India’s workplaces: Mediocrity or meritocracy?

India, a nation with the world’s youngest workforce and a growing digital economy, stands at a decisive inflection point. Yet, despite our demographic dividend and entrepreneurial talent, we’re quietly surrendering the future to a silent epidemic, mediocrity. Mediocrity is not just tolerated; it is being institutionalised, packaged, promoted and even celebrated in many boardrooms across the country.

The writing is on the wall. Today at India’s workplaces being competent is not enough. Most jobs go to the pliant, promotions to puppets, and leadership roles to those who’ve perfected the art of personal loyalty and blind compliance. The system is rigged, not always overtly, but subtly, strategically, and deliberately.

Through this column, I wish to highlight a nation’s economic growth cannot sustain, if its society and its workplaces reek of dirty politics, unhealthy competition, structured alienation of meritocracy and competence. Adding to that scourge, mediocrity & incompetence are promoted under the guise of diversity, inclusion and culture fitness, only to fulfil personal agendas of those in powerful positions at the top of every organisational layer.

Dangerously for India this trend is being normalised across sectors in enterprises of medium, large scale even MNC’s and GCC’s. This is also spreading rapidly into all other organisations, whether they are political or social. I wish to dissect this social and corporate conundrum, one that has the potential to put India’s promise on a slow-burn altar.

The mirror test for top leadership

There is a simple and time-tested way to assess the quality of an organisational leader at the top of any organisation. Boards which appoint the CEO & other top leaders must note. If one looks at assesses the quality and competence of the core team that surrounds a CEO or other top leaders in any organisation, one can clearly understand if the leader means business or he is just a seat warmer in full pursuit of protecting his chair.

The core team’s skills, credentials, depth, integrity, independence, and competence expose its reporting boss and his goals. If a CEO is surgically focused on accentuating shareholder value and has organisational interest above his own, it shows.

When an organisation is built on true meritocracy, its leadership will actively seek out people smarter, stronger, and more skilful than themselves. They understand that real leadership is not about protecting one’s seat but about enabling others to rise. In contrast, insecure leaders surround themselves with ‘yes-men’ and ‘stooges’, individuals who pose no intellectual threat, offer no original thought, and exist merely to validate every decision.

I had many opportunities to interact with CEO’s, CXO’s and CMO’s of many large companies in my professional capacity as an Organisational Strategist. On many occasions, I was surprised to see the quality of few top leaders leading top global brands bereft of even fundamentals to lead those enterprises and were consistently showing poor financial results consistently but continue to be in their positions for many years. The fingers in this case points towards incompetent boards which appoint these top leaders and forget to periodically assess the need for their continuity undermining the boards fiduciary responsibilities for the enterprise and shareholders it is serving.

This is where the rot begins. When leadership fears competence instead of fostering it, the organisation’s culture inevitably collapses into mediocrity. Decisions become reactionary, innovation dries up, and the enterprise turns into a bureaucratic swamp. What started as self-preservation becomes an enterprise-wide epidemic.

Mediocrity by design, not by accident

The core function of any enterprise which envisions success and dominance of its market space is ‘Right Recruitment’. If this function falters, I can guarantee everything else will. This is not just a passing phenomenon or isolated to a few companies. It is becoming a structural pattern, ‘mediocrity by design’. Across the private sector, especially in many mid to large Indian corporates, one can notice an alarming trend: hiring down the ladder. Leadership today, especially those who are insecure or ill-equipped, make a conscious choice to hire individuals less competent than themselves.

This is not just about poor hiring decisions; it is a survival strategy. Leaders who lack professional competence feel threatened by high-performing professionals. They know deep down that someone with better skills could expose their limitations or worse, replace them. To prevent this, they stack their teams with mediocrity. They choose loyalty over merit, passivity over potential, and convenience over challenge.

Over time, this breeds an entire ecosystem where average becomes the benchmark and excellence the outlier. The impact is profound organisations become echo chambers, where dissent is discouraged, and new ideas are seen as disruptive rather than transformative.

The fear behind the facade

At the core of this design is fear, primal and pervasive. Fear of being exposed, fear of being challenged, and fear of being outshined. Leaders who climb the ladder not through their delivery and competence but through personal loyalty, networking, social relationships, politics, or inherited privilege carry a deep insecurity of knowing they haven’t earned their place purely on merit. This internal fear manifests externally as a barrier to others’ progress.

Hiring becomes a tightly guarded gate. A truly talented candidate might be rejected not because they’re unsuitable, but because they’re ‘too good,’ ‘too bold,’ ‘radical’ or ‘not a culture fit’, phrases that, more often than not, are euphemisms for ‘a threat to the status quo’. The system builds immunity to merit. And slowly but surely, the very individuals who could drive transformation are kept out, not because they failed to qualify, but because they are qualified too well.

Region, language, and caste – the new hiring filters

In the Indian context, mediocrity is often further protected by identity-based filters, region, language, and caste. Offices in metro cities often function like regional islands. This has created mini regional groups within companies, where language, native place, caste or even surnames subtly dictate one’s growth or even survival. Caste too, though never officially acknowledged, seeps into many decisions. It does not need to be mentioned; it is understood. Leadership networks often function like social clubs, if you belong, you are in; if you don’t, even merit can’t get you through. In such an environment, diversity becomes a showpiece and inclusion a checkbox. Real talent, especially from other groups, remains locked out of meaningful leadership pipelines. I have personally seen many such enterprises, and even some large educational institutions where the senior leaders populate their own caste and creed. It subtly highlights an unwritten rule as a qualification into the core team.

This tribalism cloaked as ‘culture fit’ has a dangerously corrosive effect. It creates a cycle of exclusion and stagnation. Fresh and independent thinking is filtered out. The collective intellect of an organisation begins to shrink, while the illusion of harmony and unity grows stronger.

The economic cost of institutionalised mediocrity

Let’s move beyond emotion and look at the economics. Every time an average individual is hired in place of a meritorious one, the organisation pays a hidden tax. That tax shows up in:

l Lower innovation: Teams built on mediocrity don’t innovate; they replicate. They protect legacy processes and fear disruption.

l Higher attrition: Talented employees leave when they realise growth is impossible unless they compromise their values.

l Decreased productivity: Mediocre employees rely more on hierarchy than on performance to move up, slowing down the system.

l Brand damage: Investors and clients eventually recognise when a business is being driven by politics rather than performance.

Across sectors, startups, manufacturing, IT, retail, health, education the cost of this approach is mounting. India can’t afford this, not when the world is looking at us as the next frontier of growth.

Meritocracy vs. diversity – the false binary

Often, defenders of this system claim that prioritising diversity requires lowering the bar on merit. This is not just inaccurate, it’s dangerous. diversity and meritocracy are not opposites. Hiring competent professionals from all backgrounds, across gender, caste, region, and economic status, is not diluting merit. It is discovering it. Let’s be clear, mediocrity, whether it comes from privilege or tokenism, is the real enemy. Organisations must stop using any excuse as a smokescreen to justify unqualified and mediocre hires and instead build systems that make excellence the only constant across the board.

Founders and Boards must wake up

The responsibility for correcting this dangerous trend lies with those at the very top. Boards and founders must stop being passive observers of this culture and start becoming active architects of an empowered culture of recruiting, retaining and promoting merit and competence.

The performance of a CEO must not be measured only by quarterly earnings, but by the quality of leadership he or she builds.

When CEOs are allowed to create silos of mediocrity, it signals organisational decay. Board members must start asking:

What kind of people are being hired at the top and second-rung levels?

• Are these individuals empowering the system or strangling it?
• What is the attrition rate of high performers?
• Are internal promotions based on skill or submission?

Leadership without scrutiny breeds impunity. It’s time boards start holding top management accountable, not just for profits, but for the legacy they are leaving behind.

What needs to change now

If Indian organisations are serious about becoming globally competitive, they must install systemic mechanisms to restore meritocracy:

• Leadership audits: Evaluate not just what a leader delivers, but who they hire and promote.
• Talent retention KPIs: Incentivise CXOs to hire and retain top talent rather than just meeting revenue targets.
• Cultural reset: Embed intellectual diversity as a core value. Celebrate dissent, originality, and excellence.
• External oversight: Boards must constitute independent talent committees to monitor the merit pipeline.

The longer we wait, the more talent we lose. The next generation of innovators, builders, and changemakers will walk away, if not out of the country, certainly out of the system.

A wake-up call for the professional ecosystem

This is a call to action for founders, for boards, for hiring managers, and for professionals across India. We must restore the dignity of competence. We must reject systems built on exclusion, flattery, and mediocrity. We must say no to convenience and yes to challenge.

Meritocracy is not just about hiring smart people. It’s about creating cultures where intelligence, hard work, and integrity rise to the top. Where leaders are judged not by how many agree with them, but by how much competence is delivered under them. Where organisations don’t resemble gated communities, but dynamic ecosystems of brilliance and diversity. We owe this not just to our enterprises or careers, but to the nation itself.

The choice is clear

Mediocrity or meritocracy? This is not a rhetorical question. It is a fundamental choice every leader, every board, and every professional must make today.

The future of Indian enterprise depends on this answer. Our competitive edge depends on it. The aspirations of millions depend on it. And so does our collective self-respect.

Let us choose merit. Let us choose excellence. Let is rebuild our society to be competence centric. Let us build the kind of India where competence is not alienated or feared but celebrated.

(Author is the Chief Spokesperson of BJP, Chairman of Nation Building Foundation, and a Harvard Business School certified Strategist)