Kicked Upstairs / Real Life

Business

The business world is probably the Trope Maker, but there are many reasons for kicking someone upstairs:

• Certain strands of Middle management exists mainly for this reason (the most common one being those responsible for monitoring the trending of company and industry statistics rather than people). Anyone who works at a company for a certain amount of time expects to be rewarded in some way, but many of these people haven't actually done anything to earn that reward. But the company still needs to keep them happy, so they "promote" them to a position that basically exists for this purpose. One old British management book explicitly recommends this as a way of keeping them out of positions of real power.
• In many places, it's difficult to actually fire someone for being incompetent — you can do it, but it requires a lot of paperwork and likely severance pay as well. Companies who don't want to deal with that will shuttle off incompetent workers to a position where they have no responsibility. To get fired, you would actually have to do something wrong, like downloading porn on a work computer or something.
• The tech industry sees this a lot, as products change so quickly that the innovator who kicked off the trend is not always the guy whom everyone wants to man the helms today. But since this innovator was once incredibly valuable to the company, it's hard to get rid of him:
  • Steve Jobs was technically given this treatment shortly before he left Apple to form NeXT. Despite still remaining chairman of Apple, he was stripped off all decision-making powers and his office was moved to an almost empty building. Ironically, he managed to defy this, as a little over a decade later, Apple, desperate for a replacement for their aging classic Mac OS, purchased NeXT in order to use their operating system as a basis for a new Mac OS, bringing Jobs back into the company, of which he became CEO in short order.
  • Jonathan "Jony" Ive is an industrial designer who first joined Apple in 1992, and would rise to prominence after he created the distinctive design of the original iMac in 1998. He would continue to have an influential role in numerous subsequent Apple products, including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. As a result of this, his influence in the company steadily grew until he was promoted to "chief design officer" in 2015; however, it soon became apparent that Ive now had too much influence, as Apple's products began to exhibit many questionable design decisions that decidedly put form over function. These were best exemplified by the 2016 MacBook which offered no ports besides USB-C, requiring awkward adapters and dongles to connect anything with a different port, and featured the infamous butterfly keyboard, which was supposed to help make the laptops as thin as possible, but proved to be unpopular due to being both unreliable and uncomfortable to type on. Other Apple executives seemed to realize that Ive's new position simply wasn't working out, and he parted with the company in 2019 to form his own independent design consulting firm, which would include Apple as a client. Since he left, Apple has, in a rare move for them, reversed some of Ive's most controversial contributions, such as the butterfly keyboard, TouchBar and all-USB-C MacBooks. In 2022, reports emerged that the contract between Apple and Ive's design firm had expired and would not be renewed, formally ending his involvement with Apple products.
• In Video Games:
  • Ken Kutaragi is the co-founder of Sony Interactive Entertainment, as well as the father of the highly successful PlayStation and its iterations. But when the PlayStation 3 failed to meet expectations (especially after overspending on R&D leading to up to a $300 loss per unit), Sony "promoted" him to a software position. This led to his resignation a few months later.
  • Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Game Boy, was often believed to have been kicked upstairs at Nintendo after the mismanagement of the Virtual Boy. However, he actually more or less did this to himself; he had planned to retire from Nintendo after the Virtual Boy was released, but he believed that doing so after the system's failure would provide a symbol of its failure, so he stayed on to make the Game Boy Pocket.
  • Hideo Baba, producer of Tales of Zestiria, saw such a backlash for it (which he totally refused to address in public) that he was promoted to a new role that did essentially nothing. He quit Bandai Namco Entertainment six months later and joined Square Enix.
  • Yu Suzuki, after the failure of Shenmue II, was given this treatment. He was "transferred" into a new R&D department and told to make a new arcade game. He made something called Sci-Fi, which failed location tests. Sega, feeling more frustrated and pressured than ever, then restructured the entire R&D department and explicitly ordered him to make a racing game (which to be fair, was what got him into the spotlight in the first place). That became the ridiculously campy Sega Race TV, which passed location tests but sold poorly compared to Sega's Cash-Cow Franchise racer series at the time, Initial D Arcade Stage. In the end, Suzuki resigned and started a little known company called Ys Net. He stayed low for a decade before coming out to crowd-fund for the next installment of the Shenmue series.
  • Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, was given this treatment at Sega, having been promoted to a managerial position that he absolutely hated. This, combined with burnout from the Sonic series, is what led to his departure from Sega in 2006, the formation of his own development house Prope, and his job at Square Enix, which ended up crashing and burning after the failure of Balan Wonderworld, leading him to leave that company as well. Naka also claims that the failure of Balan has made him take a step back to reevaluate himself and pick up programming again, and he has since released a game, Shot 2048, as an indie developer. However, his conviction of and imprisonment for insider trading in 2022/2023 might put a damper on said indie dev plans.
  • Like a Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi became the latest casualty of Sega's habit of kicking people it deems past their prime upstairs. Nagoshi was "promoted" to the position of "Creative Director" after the completion of Lost Judgment in April 2021, and has chosen to leave Sega for Chinese firm NetEase due to the fact.
• Gary Gygax was the victim of this thanks to a vicious power struggle between him and Brian Blume. He was sent to Los Angeles and set up in a Beverly Hills mansion to negotiate TV and movie deals (the sole fruit of which was the Dungeons & Dragons (1983) Saturday morning cartoon), while Blume consolidated his power in Lake Geneva. After a few years, Gygax reemerged from Los Angeles, kicked Blume out, and brought on Lorraine Williams to help salvage TSR from Blume's mismanagement — which didn't go as hoped.
• Performing this move on one of their staff actually earned Benesse Corp, an educational services company in Japan, a Black Companies Award in 2013^note The Black Companies Awards are given out to companies who regularly violate human rights in Japan. It's the Transatlantic Equivalent of the Worst Company in America Award. According to the Black Companies Awards blog site, in 2009, an employee of the company was kicked upstairs for undisclosed reasons- she was transferred to a "new department" of which she's the sole employee, not given business cards, instructed to not answer the phone, and barred from accessing the company intranet. She was then given menial chores and asked to search around for a department that would accept her. This spectacularly backfired as she took them to court, who, after a lengthy trial that ended in 2012, deemed the company's move illegal as it was designed to pressure her to resign. original blog post (Japanese), Google translated.

Politics

• Within the American Political System:
  • The office of Vice President of the United States, for the longest time, was viewed as being an utterly pointless position, since it only serves two roles: casting any tie breaking votes in the Senate, and giving America a quick replacement in the event the actual President dies in office — Vice President John Nance Garner once famously called the office "not worth a bucket of warm piss". Vice Presidents were traditionally chosen as a way of covering the perceived weaknesses of the presidential candidate, thus bolstering the ticket and giving everyone someone they could agree with, but it was also convenient to "promote" someone to Vice President to keep them from causing problems in a position of actual power. The problems start when the president dies or resigns:
    • John Tyler was chosen as the running mate of Whig Party candidate William Henry Harrison in 1840, despite having once been a Democrat and having left the party but retained its ideology. Harrison died thirty days after his inauguration in 1841. The Whig-controlled Congress was most dismayed.
    • Millard Fillmore became President in the same way as Tyler, but under complete opposite ideological implications; he was a staunch Whig but chosen to balance the non-ideological war hero Zachary Taylor. Because of this, the Whigs in Congress preferred the more level-headed Fillmore to Taylor, whom it was feared could drive states into secession with his aggressive anti-slavery policies. History wound up siding with Taylor on this one, though, with Fillmore's approach (culminating in the Compromise of 1850) seen as well-meaning but misguided.
    • Andrew Johnson was a leader among pro-Union Southern politicians during the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln picked him as his running mate in 1864 to reward his loyalty. In 1865, John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln in the last days of the war, leaving Johnson responsible for the impending Reconstruction. Johnson was seen as too lenient to the former secessionists, who were still fighting tooth and nail against the empowerment of the newly freed black slaves.
    • Theodore Roosevelt was chosen as William McKinley's running mate in 1900 mostly to get rid of him. He was quite popular due to his war hero status and oratory skills, but his actual policies as Governor of New York were disliked by the conservatives who ran the Republican Party, and they hoped that he could be stripped of power as Vice President while still utilizing his popularity. Republican National Committee Chairman Mark Hanna was against the nomination, though, warning that there would be "only one life between that madman and the presidency", and when McKinley was assassinated, Hanna proved prescient:
      Hanna: Now look! That damned cowboy is President of the United States!
    • Harry Truman is a downplayed case, and his Presidency in fact led to the amendment of the Constitution to codify the presidential succession — and also to popular awareness of the dangers of kicking someone "upstairs" to be Vice President. Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate in 1944, but he accepted the nomination reluctantly, and the Democratic National Convention was well aware of Roosevelt's failing health and expecting that Truman would be President at some point. However, by early 1945, FDR decided he was feeling well enough to see World War II to its conclusion, and by the time he died later that year, nobody had gotten around to telling Truman about the American nuclear weapons program.
    • Sarah Palin never got to be Vice President, and what by now became a popular awareness of this trope was a big reason why. John McCain had nominated her as a way to broaden his base with more right-wing Republicans, but Palin's stunning lack of competence — with the extent of her foreign policy experience being memetically expressed on Saturday Night Live as "I can see Russia from my house!" — turned many people off from voting for McCain even though they preferred his policy, realizing that if anything happened to McCain (who was not in the best of health^note For what it's worth, he survived Barack Obama's two-term presidency, but given the stress of the office, it's not certain that the same would have happened had he actually been President), she would be President. A 2010 Stanford paper estimates that Palin cost McCain about 2 million votes.^note This is a staggering number for a vice presidential candidate — even in spite of this trope, political scientists aren't big on the idea that the VP pick can affect the ticket that much. The only other VP candidate who affected that many votes in either direction was Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, the first woman to run as VP, which got Walter Mondale a lot of credibility among female voters (but still wasn't enough to beat the hugely popular Ronald Reagan).
    • Mike Pence was picked as the VP in 2016 partly to assuage Evangelical Republicans' fears that Donald Trump would ignore them, and partly because he had overseen a series of catastrophes as Governor of Indiana of his own making (including an HIV outbreak and a "religious liberty" bill that cost the state a ton of money) and the party was worried he would lose what should have been a slam-dunk race in a red state for the GOP if he ran for re-election that year since governorships elections aren’t as partisan as most others.
    • Kamala Harris, who attempted to run her own campaign in 2020, was picked as Joe Biden's running mate in part to appeal to more progressive voters. She is expected to run with him again for re-election despite skepticism (mainly from the conservative right) over the potential chances of her prematurely becoming President^note Biden, who is 81 at the time of writing, would be 86 at the end of a second term.
  • But other positions relating to the Presidency, including the President himself, have been subject to this line of thought:
    • James Buchanan is widely thought of as one of the worst Presidents in American history, and the first to be called a kakistocrat (and rightly so). He was only elected because he was an unknown who had no position on the then-hot debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act^note i.e. whether those new states would be allowed to have slaves. But the reason for his lack of position stemmed from the fact that he was ambassador to Britain at the time — and he'd only been sent there because he was so incompetent that he had to be pushed out of the way. Andrew Jackson made him a minister in Russia because "[i]t was as far as I could send him out of my sight, and where he could do the least harm. I would have sent him to the North Pole if we had kept a minister there."^note At the time, no human being had ever been to the North Pole. Unfortunately, this provided Buchanan with perceived "experience" which led to his election. Historians believe that secession of the Southern states might have been crushed in 1860 but for Buchanan's dithering — by the time Lincoln was elected, it was too late.
    • In 1996, Bill Clinton's staff was uncomfortable with all the time Clinton was spending with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton had already been dogged by a few sex scandals, and not wanting the appearance of another one, they shipped Lewinsky to a useless "assistant" position at The Pentagon. It backfired spectacularly, as that's how everyone found out about Clinton's affair with her, and Clinton lying about it led directly to his impeachment.
    • Some theorize that this is what was done to Jon Huntsman when Barack Obama selected him to be ambassador to China in 2009, fearing that he would be the strongest challenger to the Presidency in the 2012 election. Huntsman ended up running anyway and finished a distant fifth in the Republican primary. Incidentally, he also did a pretty decent job as Ambassador to China.
  • In July 2016, a Wikileaks disclosure of emails from the Democratic National Committee revealed that chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz was incredibly frustrated with the incompetence of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. This led to a perception that she was trying to actively undermine Sanders, and subsequently to her stepping down from the DNC to become "honorary co-chair" of Clinton's campaign.
• Within the British Political System:
  • The position of Lord President (or, in full, Lord President of the Privy Council) is often seen as such a position. Its powers are entirely dependent on what the Prime Minister feels like, and these days, the position is often filled by a senior party member whom the PM wants to keep but doesn't trust with real power for whatever reason, either because he can't handle it or because no one else likes him.^note Ironically, the position was originally hugely important — even more so than the Prime Minister. The role was created by Henry VIII for his friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the idea being that if the King was too unwell to govern (or couldn't be bothered), Brandon would have virtually the same power and authority as the King. Meanwhile, the position of PM didn't formally exist until Henry Campbell-Bannerman — though it had been a de facto office since Robert Walpole — and most of the position's modern-day importance only comes from its merger with the office of First Lord of the Treasury. British politics is weird. A few notable examples:
    • Neville Chamberlain was handed the position by his successor Winston Churchill upon the start of World War II. The nomination is often seen this way, given that Chamberlain was mostly famous for attempting to appease Hitler, but Churchill did also establish the Lord President's Committee, which was headed by the Lord President and basically ran the British economy for the duration of the war. Chamberlain, for his part, was ill with terminal cancer and lasted only six months; oddly, political wrangling meant that Clement Attlee held the position for most of the war.
    • Nick Clegg served as Lord President from 2010 to 2015, at the same time he was Deputy Prime Minister and his party was instrumental to the coalition government of David Cameron, so he was pretty important and powerful. However, the position of "Deputy Prime Minister" technically doesn't exist (it's complicated), so (in a case of classically British constitutional engineering) he had to be kicked upstairs to give him a position commensurate with the power he actually had (and also to ensure a place in the order of precedence). This turned into a problem when the coalition started to fall apart (leading to suspicion that Cameron was just trying to avoid falling victim to a Klingon Promotion), and when it finally disbanded in 2015 and Clegg resigned from both offices, the position of Deputy Prime Minister was reduced to such a sinecure that it was eventually retired.
  • The "office of profit under the Crown" is a sinecure created for the purpose of allowing an MP to resign, because it is technically impossible for an MP to do so. Such positions usually have a Large Ham Title along the lines of "Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham" and no real responsibilities. But they do come with a nominal income, because the whole point of getting an "office of profit under the Crown" is that this creates a conflict of interest that automatically disqualifies the officeholder from being an MP. The position is held until some other MP wants to resign (which could be mere minutes later). This legal fiction is so entrenched that Gerry Adams, a Sinn Fein politician who didn't want to be an officer of the British Crown, tried to resign without applying for such a job, only for one to be given to him anyway (along with an apology and a pittance check).
  • The House of Lords has been seen for the last few decades as clearly subordinate to the House of Commons and no place for an aspiring politician. However, some such aspiring politicians were the children of members of the House of Lords, and since a seat in the Lords came with a hereditary peerage, when a member died, his seat would be inherited by his children along with his title — effectively barring said children from seeking a real political career in the Commons and kicking them upstairs regardless of their competence. The most famous such case was Tony Benn, whose father was a government minister who was created Viscount of Stansgate in recognition of his service during World War II; when his father died, Benn was stripped of his position as an MP because he inherited his father's peerage. Benn's political advocacy led to the Peerage Act of 1963, allowing Benn and similarly situated people to disclaim their positions as lords and stand for the Commons instead (and the whole automatic process of inheritance was ended by the Lords Reform of 1999).
  • King Edward VIII, after his abdication, was styled Duke of Windsor but still mistrusted and suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer — in particular, he was accused of leaking Allied war plans and had German guards appointed to his home in France during the occupation. Winston Churchill, seeking to get Edward out of Europe to a place where he couldn't help the Nazis, made him Governor of the Bahamas (which, considering that he was already a duke, could more accurately be considered "kicked sideways"). Churchill could only get Edward to go to the Bahamas under threat of court-martial, as the Duke was a gazetted major-general.
• The European Union's myriad semi-governmental structures are seen throughout Europe as a way of doing this to old, annoying, or incompetent politicans, often with the added benefit of removing them from the country entirely. There's a German saying, "Hast du einen Opa, schick ihn nach Europa!" ("Have a grandpa? Send him to Europe!"), and several media outlets have cited the Borgen example, and particularly that episode's title: "In Brussels, No One Can Hear You Scream".
• Josef Stalin worked his way into power this way; Lenin didn't like him but couldn't get rid of him, so he made him General Secretary of the Communist Party and banished many of Stalin's supporters to diplomatic posts elsewhere. However, this backfired on Lenin in a big way; what the post lacked in nominal power, it made up for in practical power. Stalin quickly realized that he had the power to reward supporters by giving them key government positions, and he also maintained the Party's membership records — i.e. kept tabs on everyone. By the time everyone realized what was happening, Lenin had died and it was too late to stop Stalin. Thanks to Stalin, even after his death it was the General Secretary who was the real leader of the USSR, not the Premier (who may have been, but usually wasn't, the same person). Stalin would ironically end up doing this to people he wanted to get rid of (when he wasn't liquidating them outright) — NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, when seen as a threat to Stalin's power, was punted off to run river transportation, while his first deputy, Frinovsky, was put in charge of the Navy.
• Examples from Nazi Germany:
  • Adolf Hitler, once he became leader of the German Workers' Party, "promoted" the party's founder and longtime leader Anton Drexler to "Honorary President". It was obvious who held the real power.
  • Hitler had this happen to himself after the 1932 election. He lost, but he and the Nazi party put up such a fight (and everyone was so scared of the Communists) that President Hindenburg named Hitler his Chancellor, hoping that he could pacify the far-right but not giving Hitler any responsibility.^note He also tried to manage Hitler by appointing moderate centrist Franz von Papen to be Vice-Chancellor. This wasn't good for anybody, as not only was von Papen largely ineffective at corralling Hitler, he wound up being among those tried at Nuremberg after the war (although he was acquitted). Hitler even toyed with assassinating him in a False Flag Operation to provide justification for the annexation of Austria. But Hitler was a shrewd manipulator who found that he had enough power as Chancellor to still put the screws on the Communists like everyone wanted, and the Reichstag fire gave him the green light to do that (although he may have set that up himself). The Enabling Act of 1933 began the first steps of turning Germany into a police state, though Hindenburg still had a check against Hitler as the President was commander-in-chief of the military. Then Hindenburg died, and Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor, which would give all the real power to him. That's how he became the dictator.
  • Hermann Göring was effectively kicked upstairs and sideways. For years, he had been Hitler's second-in-command, accumulating such titles as President of the Reichstag, Minister President of Prussia, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, and Minister for Economics, Aviation, and Forestries. He also founded the Gestapo, which was transferred to the SS. In 1940, after the fall of France, he was promoted to Reichsmarschall, firmly establishing him as the second-in-command, and a secret decree a year later formally named him as Hitler's successor. However, after failing to establish air supremacy over Britain, he started to fall out of favor with Hitler. After failing to resupply the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, Göring was effectively removed from command positions and spent the remainder of the war living like a Roman emperor in his many palaces. During the final days of the war, he tried to invoke the decree to become leader of Nazi Germany, but Hitler responded by stripping him of all his offices.
• In most republics that use the parliamentary system, the president is the head of state but has no real power (as with a ceremonial monarchy). It is therefore a useful place for kicking people upstairs:
  • Eamon de Valera, the principal author of the Irish Constitution, used to claim he had specifically designed the Presidency to be "a nice easy job for my old age". Sure enough, after serving as the President of the Executive Council and Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland for most of the years from 1932 to 1959, he became the President of Ireland at the age of 77.
  • The Economist described the election of Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee as the ceremonial president of India as being a thinly veiled ploy to get rid of him.
  • The office of President of Israel has often provided a place for men kicked upstairs; from Chaim Weizmann (whom David Ben-Gurion loathed but was too respected not to honor somehow) all the way up to most recently Reuben Rivlin (Benjamin Netanyahu wanted him out of the way; he was becoming too powerful in the Likud party).
• Idi Amin was promoted to the rank of Army Commander of Uganda by then-president Milton Obote, who believed this would make Amin easier to control. It backfired very, very badly.
• Francisco Franco promoted Juan Yagüe, one of his best army commanders, to the position of Air Force Minister so he wouldn't threaten him in the future.
• Francisco Vazquez, the former mayor of the Spanish city of La Coruña, was a prominent socialist. The government, realizing that he was a harder-core Catholic than a socialist, promoted him to be Ambassador to the Holy See, so that he could embarrass the socialist Prime Minister with incessant calls to criminalize abortion.
• The Roman Empire was a nepotist bureaucratic nightmare, which inspired the Latin maxim for this sort of manoeuvre, Promoveatur et amoveatur — "Let him be promoted to get him out of the way." It apparently happened quite often.
• In post-1952 Egypt, the position of Vice President was used to reward military officers who were loyal to the regime but seen as harmless schmucks not really in contention for power. This backfired twice: once when Gamal Abdel Nasser's VP Anwar Sadat proved to be a devious Magnificent Bastard who quickly eliminated his competition after Nasser's death, and then when Sadat's VP Hosni Mubarak turned out to be a boring, heavy-handed, and not particularly intelligent leader. President Muhammad Morsi did this to the military more directly in 2012 by stripping several top generals of their power but also giving them a bunch of medals and big fat pensions — they promptly folded under pressure, but after large anti-Morsi protests in 2013, their replacements didn't.
• In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi was prevented by law from ever becoming President and instead made the "State Counselor", a position that is theoretically akin to Prime Minister and makes her de facto head of the government, but which has no real power.
• This was a key part of Louis XIV's methods for gaining power. He'd invite nobles over to his home (and they can't turn down an invitation from the king), and then after they knew the lay of the land, he'd assign them a job working in the palace. Because they were now far away from home, they couldn't really run their lands, so Louis could do whatever he wanted there, while the nobles enjoyed their palatial lifestyle and cushy job.

Military

The military has a particularly easy way of doing this, as it can "promote" incompetent people away from the front lines and into a cushy desk job somewhere with only administrative responsibilities.

• In naval jargon, this is known as "yellowing". The term derives from the practice of the Royal Navy, where until 1864, captains were promoted to flag rank by strict seniority. This meant that if they had a competent captain whom they wanted to promote to rear-admiral, they couldn't do it until they had promoted everyone else ahead of him on the list. They solved this problem by promoting those other captains but not giving them any command (known as leaving them "on the beach"). If you did have a command, it was organised (again by seniority) into "red", "white", and "blue" squadrons, so rear-admirals without a command were said to have a "yellow squadron" (like the yellow sand on the beach).
• Colonel Leonard Wood name-dropped the trope in 1898, during preparations for the Spanish-American War. Wood was the leader of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry regiment (a.k.a. the Rough Riders), only to realize that his second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, was a lot more popular than he was. He wrote, "I realized that if this campaign lasted for any considerable length of time, I would be kicked upstairs to make room for Roosevelt." He turned out to be wrong — he was instead promoted to commander of the Fifth Army Corps' 2nd Brigade Cavalry Division, whose previous commander had fallen ill, and he got to lead the Brigade for the rest of the war, including during their famous victory at Kettle Hill and San Juan Heights (and got a rather large fort named after him to boot!).
• During World War II, Allied commanders who lost battles were often promoted to a different front to get them out of the way:
  • Archibald Wavell had this happen twice, first in North Africa and then in Southeast Asia; he actually was competent, but Churchill disliked him and had a knack for putting him into hopeless situations. He ended his career as Viceroy of India just as it was about to split.
  • Gordon Bennett of the Australian 8th Division was given command of Australia proper in response to his escaping from Japanese-occupied Singapore and leaving the rest of his command to the tender mercies of the Japanese.
  • Herbert Sobel, as immortalized in Band of Brothers, exemplified the trope; he was an absolutely ruthless training officer, and everyone he commanded hated him but respected him and credited his tactics with making them better. But he was such a failure at actually leading the unit that shortly before the Normandy invasion, he was promoted to Captain and shunted off to train new recruits. He never got the chance to serve on the front lines and attain glory on the battlefield like he so desperately wanted — he ended the war as a supply office, and he was kept stateside during The Korean War despite being recalled to active duty.
  • Lloyd Fredendall was commander of the II Corps at the Battle of Kasserine Pass in 1943 but after the American defeat, he was reassigned to stateside training assignments.
• William Westmoreland commanded American troops in The Vietnam War between 1964 and 1968, earning widespread criticism for treating the war as a conventional conflict while downplaying its guerrilla aspect. After being relieved of his command, he became the U.S. Army Chief of Staff.
• During World War I, General Joseph Joffre was Commander-in-Chief of the French army for the first three years of the war, but after appalling casualties in offensive campaigns like Verdun, which failed to reverse the stalemate, he was "promoted" in December 1916 to the rank of Marshal of France, a title first created by Napoleon and which had not been in use since 1870, allowing him to be replaced as Commander-in-Chief by his subordinate Robert Nivelle. Joffre was enticed to take this promotion with a promised advisory position to the French Minister of War, but this never materialized.

Media

Sometimes, you have to keep someone on board the production of a creative work, even if they've run out of ideas or are otherwise endangering the production.

• Star Trek had this happen twice with series creator Gene Roddenberry. The first time, in response to the poor reception of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (of which he was producer and co-writer), he was promoted to "Executive Consultant"; the studio wanted nothing to do with Roddenberry, but they couldn't fire him because his contract prevented it (and because the Fanboys would scream bloody murder). Roddenberry was allowed to make as many notes and suggestions as he liked; his replacement Harve Bennett could ignore them as much as he liked. The exact same thing happened on the production of The Next Generation, with Roddenberry being responsible for many of the shaky creative decisions of the first and second seasons; his level of influence over the show was tactfully but firmly reduced over time, and this was a big factor in the show Growing the Beard during the third season.
• During the production of A Passage to India, David Lean became so unhappy with cinematographer Ernest Day's work that he "promoted" Day to being the film's second unit director and sent him off to film shots of the Indian landscape (most of which didn't even make it into the finished film), while another cinematographer was called in to finish the film.
• Comics artist and writer Evan Dorkin drew a strip about his experience in Hollywood: he kept getting attached to projects that never got off the drawing board, but this gave him such a big "track record" that he became "too expensive to hire" and had to return to comics work. (It's probably humorous exaggeration on his part.)
• Following the controversial decision by NBC to remove Ann Curry as co-host of Today, the network invoked the trope by naming her "National and International Correspondent" for NBC News, only for the Peacock to bar her from doing live appearances, meaning she could only appear in pre-recorded segments.
• This is reported to have happened to Toei Animation producer Hiroaki Shibata. Having produced two seasons of the company's very lucrative Pretty Cure franchise, he was apparently moved to Toei's Tokusatsu division during the airing of Go! Princess Pretty Cure. This was rumored to be because of poor reception of the seasons he did produce, in particular throwing Ass Pulls at the audience when Toei was hoping to take it easy and pull the franchise out of its Audience-Alienating Era — they couldn't fire him, but they weren't going to be patient with him.
• Former Marvel Comics VP Bill Jemas was sent off to spearhead the failed revival of Marvel's Epic line after managing to alienate much of the company's creative staff with his erratic behavior and micromanaging tendencies.
• Scott Gimple, who took the reigns of showrunner on The Walking Dead for its fourth season, had this happen to him after Season 8. His tenure started out well, picking up particular acclaim for his Bottle Episodes because they provided interesting Character Development. But he fell victim to Too Bleak, Stopped Caring and Arc Fatigue (especially given that with all the Bottle Episodes, it was hard to actually advance the plot). He also took a lot of heat for a poorly received Cliffhanger at the end of Season 6, when the ratings started dropping and never recovered, and for killing off a major character in Season 8 who survived in the source material (which came as a shock to the actor who played him). AMC kicked Gimple upstairs to a position overseeing the entire franchise, which removed his power to make plot decisions on the TV series. It was briefly subverted when that put him in charge of the Spin-Off Fear the Walking Dead, but Seasonal Rot in that series led to the same result.
• Arrow is generally considered to have suffered continuous Seasonal Rot ever since Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle took over as showrunners at the start of Season 3 (barring a brief return to form in Season 5). However, due to Guggenheim's friendship with Greg Berlanti, the two managed to keep their jobs despite growing discontent from the fans and falling ratings. What finally got them kicked off the show was Season 6, which was regarded as the worst season of the show since Season 4 (a season so terrible that even lead Stephen Amell professed to hating it) and saw the ratings dip below one million for the first time since Season 1. While Mericle left the franchise entirely, Guggenheim was promoted to the role of "executive consultant", and they were replaced by the much more liked Beth Schwartz for the last two seasons.

Sports

This commonly happens in sports. Sometimes, a coach or manager is popular with the fans (often for being long-serving, and sometimes for being a successful player in his own right with the same team back in the day), so he can't be easily removed. Other times, management has found someone better but doesn't want to unceremoniously fire him. And still other times, his contract prevents him from being fired, but not from being given a different position; this is particularly common in Association Football.

• Former basketball player Isiah Thomas was so incompetent in charge of the New York Knicks — but so impervious to removal — that he had to be given a "managerial" job which explicitly prevented him from even contacting the players.
• In Ice Hockey, the Chicago Blackhawks did this to general manager Dale Tallon during the 2009 offseason. After some poor salary cap management and a paperwork snafu, he was made "senior advisor" and replaced as general manager by Stan Bowman. That season, Tallon left to become general manager of the Florida Panthers. (The fact that Chicago won The Stanley Cup in 2010 leads to debates as to which GM deserves credit for building that team.)
  
  Tallon would later go through a subversion with the Panthers, being promoted out of the GM position in 2016 due to a combination of factors, including an ownership group that wanted to put greater emphasis on speed and analytics over the more physically imposing team structure that he had built, as well as a playoff appearance that fell short of internal expectations^note they failed to advance past the first round in a controversial series that included multiple missed obstruction penalties with the team possessing the puck in the New York Islanders' zone late in regulation of game six, while the opposing goalie was sitting on the bench and the Panthers were leading the game 1-0 but trailing the series 3-2; the Islanders eventually scored to tie the game, then won the series in double overtime despite the fact that just making it there has been a rare feat for the team in its history.^note after three appearances between 1996 and 2000, the Panthers wouldn't qualify again until 2012, and after that wouldn't make it again until the 2016 squad with Tallon's fingerprints all over it He was then "demoted" back to the GM position after his replacement, former Assistant GM/Analytics Tom Rowe, made such a mess of the roster that they immediately nosedived back to the bottom of the league. (Rowe himself was moved laterally into an advisory post under Tallon.) Tallon would continue to hold the GM position until 2020, when he was simply fired outright from the Panthers organization.
• Gerard Houllier, manager of the French national football team, had this happen to him in 1993 after a disastrous attempt at qualifying for the 1994 World Cup. He was put in charge of "football development", supposedly out of sympathy, with the French Football Federation feeling that he was so catastrophically unpopular that no club would ever employ him again. Ironically, he did well in his new role and was widely credited for playing an important role in France winning the World Cup in 1998; he went on to be a successful manager again for Liverpool and Lyon.
• The NFL provides an inter-coaching example; the Washington Redskins wanted to oust head coach Jim Zorn, but not wanting to fire him, they kept him as head coach but convinced former coach Sherm Lewis to come out of retirement (he was literally calling bingo for senior citizens) and gave him all play-calling duties. This didn't help; the Redskins were still not a good football team, and Zorn, Lewis, and the rest of the coaching staff were all eventually fired. Oddly, the term "Zorning" for this phenomenon is now used in the Washington, D.C. intelligence community.
• Also in the NFL, Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman had this happen to him in early 2015; he was given the title "Executive Vice President of Football Operations", because head coach Chip Kelly demanded the power to assemble his own roster and convinced team owner Jeffrey Lurie to oblige him. The team failed to perform anywhere close to expectations that season, and the players grew increasingly frustrated with Kelly and his methods. In late December, Kelly was fired, and Roseman was given his old job back but kept his "football operations" title. Roseman, for his part, views his year without power as a blessing in disguise, as he used what he learned to help the Eagles to greater success in subsequent seasons, culminating in their first Super Bowl in 2018.
• Professional Wrestling:
  • Ole Anderson promoted the idea of Ric Flair winning the NWA World Heavyweight Title as a way to get rid of him — he hoped that the travel demands of a world champion would keep Flair out of the Carolinas.
  • Former WWE and ECW commentator Joey Styles was promoted to head of WWE.com because CEO Vince McMahon felt that his commentary didn't match WWE's style of wrestling, but knew that he was way too popular with the fans to fire. For his part, Joey seems to be fine with the move, and even mentioned on his blog that he is far more comfortable with his new position and wishes that his commentary career died with the original ECW.
  • Vince McMahon himself ended up in this position following his shenanigans between 2022-2023 where — after being caught in scandals regarding sexual misconduct, hush money, and potential financial fraud — he stepped down as chairman and CEO of WWE before retiring outright... for about half a year before he forced himself back into the board of directors during negotiations of a potential sale of the WWE (whose broadcasting deals were set to expire in 2024), using his place as majority shareholder to reclaim his position of executive chairman (and conveniently, his creative control, which was previously headed by his son-in-law, Triple H), declaring that no deals can be completed without his approved. However, when a deal was finalized between WWE and Endeavor (parent company of the UFC), he was promptly iced from nearly all of his previous power — he received lifetime tenure of his chairman status, but he was bumped down to a minority share of his company (marking the first time the WWE was primarily owned by someone other than a McMahon), massively clipped of his corporate leverage, and was unilaterally removed from the WWE creative team by Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel, returning full creative control to Triple H, moves that were all-but-directly stated by Emanuel and SEC filings to be because McMahon and his scandals were massive risks that needed to be out of the way. McMahon would end up leaving the company again in early January after he was hit with another massive lawsuit alleging him of even more sexual misconduct, and given his lack of corporate leverage this time, it's likely this will remain permanent.
  • Jesse Sorenson from TNA Wrestling was given a job as a production assistant after a major injury prevented him from wrestling. When he was ready to return to wrestling, he got himself fired.

Other

• Roman Catholic Church
  • After the fallout of the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, Cardinal Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston, was "promoted" from his prior office to the Roman Curia in Vatican City, where he served on several committees and held a few offices with no real authority.
  • After the election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke was removed from his posting as the Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura (aka the Vatican Supreme Court) along with the group that recommended priests for promotion to Bishop to the Pope. Burke was reassigned to be the head of Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta - a largely ceremonial post. While he eventually was appointed back to the Apostolic Signatura, it was as a member of the court and not its leader.
  • Within the Catholic Church the office of Coadjutor Bishop or Archbishop is appointed to serve alongside the current Bishop or Archbishop of the Diocese and receive on the job training before the current office holder leaves, at which point the Coadjutor automatically suceeds to the office. At times in the past the Church has used the process to ease a Bishop accused of misconduct out of office by appointing a coadjutor and giving the Coadjutor all the actual authority in the Diocese.
    • In the 1940s this was used to ease the Archbishop of Dubuque Francis Beckman out of office as Beckman had caused a financial crisis through involving the Diocese in what turned out to be a scam. Henry Rohlman was promoted to Coadjutor Archbishop of Dubuque and it was made quite clear to Beckman that while he still had the title of Arcbhishop that Rohlman was actually in charge. Beckman stepped down in November, 1946 and left the area.
  • Also, within the Church Dioceses that are no longer active are giving the status of Titular Sees as a way of honoring the memory of these defunct Dioceses.^note Traditionally this was done to honor Dioceses that had fallen out of control of the Church. These Dioceses were titled In partibus infidelium to signfy the area was no longer controlled by Christians. In modern practice Dioceses that move headquarters or are merged into another Diocese are granted the status Titular Sees, and are no longer titled as being in the hands of unbelievers. Assistant Bishops or those Bishops who don't acutally oversee a Diocese are named the leaders of the Titular Sees. From time to time, controversial clergy were kicked upstairs from overseeing active Dioceses to heading Titular Sees as a way of sidlining them. This has fallen by the wayside as those Bishops who committed serious misconduct are now simply deposed and stripped of their clerical office.
    • For example, when Bishop Jacques Gaillot began speaking out in favor of things like married priests, birth control, and supporting LGBTQ the Vatican responded by "promoting" him to be the Bishop of Parthenia - a defunct Diocese in northern Africa. In a bit of a Reassignment Backfire Gaillot established a virtual Diocese of Parthenia to reach out to people, though he has not published on the Diocese website in several years now.
• In his book From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor Jerry Della Femina describes an ad agency that had "the Floor of Forgotten Men". It consisted of workers with long-term contracts whom the agency didn't want anymore. They were moved to their own floor and given a single secretary and no work to do.
• Shortly before he was unmasked as a longtime Russian spy; veteran FBI agent Robert Hanssen was "promoted" to supervisor of FBI computer security in December 2000 with a young assistant named Eric O'Neill whose real job was to watch Hanssen - with Hanssen subsequently becoming suspicious that investigators were on to him, and Hanssen was subsequently caught 2 months later.