasingly, cannot tell the difference between virtual and real; between the counterfeit and the genuine. And so it stops trying.

Ultinately - the person who knows pays the price. Not through any single act of injustice. Through accumulation. Their work gets absorbed. Their analysis gets laundered through someone else's sign-off. Their objections get reframed as resistance. 

The institution was not built to protect them. It was built to process them.

You know the email before you've read it.

The subject line carries the signature: Re: Moving Forward Together. Or Touching Base on Next Steps. Or the classic, Reflections and the Path Ahead — which promises wisdom and delivers neither.

The opening paragraph thanks everyone for their ongoing commitment. Acknowledges that this has been a challenging period. Notes that there is much to build on. None of these sentences contain information.

Then comes the pivot. This gives us an opportunity. It is always an opportunity. The cancelled project is an opportunity to refocus. The failed consultation is an opportunity to broaden engagement. The inconvenient evidence is an opportunity to ensure all voices are heard. Failure does not exist in the counterfeit manager's lexicon. It transforms, always, into opportunity. Which means it never has to be examined.

Watch for the passive voice. It does the heavy lifting. Decisions are not made — they have been taken. Concerns are not dismissed — they have been noted. The project plan was not killed — it was decided not to progress it at this point. 

The passive voice removes agency from the sentence entirely. Nothing is anyone's fault. Things simply happen. And then we move forward together.

The buzzwords cluster around process and inclusion: cohesion, alignment, broadening the conversation, ensuring all voices, building from the grassroots, holding space. Each one sounds like engagement and means its opposite. Broadening the conversation means diluting the argument. Ensuring all voices means no single voice — including the one backed by evidence — gets to lead. Alignment means agreement with what has already been decided.

The contradictions are structural and they are consistent. We need to move quickly — but we also need to take time to do this properly. We value your expertise — but we need to make sure the wider membership feels ownership. The evidence is important — but we shouldn't get ahead of where people are. Urgency paired with delay. Expertise paired with democratisation. Evidence paired with process. Every pairing lands in the same place: nothing happens, and nothing is anyone's fault.

What this costs the person who knows is not dramatic. It is daily. Cumulative. You read the email. You feel the contradictions. You find the three places where the framing has quietly swallowed your work. You draft a reply that is careful and professional and holds the line. You press send. You feel the specific exhaustion of someone who has had to be precise in response to someone who never has to be.

You do it again next week. And the week after.

The work continues. The counterfeit circulates. And the distance between what you know and what the institution is willing to act on widens. Quietly. Email by email.

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Thirty years in workplaces teaches you things no leadership programme will.

The first: you cannot convert a counterfeit manager. They are not a problem to be solved through better communication or clearer evidence. The system that produced them continues to reward them. You are not going to out-argue the structure.

The second: document everything. Not out of paranoia — out of precision. The counterfeit manager's greatest weapon is the institutional memory hole. The meeting that reached a conclusion later denied. The email trail that somehow doesn't support what you were clearly told. The work absorbed without attribution. Your paper trail is your reality check. Keep it.

The third, and this one takes time: separate your work from your recognition. The work is real. The evidence is sound. The argument holds. None of that depends on whether the counterfeit manager acknowledges it, acts on it, or reads it properly. The institution may not reward you. The work still matters. Hold those two things separately or the second one will hollow you out.

The fourth: find your people. Not just to complain — though that's essential too — but to stay grounded. The counterfeit manager operates partly by making you doubt your own read. Am I overreacting? Am I being difficult? Is this actually as bad as it feels? The answer, usually: no, yes, and yes. You need someone outside the dynamic who knows the terrain and will tell you the truth.

The fifth: know your exit. Not as defeat — as strategy. The counterfeit manager has longevity because the institution protects them. You may not change the environment. You can choose how long you remain in it and on what terms. Knowing your exit — having it planned, having it moving — changes everything. You are not trapped. You are choosing, for now, to stay. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

And finally. The thing no one says out loud but every experienced officer knows: sometimes the most radical act available is to do the work anyway. Build the evidence. Hold the line. Be the person in the room who actually knows — even when the room doesn't reward it. Even when the counterfeit circulates freely. Even when the email lands on a Monday morning and the dread is immediate and familiar.

The work is yours. They cannot counterfeit that.