Posted on 07/12/2019 12:48:24 PM PDT by Textide
The Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence. In other words, a front-office secretary who is quite good at her job may thus be promoted to executive assistant to the CEO for which she is not trained or prepared for—meaning that she would be more productive for the company (and likely herself) if she had not been promoted.
The Peter Principle is thus based on the logical idea that competent employees will continue to be promoted, but at some point will be promoted into positions for which they are incompetent, and they will then remain in those positions because of the fact that they do not demonstrate any further competence that would get them recognized for additional promotion. According to the Peter Principle, every position in a given hierarchy will eventually be filled by employees who are incompetent to fulfill the job duties of their respective positions.
While many people do rise to the level of their incompetency, it is FAR from "every position". You don't go from "good enough to get promoted" straight to incompetency, and your lack of potential for increased responsibility is not invisible to your supervisor/manager. There is some level of meritocracy in the vast majority of promotions, and someone doing a "just acceptable" job is not likely to be promoted to a more challenging position. When was the last time you saw a company that just promoted people because they were "next"?
The Peter Principal is much more likely to be demonstrated in bureaucracies with a union/socialist mentality. Local governments are the worst. It is unlikely to be seen in organizations that actually measure performance, and that is by far the norm.
It didn’t seem to be the case at Intel until about 5 years ago.
You needed to be forged in fire to get promotion at Intel.
Rene James and BK were the worst CEO’s in the history of the company.
Rene decided to vanish and then leave.
BK was so bad the Board made up charges to force him out.
I would imagine this happens a lot in larger corporations. In any well run business were managers are primarily held responsible for efficiency and productivity above other goals (and bureaucratic bloat) no one will be interviewed and promoted to a job that does not best serve those interests, particularly that manager oversees both the position vacated and the one being filled.
The Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence.
Like Pelosi and Schumer.
Another example is AOC who should still be tending bar.
You’re assuming she was a competent bar tender.
The general source of this is that job skills and management skills are separate and having lots of one doesn’t grant any of the other. So you can be fantastic at your job, but that doesn’t you can lead a team. My manager is a shining example. He’s a fantastic QA engineer, highly technical, great sense for bugs, able to grind through drudge work with a smile. And absolutely zero leadership or organizational capability. He mostly relies on us to be self driven, which is nice often, never gets in our face. But when you’re getting to the end of a release that’s a good time to be pulling the team together, finding out what they think about the release, where is it weak, what can we do, are we making a shippable product? Instead he cancels the weekly department meetings for the last six weeks and has no idea what’s going on.
“the principle that all the dull-witted, scaredy-cats band together in organizations against innovation and excellence”
It’s called the Harrumph principle.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt3GBlVjUd0
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I read that book in 1973.
An absolute classic.
Nursing and Academia
Total Peters.
when he crashes and burns take the old job back
They used to tell us there was a “Management Ladder” and a “Technical Ladder”.
Well, all the raises and advancements went to the Management Ladder, DUH.
I can think of about one or two folks who advanced on the Technical Ladder. They were good, maybe not better than those who did not advance, but got noticed by schmoozing with the publicity process.
The real, competent technical folks did their job, and did not lobby for notoriety. So they did a lot of good work and did not use the paid project time for ‘publicity’. So it hurt them, salary-wise.
To the point that employees, good tech capability, took a management job to get an advance. Then might transfer back to tech. Did a poor job of management, messed up things, for the next guy (or the remaining tech folks) to fix.
Yep. and the engineer probably dislikes his new job, too.
It’s been proven to be about as true as gravity.
Your example is a brief outline of my early employment history.
And yes, I’m an engineer! :)
When being promoted from a ‘field’ position to Management, it is critical that you inherit the power to immediately confirm those you are about to manage, including the right to terminate. You are only as good as the people you work “with”, no those who work “for” you. Therefore, you want to work “with’ those who know the job. Like any decent General, it is best to be in the ‘field’ with your troops.
BeGood/Ross
Happens in the military all the time. The most competent people in non-combat roles are the E-5s. Enough experience to do their job well but with few responsibilities, and high enough in rank to get few sh*t details. Once you get to E-6, your duties increasingly shift to shuffling paperwork and “supervising”, i.e. sitting around reading the newspaper, drinking coffee and shooting the sh*t.
This idea has been around since the 1960’s in this form. Rising to one’s level of incompetence has been a standard since one man started hiring other men.
Most people would not admit that. I got stuck behind a few folks who could not bring themselves to admit they were over their head. It had to get ugly and stressful before these guys got blown out.
It would have been easier to step back and say, “whoa” this ain’t for me.”
I think its true
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