The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?

Really interesting article!

The Peter principle states that "every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence". The article cites an example from Sales teams. That it's the highest performing sales people that are promoted to sales team managers, and they don't perform well as managers (team performance drops).

They then talk about solutions, such are promoting people at random.

But it seems like at least part of the problem in endemic in our view of organisations. People often want management positions because they are paid more, are more secure, or have more power. Maybe if we shifted our view of management as "just being a different skill set" and not always being higher paid then we'd find people without the required skills wouldn't try and obtain those positions and would focus on what they are good at.

Most organisations structure power in hierarchies, meaning a small number of people at the top of the pyramid are responsible and supposed to be ultimately accountable for ALL decisions being made under that structure.

This naturally leads to a situation where those working at the top are being overwhelmed with demands for their attention and decision making approval.

A conscientious person - arguably a good _leader_ - will take this responsibility seriously, and devote their time and energy to handle all those demands as best they can.

But another type of person - a "player" - will realise that the work of decision making actually _detracts_ from their success within the organisation. A "player" will figure out they should avoid the work of leadership as much as possible and instead devote their time to fostering their own image, gaining popularity, claiming responsibility for other peoples good decisions and generally working their way up the pyramid.

For me hierarchical power structures are the root cause of the problem here, not human nature - the "player" is really acting rationally, taking the path of least resistance to achieve their goals.

The problem IMO is we're using legacy approaches to organising ourselves groups that stems from military theory of the 18th century - that most armies themselves have now moved beyond - see https://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-....

We need smarter ways to organise and we probably need AI at some level to help us scale up to higher volumes of effective decision making.

The Peter Principle suggests people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. The Dilbert Principle (which Harford also mentions) suggests incompetents are promoted to middle management to minimize their ability to do harm.

The Gervais Principle uses The Office (and organizational theory according to Whyte) as a reference. The firm ranges from pathological to chaotic. Clueless overachievers get put in middle management, while sociopaths are groomed to jump to the top positions.

This was a funny, interesting overview, made me actually want to read about academic organizational theory for the first time in my life:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

>The Peter Principle is satire: it mocks management and it mocks books about management. It is striking, then, that most people take it quite seriously.

It might have been intended as satire.

I see nothing in it that cannot be used as a straight argument with quite good explanatory and predictive power.

A lot of things started as something else. It's their inherent qualities that matter as to what they are, not the intentions of the creator.

>So Profs Pluchino, Rapisarda and Garofalo suggest a compromise: promote people at random. This may be the best response to a world where leaders stick around until they are ready to depart. But there is an obvious alternative: when people are not up to the demands of their job, we should not wait for them to resign. They should be sacked — or, perhaps better, demoted back to the roles where they once flourished.

Both were attributes of the old Athenian democracy.

The problem with the Peter Principle (and similar) is that it doesn't account for the skill of getting promoted, which is a separate skill from professional skills as in salesmanship, technology and math skills, or people skills. People who rise to the top usually have developed a keen sense of what enables promotion, and once promoted what it requires to keep that position. To a large extent it becomes managerial skills which may as such be learnt in schools, but such courses seldom deal with the politics side. To be successful one probably need to figure it out for oneself, and even then chance plays a large part.

Which is why the article is wrong: the front bench of the house of commons and the people mentioned (and others mentioned in similar tirades) are not stupid, they are highly adept, it's just that this skill doesn't have a (non-derogatory) name AFAICT. And it doesn't necessarily correlate with our preconceptions of what people at such positions in society or organizations should be good at.

From what I've seen, there is a large random element to promotions. A few corporations put in place good processes that ensure that promotions occur according to some specific criteria, but such corporations are rare. Most promotions arise from the gut level feelings of managers, and we all know how much those gut level feelings are open to irrational biases. There are the obvious, well documented biases involving race and language and religion and gender, as well as many other forms of biases that come down to subtle differences in communication style.

For those who prefer famous examples, I'll offer one that Peter F Drucker often discussed: the difference in communication styles between John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Both men were very smart and talented, in their own ways, but Kennedy preferred to receive information in written form, whereas Johnson preferred to receive information orally. Kennedy was a reader, Johnson was a talker. However, Johnson also felt insecure regarding the dazzling education that the Kennedy's had, and Johnson wanted to imitate their style. So when Johnson became President, he kept around many of the Kennedy people, who continued to write long reports, of the type that Kennedy would have appreciated. Johnson didn't read them, he wasn't a reader. And then he'd ask someone like McNamara to orally offer a short summary of a long report, and McNamara would leave out a lot of details that he assumed Johnson had already seen in the written report.

In Drucker's opinion, this was how a leader as smart as Johnson could stumble into a mistake as big as Vietnam.

Did Johnson deserve the promotion he got? Most would say he had the intelligence and managerial skill to handle the top job. He had done a fantastic job in the Senate. But he was undermined by irrational and emotional factors, in particular the subtle kind of class envy that would cause him to want to imitate the highly literate style of the Kennedy's.

I've seen something like this at most of the places I've worked, leaders who could have been good if a few circumstances were different, but its only in retrospect that it becomes clear which circumstances should have been different.

The Peter Principle describes a system of promotion that basically rational until it goes too far. But I've never seen anything that rational, not at any of the places I've worked.

I thought a lot about this a while back. A very few large companies have dual tracks, one for promoting professional engineers but keep them out of the management track. In my opinion, this is a good idea.

If a software or hardware engineer is promoted into managing other engineers, this is an entirely different skill. It helps when one understands the technical requirements and issues but management is a business skill.

I know of a lot of tech people who “self demote” because they don’t enjoy management and others who left jobs to avoid managemt. and you can do quite well as an individual contributor. Is that true in other industries?

> The better they had been in sales, the worse their teams performed once they arrived in a managerial role

I hope the study authors controlled for the [short term] effects on relative team performance of taking a very effective salesperson out of the sales force [and not even having a replacement]...

Jokes aside, I'm not so sure the Peter principle applies equally to everybody -- I know a some who hold on to positions because they enjoy the position. Granted, in some fields it is essentially impossible to not be promoted as it were.

My manager at Charles Schwab said "managers don't know anything"

(Not so seriously.) I suggest, it may be even worse. Arguably, a person who is able to integrate, to connect and to convey her/his thinking to an audience is more likely to be regarded widely as competent than a person who doesn't. But there's a problem with this, namely complexity of thinking. We may observe that it becomes extremely more difficult to connect in this way, as the distance in understanding and the complexity of reasoning increases from a common mean of understanding, as the load of information and education implied and required to follow an argument separates an expert from a layperson. However, there's a feeling of suitability of what is to be conveyed, to be discussed, what may be worth to be communicated. Generally, we do not like to just repeat the basics of our understanding, this is not the point we're at, the gravitational center of our deliberations. We haven't engaged in higher education, just to repeat the eyeopening one-liners of the introductory lessons over and over again. There's a gradient of complexity, and arguably a worthwhile statement is located somewhere at the higher half of it. And, as things are, the more natural we are, the better, the more successful we are in communications.

By this, we may conclude, a person commonly acknowledged for her/his competence is also a person successful in communicating understanding, thus a person, who's understanding is essentially neither more informed nor more complex than the average understanding. A person at the high point of the career, just before adhering to Peter's principle, is also a person, who has been shifting for merits, understood by just few, eventually to a field, where her/his genuine level of competence is just a bit above of the one of the general public, honoring this with general praise. The experts must stand aside, in shame, as they are necessarily excluded from this communion. Even if, by some peculiar accident, our person has maintained a respectable level of expertise, she is ultimately nudged towards a flattering level of communicability. Thus we may propose, a successful career is rather the matter of a diminishing epsilon, which separates expertise from common understanding. Peter's principle is not dysfunctional, but rather the vanishing point (quite in the literal meaning, as far as this epsilon is concerned).

Without the social component we as a species would not have accomplished as much as we have. We would not, for instance, have been so successful at sustenance that we would have time to sit around griping about our bosses - people who are there precisely because without them - we would not have time to sit around griping about them.

Organizations scale at the cost of efficiency - but scale they do. Incredibly powerful and inescapable - your idiot boss is here to stay.

At my job, leadership and mgmt responsibilities are given before promotion, and those who do well are promoted to management much later. Those who do not do well in managrment are instead promoted if they stuck to what they are good at.

Oh also, promotions and raises are seperate. One is responsibility change, one is salary change.

This doesn't seem hard.

As a developer who has risen through management ranks quickly I can say that without training and support I would have very readily lived this principle. One set of skills can only be partially transferable to the new demands of management.

my thoughts on this. warning: lots of assumptions, technicalities and anecdotal evidence following.

let's assume the reward we're talking about here and people are mostly after is financial (i.e. pay increase). so if you are after higher pay, a promotion "up the corporate ladder" is the natural way, as your wage would increase much more slowly if you stayed at the same job. this at least is even codified in most countries minimum wage laws.

but what about that ladder? why is it "moving up" (good) and "moving down" (bad)? software engineering is an interesting example here, as you can fill almost every available position with people whose skill can make a difference. an expert tester, an gifted community manager, UX designer or talented technical documentation writer might all have an impact on the product that's worth their weight in gold, even though the results might not be as obvious and tangible as those of, say, a project manager (who could convincingly claim the success of a project while this would be strange for a technical writer). compared to unskilled rote work where the worker mostly simply has to show up and do his/her job.

thus, the question is, why does someone "higher up" the ladder earn more than someone "lower down". obvious answers to this are workload, skill, responsibility and quantity.

as for workload: 1. being higher up the ladder doesn't automatically mean one is working more and harder than the people below one. 2. working more (hours) doesn't necessarily mean one's more effective. at some point effectiveness decreases due to stress, sleep deprivation, burn out.

as for skill: the peter principle itself and years of anecdotal evidence (through the media, not necessarily personal) have shown that moving up the ladder into different jobs doesn't necessarily equate with higher skill in the new position.

as for responsibility: 1. at least in software engineering, criminal prosecution for incompetence at the managerial/top level is rare (assumption). positions that require real personal responsibility (say, something where lives are on the line) aren't necessarily paid better. nurses or teachers aren't paid better than CFOs, they're much more at risk for prosecution in case of negligence or incompetence. 2. failure to do your managerial job in one company well doesn't necessarily prevent you from getting the same job in a different company, as much hinges on a personal network and it's usually easier to get exposure to potential future employers if you're regularly working with partners and customers instead of just interfacing with other people from the same company (assumption). 3. personal responsibility for your family and dependents: higher pay usually means more savings, which makes one less dependent on keeping the same job than someone with less pay and savings. this might be disputed as higher pay usually means a more lavish lifestyle and higher expenditures, but a loaf of bread costs the same for everyone, some costs are just fixed and the system is somewhat rigged to care for those at the top (anecdotal evidence).

as for quantity: this is what makes it a hierarchy. if there's one project manager for a project with, say, five developers, PM positions are obviously rarer than developer positions. i can't think of a reason why this should have an influence on reward though. managing people is a very different skill to writing code; there's technically less demand for it (as you only need one manager for N developers) but i'm not convinced that your skill here has a higher impact. while four good developers can make up for one bad developer and still keep the quality high, five good developers could also make up for one bad manager and still keep the quality high. the quality of the managerial work doesn't introduce a skill ceiling; i see it more as a multiplicator of the work of his/her teammates (and maybe a lower skill boundary, if a good manager can effectively handle sub-par actors). the other angle here is _availability_, but i'm not convinced it's harder to find a good PM than it's to find a good technical writer nowadays.

so, what i want to say is that the corporate ladder itself is a misguided, outdated construct and basing your wage on your position on it is actively harmful. it forces employees to abandon the work they're skilled and talented at for jobs that are rewarded better for worse quality and job satisfaction.

it should be seen as a graph where the node weight (pay) depends on effectiveness. which is hard compared to ladder position as the latter is trivial to assess, constant and traditionally socially accepted while the former is highly dependent on circumstances, hard to measure and introduces additional risks due to social dynamics.

i'm convinced the upsides of removing the pressure to "move up" the ladder/hierarchy for financial gain would greatly benefit a company - and society as a whole, if implemented universally -, but i'm not sure if people are ready for it and whether we have the tools and systems to implement it correctly.

i guess back then i thought google would be the company that finally broke the barrier back then when one of their mottos was that managers aren't more important than developers. not sure if that's still the case, ever was the case or whether they have reverted to a more traditional model.

Contra Betteridge's law of headlines.

tl;dr: yes

It's not a joke. It's an aphorism that is funny because it is true.

You could apply the same joke principle to athletes and say they are all in the wrong league for their skill level.

> If someone is good at her job, she’ll be promoted...

This is exactly the opposite of how I understand the Peter Principle.

My understanding is that folks who are good at their job remain in their position (because they are good/effective workers adding value to the company). Meanwhile, employees that cause problems on the job get promoted out of a position where they can do damage, because it’s easier to promote than to fire for whatever reason.