To assume that people always reach their level of incompetence in the same discipline reflects a static mindset. So chances are if you cap out, a job change can be just the catalyst to keep growing and moving on up. And today, people switch jobs and companies at a much higher rate than in 1968 when The Peter Principle was written. Yes, it is true that rates of promotion slow down as you rise the ladder, but that’s a scarcity issue. Will you eventually cap out? Are you destined to be the Lumbergh of your office? Ok, so what happens if you are a manager. You do want to be a smart company, don’t you? But for the most part, smart companies recognize the need for separate career paths. Oh, it still happens that a strong IC is promoted into management even at a company that gets it. More and more companies recognize the need for separate individual contributor (IC) tracks from management tracks. Is the Peter Principle alive and well today? Oh I’m sure it is. The real insight in The Peter Principle is this - the fact that someone is good at sales, or marketing, or programming doesn’t make them good at management. ![]() So obvious it’s not worth putting a name on it. You know who you are, you’re the exception that proves the rule. In a hierarchy, every programmer promoted to a stage magician will be incompetent, except for that one person you know who always brings out the tricks when nobody is interested. Let’s change the disciplines to make it more apparent. In The Peter Principle, the people who were promoted to their level of incompetence were promoted into management. The sales reps in the study, to quote one successful sales manager, were “promoted not to the level of their incompetence, but rather out of the area of their competence.”Īnd this aligns with the context of Peter’s book that’s so often missed. It did not test whether people top out when asked to perform increasingly complex stages of the same disciplines for which they were first hired. Management is a different discipline than sales, or writing software, or underwater basket weaving.Īs the author of the Forbes article notes about the study, Except, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that this study shows people being promoted to a different discipline. The data show that the best salespeople were more likely to a) be promoted and b) perform poorly as managers. During that time, 1,531 of those sales reps were promoted to become sales managers. Three professors - Alan Benson of the University of Minnesota, Danielle Li of MIT and Kelly Shue of Yale - analyzed the performance of 53,035 sales employees at 214 American companies from 2005 to 2011. There is some real evidence to suggest it’s a real phenomena, but that evidence has to be taken in context.Ī few years back, some researchers tackled this question as mention in this Forbes article… This isn’t to suggest that the Peter Principle is wrong. Cube all show various degrees of incompetence. The case studies feature some geometrically named characters, Note that in naming this principle after himself, Professor Peter violates Haack’s Law which states,Īs evidence for the Peter Principle, Professor Peter cites a “Hypothetical Case Study”, the gold standard for social science studies. In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence. ![]() ![]() Here’s how Professor Peter stated the law he named after himself, Over time, cynical folks latched onto it as a universal law of nature. Peter wrote The Peter Principle in 1968 as satire critical of management and management practices.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |