At least with airlines this seems to be largely abandoned now. My wife worked for a large middle eastern airline for a few years, and the crews were just assigned randomly. Well I guess there is a complicated algorithm that figures it out, but given the company has nearly 15,000 cabin crew it’s unlikely you’ll see someone you flew with again on another flight.

Also from the stories I heard people were promoted to managerial roles (on big flights there’s usually a senior for each class, and then a purser who reports to the captain) through seniority, not because they had any specific people skills that made them a good manager.