Below, Nir Halevy shares five key insights from his new book, Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them.
Nir is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he has studied social influence in groups, teams, and organizations for more than two decades.
What’s the Big Idea?
Hierarchy is everywhere, and it can either bring out the best or worst in us. We don’t need to eliminate hierarchy to fix it. By creating shared value, recognizing different paths to success, and strengthening human connections, we can build hierarchies that work for everyone, not just those at the top.
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1. A chance Lyft ride revealed what research alone could not.
This book began in the backseat of a Lyft. I asked my driver what else she does in life, and her answer surprised me. She is a ballet dancer who had some time before starting a new job. When her former artistic director learned of her intention to move to another ballet company, she was dismissed, so she was driving Lyft to support herself until moving to another part of the country to join a ballet company there.
I asked follow-up questions. She described the indignities of standing onstage for hours while more senior dancers went home to ice their feet. She talked about the artistic director, the ballet masters, the other dancers, and the social dynamics of galas and audience events. Her stories were vivid and precise in a way that decades of academic research had never quite captured.
That serendipitous conversation made me realize that the science of power, status, and influence—research that my colleagues and I had been conducting for years—needed to be told through the people actually living inside these systems. So I started scheduling interviews: with other ballet dancers, then actors in improv ensembles, athletes and coaches, leaders in tech, healthcare, government, and the military. Their stories brought the research to life in ways that data alone cannot.
2. The ubiquity, diversity, and stickiness of hierarchy.
Many of us picture hierarchy as military ranks or corporate org charts. But small startups distinguish between employees, executives, and founders. The Roman Catholic Church distinguishes between deacons and priests, bishops and archbishops, cardinals and patriarchs. Even Wikipedia’s community of volunteer contributors has a hierarchically structured governance system with roles that vary in access and privileges—file movers, reviewers, bureaucrats, and stewards.
Hierarchies are ubiquitous, diverse, and also extremely sticky. Three positive forces help well-functioning hierarchies reproduce themselves:
- They satisfy fundamental human needs for safety and predictability.
- They serve as incentive systems that motivate achievement.
- They promote collective success.
People embedded in these systems are often motivated to maintain them because they see real benefits—for themselves and for their group as a whole.
Unfortunately, hierarchies are often just as sticky when they are broken. Three negative forces that sustain broken hierarchies include:
- Exploitative ideologies that justify the status quo.
- Abuse of power by bad actors.
- The inertia baked into any established system.
Expressions like “snitches get stitches” capture the real-world calculus: speaking up against power can result in severe punishment. Strong conformity pressures and informal sanctions make challenging these systems genuinely risky, which is why broken hierarchies can persist long after everyone knows they’re broken.
3. How to diagnose a broken hierarchy.
Organizational hierarchies tend to break in predictable ways. The result is a recognizable syndrome with three interrelated symptoms: ultracompetitive, unjust, and unstable.
In an ultracompetitive hierarchy, employees feel punched from the sides by cutthroat peers competing ceaselessly for resources, recognition, and opportunities. Coworkers engage in endless social comparisons, feel trapped in incentive systems that pit them against each other, and experience chronic stress and threat. This can manifest as passive harm, such as in colleagues hoarding information and withholding help, as well as in active sabotage, like deliberately giving misleading advice.
“Organizational hierarchies tend to break in predictable ways.”
In an unjust hierarchy, employees experience various unfair outcomes. This can be things like being passed on for promotion that was deserved or being discriminated against in pay. This also includes unfair procedures, such as arbitrary decisions that bosses leave unexplained, rude treatment, harassment, or abusive supervision. If ultracompetitiveness feels like being punched from the sides by your peers, injustice feels like being punched from above.
In an unstable hierarchy, swift and unpredictable changes undermine psychological safety. Employees grow paranoid and worried. Power struggles and frequent leadership changes compound the problem, and talented people leave to escape what has become a draining, threatening environment.
4. How to fix a broken hierarchy.
You can help fix a broken hierarchy by helping it meet three standards. I call these the CPR principles:
- C: Common Value. A healthy hierarchy should reflect who we are, what we believe in, and who we wish to be. It should benefit the collective as a whole.
- P: Pluralism. A well-functioning hierarchy should enable multiple pathways to contributing, thriving, ascending, and leading.
- R: Relatedness. A hierarchy should bring people closer together rather than pull them apart.
There are many concrete solutions that meet one, two, or all three standards and can help you fix a broken hierarchy starting tomorrow. Some fixes are structural. For example, if you can change evaluation systems and incentive structures, you can make the hierarchy more pluralistic by recognizing and rewarding many different kinds of contributions, rather than crowning a single winner.
Other solutions are behavioral. For example, expressing prosocial emotions such as empathy, gratitude, and kindness, or using appropriate humor, can increase connections between people and help your team retain talented members who wish to work in a supportive, psychologically safe environment.
5. A single leadership act can embody everything.
In December 2023, David Hallberg—the artistic director of the Australian Ballet and a former principal dancer with American Ballet Theater and the Bolshoi Ballet—walked onstage at the Sydney Opera House after a performance of Swan Lake. Before an audience of 1,400 people, he announced the promotions of two dancers: Marcus Morelli and Jill Ogai.
He could have called them to his office. He could have sent an email over the summer break. Instead, he did something worth studying.
“The whole ceremony brought the company and its patrons together in a shared moment of joy.”
Hallberg explained publicly and compellingly why each dancer deserved the promotion, repeating the phrase “very hard to ignore” three times—framing recognition as natural, even inevitable, given their demonstrated brilliance. He waited at the side of the stage, not the center, giving the promoted dancers the spotlight while he played a supporting role. And he used the phrase “recognition can happen in many ways,” signaling pluralism; there was no single narrow path to principal artist. The whole ceremony brought the company and its patrons together in a shared moment of joy. Tears, roses, applause, and hugs from colleagues onstage.
This festive promotion ceremony exemplifies what CPR looks like in practice:
- Common value: the promotions were grounded in publicly stated meritocratic standards—talent, maturity, hard work—that the entire ballet community could recognize and affirm.
- Pluralism: two dancers were promoted simultaneously, demonstrating that advancement isn’t zero-sum, and that leadership can be shared.
- Relatedness: a moment that could have been a private administrative transaction became a communal celebration that strengthened ties across the entire organization.
A single leadership act, thoughtfully designed, communicated all three principles at once. That’s the promise of the CPR framework, and it’s available to any leader willing to think carefully about how hierarchy can serve the people inside it.
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