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Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them
Not yet published
Expected 20 Oct 26A bold argument that many workplace hierarchies are fundamentally broken and that all of us―regardless of our rank or role―can help fix them.“A smart, evidence-backed guide to fixing the systems we love to hate but can’t live without.” ―Daniel H. Pink, #1
New York Times
bestselling author of
Drive
Workplace hierarchies often evoke fear, anger, and envy in employees who feel caught in competition with coworkers and under relentless pressure from dominant bosses. The ensuing uncertainty and instability harm employee well-being and undermine organizational performance. Stanford social influence expert Nir Halevy argues that this is because we’re doing hierarchy wrong. When done right, hierarchies can be beneficial, and not just for whoever is at the top.In Level Up, Halevy explains how you can diagnose a broken hierarchy and help fix it, using a framework and concrete solutions that apply to employees across ranks and roles. Drawing on scientific evidence, interviews, and real-world stories from boardrooms to breakrooms, Halevy shows how functional hierarchies create the structure people need to receive mentorship and developmental support, to understand what it takes to move up the career ladder, and to coordinate effectively with one another.Rather than cynically teaching readers how to navigate the dysfunctional labyrinth of a broken hierarchy, Level Up offers a pathway for keeping many of hierarchy’s benefits without bearing its costs. This book is essential reading for people at any level of the org chart.
272 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication October 20, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Rank Comes Back Wearing Better Shoes
“Level Up” follows hierarchy through its modern disguises, from culture talk to promotion rituals
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 29th, 2026
Despite the modern office’s gift for laundering power into neutral nouns, hierarchy keeps finding its chair. It returns as alignment, ownership, accountability, scope, influence, leveling, stewardship, and, when the conference badge has been freshly printed, culture. Nir Halevy’s “Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them” begins from that stubborn recurrence. The book’s sanest provocation is also its least fashionable one: we have not figured out how to abolish hierarchy, and many efforts to flatten it merely teach rank to travel under a softer name.
Even so, Halevy is not writing a valentine to bosses, founders, rainmakers, or the miraculously strategic colleague who says little in meetings and is promoted by Thursday. His argument is more exacting. Hierarchies can coordinate work, clarify responsibility, reward contribution, and help a group decide who should do what when the room is full of competing claims. They can also become engines of humiliation, favoritism, rivalry, exhaustion, and professional weather-reading. The question is not whether rank exists. The question is how rank earns consent from the people who must live beneath, beside, and inside it.
More than most leadership books, “Level Up” understands hierarchy as an atmosphere before it is an org chart. People do not experience status only as title, pay, reporting line, or access to the better conference room. They experience it as who gets interrupted, who gets thanked, who receives patience, whose mistake is treated as information, whose mistake becomes identity, who gets room to recover, and who learns to read every closed door as a memo. Halevy’s best pages listen for the small sounds of rank: envy, shame, suspicion, relief, admiration, loyalty, and the daily injuries by which a workplace tells people where they stand.
Early in the book, Halevy makes the distinction on which everything else depends. Hierarchy itself is not the disease. Broken hierarchy is. He organizes that brokenness into three symptoms: ultracompetition, injustice, and instability. He then offers three corresponding treatments: common value, pluralism, and relatedness. The scheme is tidy enough to fit on a laminated card, but the thinking is less canned than that. Instead of asking whether a workplace is good or bad, the reader begins asking better questions. What is being rewarded? Who trusts the rules? How secure does rank feel? Do people compete in order to contribute, or because contribution has become indistinguishable from self-defense?
The opening section works because it refuses the romance of flatness. Halevy moves through organizations and communities that try to soften, conceal, or abolish ranking, only to find hierarchy reappearing through expertise, pay, visibility, responsibility, information, or informal esteem. That is the bracing part: anti-hierarchical language can flatter the people most fluent in it. Halevy is interested in what happens after the vocabulary changes and the old signals keep doing business in a new suit.
Rather than staking the book on theory alone, Halevy keeps returning to scenes. The rowers Julie and Laura compete for a coveted seat; one wins, one loses, and the emotional residue outlasts the race. Denise, a nurse, becomes trapped in a workplace where disrespect and professional vulnerability feed each other. Alex, a dancer, encounters artistic hierarchy as bodily exposure: correction, dependence, judgment, the terrible intimacy of being evaluated in public. Louisa, a hotel housekeeper, faces underpayment, coercion, mockery, and retaliation. Carlos Ghosn’s fall at Nissan and Renault becomes hierarchy as spectacle, insecurity, and institutional tremor. The scenes give weight to the labels; without them, the book would risk becoming a tray of concepts passed too politely around the table.
In the ultracompetition chapter, Halevy is especially good on the instant when comparison changes flavor. Competition is not inherently corrupting. A race, an audition, a promotion cycle, or a leaderboard can sharpen effort and clarify excellence. But when ranking becomes the central social fact of a group, everyone begins to live in relation to the scoreboard. Peers become threats. Feedback becomes positioning. Recognition becomes a rationed good. The ugly genius of ultracompetition is that it can make another person’s success feel like an evacuation notice.
Part of the force of the rowing example lies in what happens after the decision. Julie wins the seat; Laura loses; the team rides in silence; the private drama of rank has to be carried back into collective life. Halevy knows that hierarchies rarely end at the announcement. Someone still has to sit beside the person who was chosen. Someone still has to row, dance, prescribe, build, sell, teach, or answer emails with the knowledge that the group has just assigned value unevenly. “Level Up” is alert to that afterlife. Its real subject is often not competition itself, but what competition leaves in the room.
A useful severity enters the justice chapter. Halevy distinguishes interactional, distributive, and procedural injustice: how people are treated, what they receive, and how decisions are made. The taxonomy might sound tidy, but it explains why some hierarchies remain tolerable even when unequal. People can often accept not getting the role, the solo, the raise, or the title if they believe the criteria made sense, the process was honest, and the person delivering the decision still saw them whole. What breaks hierarchy is not disappointment. It is disappointment plus insult, opacity, arbitrariness, or contempt.
Prose is the book’s instrument, not its showpiece. Halevy writes in a clear, practiced style: scene, study, concept, implication, tool. The sentences are usually medium-long, patient, and cumulative. They seldom glitter for their own sake, and the book will not be underlined primarily for music. This restraint mostly helps. The prose stays calm without going bloodless, accessible without treating the reader as a decorative fern, and orderly without sanding away feeling. It makes social-science evidence usable while keeping the human stakes in view.
Among its near relations, “Level Up” brushes against Daniel Coyle’s “The Culture Code,” Will Storr’s “The Status Game,” and Michael J. Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit,” though none is quite its twin. Coyle is warmer and more anecdotal; Storr is more panoramic about status as an appetite; Sandel is more philosophical and civic in scale. Halevy’s lane is narrower and more managerial, but not merely managerial. He is asking how unequal systems can distribute respect without pretending inequality has vanished. That is a less glamorous question than how to win power, and a more necessary one.
Diagnosis and treatment give the book its shape. First Halevy teaches the reader to see the pathology: ultracompetition, injustice, instability. Then he turns toward repair: common value, pluralism, relatedness. The arrangement is almost medical, though thankfully it does not put the argument in a white coat. It gives the book momentum and practical clarity. Still, the same tidiness that makes the argument portable can make the world outside the page seem more cooperative than it is. Broken hierarchies are not only confused. They are often defended, rewarded, financed, legalized, and loved by their beneficiaries.
It matters, then, that Halevy’s repair model begins with common value. After “Swan Lake,” David Hallberg publicly promotes Marcus Morelli and Jill Ogai at the Australian Ballet, explaining not only that they have risen but why their rise belongs to the company’s shared values. Recognition is not treated as private loot. It is made legible to the group. The scene matters because promotion becomes a communal ritual rather than a sealed verdict. Rank turns less corrosive when people can see the value it claims to honor.
Meritocracy receives one of the book’s sharper treatments. Halevy does not simply denounce merit, which would be easy and fashionable in some rooms, nor does he kneel before it, which would be easier still in others. He distinguishes between merit as a legitimate basis for role assignment and meritocracy as a story power tells about itself after the invitations have gone out. A hierarchy that rewards skill, contribution, effort, judgment, courage, and care can earn trust. A hierarchy that retrofits moral explanation onto inherited advantage merely gives unfairness better stationery.
If the book has a quiet challenge inside its practical manner, it is the argument for pluralism. Many organizations claim to value different kinds of excellence while building systems that reward only one. Halevy’s examples from ballet, the military, hospitals, family businesses, and teams show why a single ladder distorts attention. When everyone must climb by the same route, colleagues become obstacles, and the organization loses sight of contributions that do not resemble dominance. Pluralism does not abolish evaluation. It multiplies the ways people can matter. That is subtler than “everyone gets a prize,” and far more useful.
The book’s final treatment, relatedness, is more serious than the word may initially sound. In a thinner book, relatedness would become a poster in a break room, the kind of concept that smiles at you while the coffee machine gives up. Halevy means something sturdier. Broken hierarchies isolate people; functioning ones make relationships safer, more candid, and more durable. The examples from improv, policing, emergency dispatch, and athletic rivalry show trust coexisting with difference in rank. The point is not that everyone should be friends. The point is that hierarchy becomes dangerous when it strips people of ordinary mutual regard.
Rank, lately, has been having a very public season. Managers are asked to translate decisions they did not make; workers are asked to trust reorganizations they did not choose; AI is rearranging tasks faster than many organizations can explain who is accountable for what. Pay visibility, office-policy fights, leadership churn, and renewed interest in worker voice all sharpen the same question Halevy asks more quietly: who gets discretion, who gets watched, who gets credit, and who bears the uncertainty? “Level Up” is not about every workplace anxiety now wandering through public discourse with a tote bag and a keynote slot. Its usefulness is narrower and better than that. It shows why so many of those anxieties feel personal.
One of Halevy’s better instincts is to distrust pleasantness. Hierarchy can be polite and still broken. A workplace may have immaculate manners, inclusive slogans, and beautifully formatted values statements while distributing opportunity through favoritism, tolerating bullies, punishing dissent, or rewarding theatrical exhaustion. This is where “Level Up” earns its bite. Legitimacy must be built into practices, not merely announced. A broken hierarchy with better adjectives remains broken. It has simply reupholstered the waiting room.
Power is the place where the book sometimes blinks. Halevy’s prescriptions are sound: common value, pluralism, relatedness. They are memorable, humane, and genuinely useful. But repair often requires more leverage than the injured possess and more humility than the powerful are inclined to volunteer. The toolkit form, by nature, tidies the mess it enters. Some readers will want a harsher reckoning with coercion, bad faith, and the possibility that many broken systems are not awaiting insight. They are working quite well for someone.
On my scale, “Level Up” is an 83/100, which translates to a Goodreads-compatible 4/5 stars. That score places it comfortably above most leadership books I read for this kind of work: more emotionally observant, more disciplined in its structure, and less willing to sell a cheerful shortcut. It misses the top tier because its prose is effective rather than memorable, and because its repair model can make entrenched power look more persuadable than it tends to be. The book is not dazzling. It is lucid, and lucidity has been badly underrated by people with excellent lighting.
Under the practical apparatus, “Level Up” is really about consent. Why do people accept being ranked? When does inequality feel earned, useful, or at least bearable? When does it begin to feel like theft? Halevy’s answer is not sentimental. People can accept unequal status when the system serves shared value, recognizes more than one kind of contribution, and preserves human connection across rank. Strip those away, and hierarchy becomes a machine for manufacturing resentment. Keep them alive, and rank may still sting, but it does not automatically degrade.
Like a good diagnostic, “Level Up” sometimes feels as if it has placed a label on an irritation the reader had learned to treat as private. The anxious glance at a peer’s promotion. The suspicion that merit has arrived wearing someone else’s family crest. The meeting where nobody speaks plainly because the room is crowded with invisible consequences. The relief of being corrected by someone who still believes in your future. Halevy’s talent is to arrange such moments into a usable map. The map is not the territory, but it is much better than wandering the office with a candle and a professional-development PDF.
Over time, I suspect the epilogue will prove more important than its modest size suggests. In the game “Promotion!,” groups working with the same rules produce different social worlds: one secretive and cutthroat, another more transparent and collaborative. The point is not that rules do not matter. Halevy has written an entire book because they do. The point is that rules acquire their meaning from the habits, fears, rewards, and explanations around them. A hierarchy is not fixed because its boxes have been redrawn. It is fixed only when people can recognize themselves in the reasons it gives.
Still, the image that lingers is not a chart, ladder, or tool, but a group of people after the ranking has happened. Someone has been chosen. Someone has not. Someone must explain why. Someone must decide whether to trust the explanation. Someone must return to the work tomorrow carrying pride, disappointment, envy, hope, or suspicion. “Level Up” is most persuasive when it stays with that room after the announcement, when the applause has thinned and hierarchy has to prove, again, that it deserves the human weather it creates.
“Level Up” follows hierarchy through its modern disguises, from culture talk to promotion rituals
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 29th, 2026
Despite the modern office’s gift for laundering power into neutral nouns, hierarchy keeps finding its chair. It returns as alignment, ownership, accountability, scope, influence, leveling, stewardship, and, when the conference badge has been freshly printed, culture. Nir Halevy’s “Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them” begins from that stubborn recurrence. The book’s sanest provocation is also its least fashionable one: we have not figured out how to abolish hierarchy, and many efforts to flatten it merely teach rank to travel under a softer name.
Even so, Halevy is not writing a valentine to bosses, founders, rainmakers, or the miraculously strategic colleague who says little in meetings and is promoted by Thursday. His argument is more exacting. Hierarchies can coordinate work, clarify responsibility, reward contribution, and help a group decide who should do what when the room is full of competing claims. They can also become engines of humiliation, favoritism, rivalry, exhaustion, and professional weather-reading. The question is not whether rank exists. The question is how rank earns consent from the people who must live beneath, beside, and inside it.
More than most leadership books, “Level Up” understands hierarchy as an atmosphere before it is an org chart. People do not experience status only as title, pay, reporting line, or access to the better conference room. They experience it as who gets interrupted, who gets thanked, who receives patience, whose mistake is treated as information, whose mistake becomes identity, who gets room to recover, and who learns to read every closed door as a memo. Halevy’s best pages listen for the small sounds of rank: envy, shame, suspicion, relief, admiration, loyalty, and the daily injuries by which a workplace tells people where they stand.
Early in the book, Halevy makes the distinction on which everything else depends. Hierarchy itself is not the disease. Broken hierarchy is. He organizes that brokenness into three symptoms: ultracompetition, injustice, and instability. He then offers three corresponding treatments: common value, pluralism, and relatedness. The scheme is tidy enough to fit on a laminated card, but the thinking is less canned than that. Instead of asking whether a workplace is good or bad, the reader begins asking better questions. What is being rewarded? Who trusts the rules? How secure does rank feel? Do people compete in order to contribute, or because contribution has become indistinguishable from self-defense?
The opening section works because it refuses the romance of flatness. Halevy moves through organizations and communities that try to soften, conceal, or abolish ranking, only to find hierarchy reappearing through expertise, pay, visibility, responsibility, information, or informal esteem. That is the bracing part: anti-hierarchical language can flatter the people most fluent in it. Halevy is interested in what happens after the vocabulary changes and the old signals keep doing business in a new suit.
Rather than staking the book on theory alone, Halevy keeps returning to scenes. The rowers Julie and Laura compete for a coveted seat; one wins, one loses, and the emotional residue outlasts the race. Denise, a nurse, becomes trapped in a workplace where disrespect and professional vulnerability feed each other. Alex, a dancer, encounters artistic hierarchy as bodily exposure: correction, dependence, judgment, the terrible intimacy of being evaluated in public. Louisa, a hotel housekeeper, faces underpayment, coercion, mockery, and retaliation. Carlos Ghosn’s fall at Nissan and Renault becomes hierarchy as spectacle, insecurity, and institutional tremor. The scenes give weight to the labels; without them, the book would risk becoming a tray of concepts passed too politely around the table.
In the ultracompetition chapter, Halevy is especially good on the instant when comparison changes flavor. Competition is not inherently corrupting. A race, an audition, a promotion cycle, or a leaderboard can sharpen effort and clarify excellence. But when ranking becomes the central social fact of a group, everyone begins to live in relation to the scoreboard. Peers become threats. Feedback becomes positioning. Recognition becomes a rationed good. The ugly genius of ultracompetition is that it can make another person’s success feel like an evacuation notice.
Part of the force of the rowing example lies in what happens after the decision. Julie wins the seat; Laura loses; the team rides in silence; the private drama of rank has to be carried back into collective life. Halevy knows that hierarchies rarely end at the announcement. Someone still has to sit beside the person who was chosen. Someone still has to row, dance, prescribe, build, sell, teach, or answer emails with the knowledge that the group has just assigned value unevenly. “Level Up” is alert to that afterlife. Its real subject is often not competition itself, but what competition leaves in the room.
A useful severity enters the justice chapter. Halevy distinguishes interactional, distributive, and procedural injustice: how people are treated, what they receive, and how decisions are made. The taxonomy might sound tidy, but it explains why some hierarchies remain tolerable even when unequal. People can often accept not getting the role, the solo, the raise, or the title if they believe the criteria made sense, the process was honest, and the person delivering the decision still saw them whole. What breaks hierarchy is not disappointment. It is disappointment plus insult, opacity, arbitrariness, or contempt.
Prose is the book’s instrument, not its showpiece. Halevy writes in a clear, practiced style: scene, study, concept, implication, tool. The sentences are usually medium-long, patient, and cumulative. They seldom glitter for their own sake, and the book will not be underlined primarily for music. This restraint mostly helps. The prose stays calm without going bloodless, accessible without treating the reader as a decorative fern, and orderly without sanding away feeling. It makes social-science evidence usable while keeping the human stakes in view.
Among its near relations, “Level Up” brushes against Daniel Coyle’s “The Culture Code,” Will Storr’s “The Status Game,” and Michael J. Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit,” though none is quite its twin. Coyle is warmer and more anecdotal; Storr is more panoramic about status as an appetite; Sandel is more philosophical and civic in scale. Halevy’s lane is narrower and more managerial, but not merely managerial. He is asking how unequal systems can distribute respect without pretending inequality has vanished. That is a less glamorous question than how to win power, and a more necessary one.
Diagnosis and treatment give the book its shape. First Halevy teaches the reader to see the pathology: ultracompetition, injustice, instability. Then he turns toward repair: common value, pluralism, relatedness. The arrangement is almost medical, though thankfully it does not put the argument in a white coat. It gives the book momentum and practical clarity. Still, the same tidiness that makes the argument portable can make the world outside the page seem more cooperative than it is. Broken hierarchies are not only confused. They are often defended, rewarded, financed, legalized, and loved by their beneficiaries.
It matters, then, that Halevy’s repair model begins with common value. After “Swan Lake,” David Hallberg publicly promotes Marcus Morelli and Jill Ogai at the Australian Ballet, explaining not only that they have risen but why their rise belongs to the company’s shared values. Recognition is not treated as private loot. It is made legible to the group. The scene matters because promotion becomes a communal ritual rather than a sealed verdict. Rank turns less corrosive when people can see the value it claims to honor.
Meritocracy receives one of the book’s sharper treatments. Halevy does not simply denounce merit, which would be easy and fashionable in some rooms, nor does he kneel before it, which would be easier still in others. He distinguishes between merit as a legitimate basis for role assignment and meritocracy as a story power tells about itself after the invitations have gone out. A hierarchy that rewards skill, contribution, effort, judgment, courage, and care can earn trust. A hierarchy that retrofits moral explanation onto inherited advantage merely gives unfairness better stationery.
If the book has a quiet challenge inside its practical manner, it is the argument for pluralism. Many organizations claim to value different kinds of excellence while building systems that reward only one. Halevy’s examples from ballet, the military, hospitals, family businesses, and teams show why a single ladder distorts attention. When everyone must climb by the same route, colleagues become obstacles, and the organization loses sight of contributions that do not resemble dominance. Pluralism does not abolish evaluation. It multiplies the ways people can matter. That is subtler than “everyone gets a prize,” and far more useful.
The book’s final treatment, relatedness, is more serious than the word may initially sound. In a thinner book, relatedness would become a poster in a break room, the kind of concept that smiles at you while the coffee machine gives up. Halevy means something sturdier. Broken hierarchies isolate people; functioning ones make relationships safer, more candid, and more durable. The examples from improv, policing, emergency dispatch, and athletic rivalry show trust coexisting with difference in rank. The point is not that everyone should be friends. The point is that hierarchy becomes dangerous when it strips people of ordinary mutual regard.
Rank, lately, has been having a very public season. Managers are asked to translate decisions they did not make; workers are asked to trust reorganizations they did not choose; AI is rearranging tasks faster than many organizations can explain who is accountable for what. Pay visibility, office-policy fights, leadership churn, and renewed interest in worker voice all sharpen the same question Halevy asks more quietly: who gets discretion, who gets watched, who gets credit, and who bears the uncertainty? “Level Up” is not about every workplace anxiety now wandering through public discourse with a tote bag and a keynote slot. Its usefulness is narrower and better than that. It shows why so many of those anxieties feel personal.
One of Halevy’s better instincts is to distrust pleasantness. Hierarchy can be polite and still broken. A workplace may have immaculate manners, inclusive slogans, and beautifully formatted values statements while distributing opportunity through favoritism, tolerating bullies, punishing dissent, or rewarding theatrical exhaustion. This is where “Level Up” earns its bite. Legitimacy must be built into practices, not merely announced. A broken hierarchy with better adjectives remains broken. It has simply reupholstered the waiting room.
Power is the place where the book sometimes blinks. Halevy’s prescriptions are sound: common value, pluralism, relatedness. They are memorable, humane, and genuinely useful. But repair often requires more leverage than the injured possess and more humility than the powerful are inclined to volunteer. The toolkit form, by nature, tidies the mess it enters. Some readers will want a harsher reckoning with coercion, bad faith, and the possibility that many broken systems are not awaiting insight. They are working quite well for someone.
On my scale, “Level Up” is an 83/100, which translates to a Goodreads-compatible 4/5 stars. That score places it comfortably above most leadership books I read for this kind of work: more emotionally observant, more disciplined in its structure, and less willing to sell a cheerful shortcut. It misses the top tier because its prose is effective rather than memorable, and because its repair model can make entrenched power look more persuadable than it tends to be. The book is not dazzling. It is lucid, and lucidity has been badly underrated by people with excellent lighting.
Under the practical apparatus, “Level Up” is really about consent. Why do people accept being ranked? When does inequality feel earned, useful, or at least bearable? When does it begin to feel like theft? Halevy’s answer is not sentimental. People can accept unequal status when the system serves shared value, recognizes more than one kind of contribution, and preserves human connection across rank. Strip those away, and hierarchy becomes a machine for manufacturing resentment. Keep them alive, and rank may still sting, but it does not automatically degrade.
Like a good diagnostic, “Level Up” sometimes feels as if it has placed a label on an irritation the reader had learned to treat as private. The anxious glance at a peer’s promotion. The suspicion that merit has arrived wearing someone else’s family crest. The meeting where nobody speaks plainly because the room is crowded with invisible consequences. The relief of being corrected by someone who still believes in your future. Halevy’s talent is to arrange such moments into a usable map. The map is not the territory, but it is much better than wandering the office with a candle and a professional-development PDF.
Over time, I suspect the epilogue will prove more important than its modest size suggests. In the game “Promotion!,” groups working with the same rules produce different social worlds: one secretive and cutthroat, another more transparent and collaborative. The point is not that rules do not matter. Halevy has written an entire book because they do. The point is that rules acquire their meaning from the habits, fears, rewards, and explanations around them. A hierarchy is not fixed because its boxes have been redrawn. It is fixed only when people can recognize themselves in the reasons it gives.
Still, the image that lingers is not a chart, ladder, or tool, but a group of people after the ranking has happened. Someone has been chosen. Someone has not. Someone must explain why. Someone must decide whether to trust the explanation. Someone must return to the work tomorrow carrying pride, disappointment, envy, hope, or suspicion. “Level Up” is most persuasive when it stays with that room after the announcement, when the applause has thinned and hierarchy has to prove, again, that it deserves the human weather it creates.
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