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.
> 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.
Some tech companies have started to do that with technical seniority tracks. I think one bit that's still missing remains the ability to move people back into previous positions without loss of face or income if they don't fit in the new one.
The problem, which I worry is unfixable, is that managers are the people who decide which jobs are most stable and paid the most. Unsurprisingly, they give themselves the majority of the spoils.
Democracy isn't democratic either. Why else would concepts like seniority exist in the US Senate? Or sub committees... How is the US Senate in line with the concept of one person one vote? If we want our vote to count more, we should move to Wyoming (which gets two senators the same as California)?
If we have each employee one share each, I'm sure many would simply turn around and see if they can sell it. How can we retain one person one vote in a company? Make shares non transferable? Do we allow proxy voting?
That's because the US government is not organized as a democracy, but rather as a republic. The Senate is not intended to be democratic, it is intended to be a deliberative body of representatives who come to consensus on legislative questions. It's quite a large deliberative body, so its method of consensus is superficially akin to democracy in that many questions are answered through voting, but it isn't, and was never intended, to be democratic in the pure sense. Along the same lines, it is only recently that we began democratically electing Senators.
None of this is by accident, and was done this way for similar reasons as companies have for running themselves un-democratically.
> That's because the US government is not organized as a democracy, but rather as a republic. The Senate is not intended to be democratic, it is intended to be a deliberative body of representatives who come to consensus on legislative questions. It's quite a large deliberative body, so its method of consensus is superficially akin to democracy in that many questions are answered through voting, but it isn't, and was never intended, to be democratic in the pure sense. Along the same lines, it is only recently that we began democratically electing Senators.
How often is there a consensus in the Senate? It seems like almost everything happens along party lines. Who are senators supposed to represent?
I've heard this "a republic, not a democracy" so many times. Don't get me wrong. I am very grateful for a nation of laws. However, it doesn't seem that being a republic, not a democracy is what is protecting the rights of the minority or the rule of the law.
It just feels like the purpose was to prevent wild swings but I'm afraid what is supposed to protect us from abrupt, wild swings will make it near impossible to correct a slow swing.
Party line votes were historically more rare (under 50%). That has changed dramatically over the last few years and is a belleweather of the deep divisions in the country.
There were always divisive issues but there are also a lot of boring and mundane work. 90% party line votes are evidence the parties feel it's not politically safe to be seen agreeing with others on any issue regardless of how mundane. That isn't something you'll fix short of changing the electorate or getting rid of elections.
In the period between the New Deal and now they were usually rarer because the New Deal Coalition broke the old party alignment and it took a long time before the parties each had a coherent ideological position again; that was a naturally unstable position.
It had little to do with boring, mundane work, it has to do with the fact that liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats—when neither of those meant centrist, they meant more to the left or right than the center of the other partt—used to exist, significantly, in both the electorate and elected office.
This was always an unstable condition, and the trigger for accelerating it's inevitable Denise was Johnson's civil rights position. But it still took a few decades after that for the realignment to complete.
Except that the current increase in partisan voting began in the 2000s. The 50s were closer in the mid 70% but for the period since partisan voting was under 50%
The administration of the US government has no elements of direct democracy (that I can think of). It is a republic with democratically elected representatives.
“A republic with democratically elected representatives” (like “a monarchy in which practical authority is durably assigned to a body of democratically elected representatives”) is an example of a representative democracy, which is not only a kind of democracy, it's by far the most common kind of democracy.
We've entered pretty pedantic territory now IMO, but I think it's much more useful to consider the US government itself a republic because that's how its day to day operation is conducted. Thinking of it as a democracy leads to questions like the thread starter, for instance about un-democratic committee and leadership structures, which are actually non sequiturs because it's not a democratic system.
I'd do it just the opposite - folks don't all want to be involved, but want somebody who they respect to do it for them. Freely allow proxies to be assigned, to anybody, not just to 'elected officials'. Those with proxies could reassign the whole wad to another person, and so on.
Companies in the west are democratic, but the voting rights are held by the owners of the company. If you are a citizen, it is your country and you get a vote. If you are an employee, it is not your company.
Not necessarily true. Many companies including Google have different classes of shares where they have more voting rights than thier share of ownership.
Not many public companies are structured like this, and for a while it was a requirement of some exchanges that one share be one vote. I know that people on Hacker News (high concentration of founders) like the idea of a public listing without one share one vote, but I think it is better for companies in the long run to have their board seats elected by the shareholders. It may seem good now to have Mark Zuckerberg to have total control of FB, but will it seem like a good idea for his children to have more control than the actual owners? This is the kind of trouble companies like Viacom have gotten into by giving their founders too much control.
That's not many companies actually but rather a tiny minority of firms that are exploiting their ability to make unusually huge profits to get investors despite poor and risky terms.
But... aren't they? It's one share one vote, not one employee one vote, but I think that still qualifies as democratic. Then, there are elected board members (the representatives) who hire the CEO (the prime minister?), etc.
That wouldn't fit most definitions of democracy (which would be variations of "every person gets a single equal vote"). Most companies are more of an oligarchy.
Neither is the US. The US is a democratic republic: we vote in congress, the senate, and the president who then make decisions for us on our behalf. Public companies are similar: shareholders vote in board members, who then elect a CEO for the company on our behalf.
That is assuming that there's only one share class. Companies often have different classes of membership/shareholder which have different voting powers (or none).
Try to start a democratic company (or run a thought experiment about doing so) and you will probably find the reasons why democracy works better as a way to manage a society than a single company.
It does happen. Both the largest supermarket chains in Switzerland are cooperatives.
However, small competing firms in a market where people vote with their wallets is already pretty democratic. The voting takes place at a different level - people choose companies rather than leaders or direct policies, but it works well enough.
I work at a company where at least on the technical side, this is not true. ICs and managers are on similar pay scales. And manager jobs are certainly less stable than IC positions. Additionally, "failure" as a manager often means returning to an IC role.
Directly? No. By definition firing people isn't in an IC job description.
Can an IC get a manager fired? Yes. Skip-level reviews and 1:1s usually paint a clear enough picture for upper management that the correct course of action is to fire the manager. The more senior the IC, the more weight their review carries.
Can a manager fire an IC? Not unilaterally. Again, skip-level reviews and 1:1s are there to help upper management evaluate how well the manager is doing their job. Feedback from other ICs is also a big part of it. Senior ICs are generally involved not just in the decision but as part of ensuring the underperforming IC is getting sufficient support so they can be fairly evaluated.
I'm sure systems like this have broken down at other companies, but it seems to work well enough where I've worked.
I'm sure this is how it looks from the outside, but it's very much not the way things actually work. Except in very limited cases (like, owner of a small private company), your boss does not set his own salary without oversight. And even then, the best way to increase his own salary is for the company to grow, so he's incentivized to run a proper business and not a sweatshop.
The problem has multiple issues. Managers getting paid more is certainly an incentive for people who aren't qualified to want to become managers.
Managers having power is another issue. It's possible for a manager to have less power. Their job being to facilitate and coordinate rather than direct.
Managers have power on multiple levels as well. Some have power over people, who does what, but they also often have power of decisions, what gets done, what to make, where to focus.
In other words, to fix the incentives that pull non-qualified people into management positions it seems like all of those issues need to be separated from the manager position?
In other words someone might not be a people person so isn't good and facilitating and coordinating between people and or other teams but they could be good at one or more kinds of team level decision making and want that responsibility.
One partial solution to having a single power hierarchy is having multiple power hierarchies. Then no one person is the boss of me, and when someone wants something done, they can't just order me to do it. They can't be a jerk to me or they might find their work assigned to my lowest priority.
It can go horribly wrong, too ("I have eight different bosses, Bob!"). I don't think there's any power structure which can prevent selfish or malevolent people from harming the organization: "The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery."
I think the article mentions the core problem. It’s not necessarily the people can’t move down (although that would be good) it’s that we don’t take into account the skills of the job the person is GOING to when deciding if they should be promoted to it.
If that was the criteria used maybe this problem wouldn’t exist in the first place.
> I think one bit that's still missing remains the ability to move people back into previous positions without loss of face or income if they don't fit in the new one.
Don't know where you are at but my manager literally did just this by switching back to an individual contributor role and retained the same level. Also, managers and individual contributors make the same amount per level so he didn't lose any income.
At my employer, senior technical roles are bonus-eligible at rates similar to line management. Salaries are similar as well. And I know a few employees who have dabbled in management and later returned to senior technical roles without lasting negative impact.
At my company the levels for technical engineers (traditional engineering btw, not software) is: Engineer 1, 2, Senior, Lead, & Principal where Lead is supposedly equivalent to a Supervisor & Principle a manager. In reality we have only a few leads and no principals. So there is very little incentive to go technical as you'll never make more than a Supervisor and Supervisor has at least 4 more levels above it.
Part of the company is similar to the Peter principle, but where I am, all the smartest and most technical people go into management which creates a different problem. They're often sub par at managing people and the administrative side of things. It also creates brain drain where we constantly have a lack of know-how in the less senior ranks. On the good side is that things generally work better with highly technical management as they tend to almost always make superb decisions and don't have to constantly consult about things. My last manager could listen to work being done and know exactly which processes it impacted and why due to the specific SQL tables involved. They can also direct subordinates in the knowledge they took with them too. These managers tend to be more focused with getting the job done quickly and properly with minimum impacts rather than political infighting.
A technical manager without political skills can hurt the team. They can’t get raises for them, resources, or recognition. A non technical political manager can easily outmaneuver a technical manager. It’s good to have a technical manager to get things done and learn, but expect to have to change jobs to get ahead.
Agreed in some cases, but again, I've been pleasantly surprised.
Technical managers understand what needs to be done...etc and enable high performing teams and make it well known during bonus discussions. When your department is responsible for major success each year, the technical manager can push promotions...etc fairly well. At this rate I'm avoiding the other departments like the plague.
Ah, well failure to use positions that exist is a bit strange. My test engineer is a “senior principle”. Losing her to a management role would be a blow to both my team and the broader product-line (ERP, many dev teams). Of course, I was a principle dev and moved into management for a change of pace and new challenges, so title and salary are no guarantee that tech talent stays in tech roles.
> 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.
This is exactly it. Hierarchies are good for efficiently organizing and distributing work. I mean, they're trees which are used everywhere for load balancing and distribution in computer science. We just have to break the association of a work hierarchy with social status which we're hard-wired to see, and part of that is the higher salaries given to people higher in the hierarchy.
Really, salary should probably be tied to hours and seniority.
The organization that pays the market wage will usually out-compete the organization which pays based on hours and seniority. Seniority is a poor proxy for productivity (theer's definitely a correlation, but it's not strong and it ignores individual variation, which is large), while paying based on hours is rewarding poor productivity.
> The organization that pays the market wage will usually out-compete the organization which pays based on hours and seniority.
That's conjecture though isn't it? Because the organization that doesn't promote its star employees out of their range of competence will perform better and have less turnover because people won't be leaving for better opportunities elsewhere.
> Seniority is a poor proxy for productivity (theer's definitely a correlation, but it's not strong and it ignores individual variation, which is large),
Sure, obviously productivity is a consideration in whether to keep an employee, and possibly a consideration for raises. You don't want to keep any kind of non-productive employee. But while they're not productive in their current role, they might be productive in another role.
> while paying based on hours is rewarding poor productivity.
You're assuming a lot about what I meant by hours.
That was my first thought, too. It seems quite plausible that the exact skills suited to doing well in sales (competitiveness, focus on short-term gains, etc.) may be the exact opposite of skills suited for managing.
The article's generalization from a specific employee type to all employees is unfounded.
It's universal across organisations: you need people management skills to be a manager, while most other positions require skills specific to their domain such as being a good confidence artist to make sales, being a good logical abstract thinker to be a programmer, and so forth.
Generally speaking, promoting someone who has great technical competence into a soft skills position is a recipe for disaster: you lose both a good manger and a good technical specialist.
The fundamental flaw is perceiving management as a senior role, when management is actually a subservient role to the rest of the organisation.
To go this route you'd need to delegate substantial decision making power for technical questions. Most companies don't do that, and plan to have unicorn managers with both skill sets.
The ratio of tech to people skills depends on the difficulty of execution. In the 90s when every tech company was a "hard tech" company you needed technical representation at a high level. Bill Gates would only allow former programmers to manage his programmers for this reason.
> 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.
Then how will we know who's better than everyone else and has "made it"? How am I supposed to validate myself other than by having lots of people "working under me"? The point of management is being able to tell people what to do, because they're beneath you. Also, being able to tell your friends and family you're Executive Chief Head Lead Architectural Director.
When you dont pay managers more, generally speaking people don't want to do it. Especially not well qualified people - and you don't want non qualified person there.
Managers get paid more because their benefit to the organization is that they amplify the productivity of the entire team (if they’re good). Of course there are many examples of bad managers where this doesn’t happen, but that’s the idea anyway.
You could say the same thing about Janitors or network engineers or devops, or many other positions in a company. If they're doing their jobs well, they increase the productivity of all other employees.
Managers might get paid more because they are a scare resource or for other reasons, but it's not just because they increase productivity.
Every job doesn’t get paid for the full value it provides to the company, otherwise the company wouldn’t be profitable, so saying that every job increases productivity is true to a point, but the scale of the increase is different. Only jobs that provide a significant increase in productivity or profits are the ones that benefit from higher salaries as a reward for that, like management and sales. Jobs like janitors, while they do provide some help in productivity, are also subject to market forces which keep the wages low.
And I didn’t say they get paid more just because of productivity increases.
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.
People tend to have a strong urge to avoid responsibility (and therefore making decisions), that's the whole point of having superiors. If everyone's fully responsible for what they do, they don't do their work.
Even an incompetent superior helps here, because at least in theory you can divert responsibility to them. It allows people do their work for the majority of the time when things don't go wrong. If they do go wrong, everyone gets to blame everyone else somehow, maybe the company tanks, but really life goes on.
You may point out problems here and there, but no other obvious alternative (like flat structures) are devoid of problems.
I'd be wary of solutions that take human responsibility completely out of the equation (such as AI). Sometimes a decision not made is actually for the best.
I think the idea is, rationalizing to one person, who can then represent your ideas to the many others with a vested interest, provides leverage to you as an employee (easier to convince one person than to convince every person). Of course, managers can do a good or bad job of this, and done poorly, can create more work for their employees.
Distributed decision-making works just fine without AI. As Marquet puts it: “move the authority to the information” (as opposed to the converse more typical of the hierarchical organisation). Read “Turn the ship around!”, also a great audiobook.
Military people applying their experiences to company leadership are problematic, because they worked with a selection of people that doesn't reflect the general population.
In the general population, not everyone wants to be a leader, not by a long shot.
I agree. However, I don't see any other way how to prevent players doing this except democracy - a system where every person has (prescriptively) the same amount of power.
However, many people reject the idea of economic democracy, despite studies showing that e.g. worker cooperatives often have higher productivity and despite the fact that we accept democratic governance as a way to operate the government.
Flat organizations aren't really flat. Instead of written org chart you have an unwritten org chart and it might be harder to replace a bad informal manager than a bad formal manager. See: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Democratic and flat is not the same (I was wondering if this confusion comes up). Flat doesn't necessarily prescribes what the power distribution is, but democracy does. On the other hand, democratic systems can have an organizational hierarchy too, as is a case with representative democracy.
I don't think anybody is rejecting the idea, it's just that it isn't considered as a default way to build a new organization. And it makes sense since, for a founder, you take on extra risk, put in extra work, and demand a lion's share of the rewards. It takes a special person to do the first two but not the latter.
If people were actively rejecting worker co-ops, you'd expect to see them failing in practice. But what actually seems to happen is, they're very difficult to start up, but once running, run effectively with little centralized leadership.
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:
>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.
The military approach is interesting in this regard - generally you have a "leadership pair" of officer+NCO; commanding officer + executive officer, with quite separate duties, one is responsible for planning and giving the orders/deciding what needs to be done; and the other is responsible for "managing the troops" to get that task done effectively and ensuring that they have what they need to do it.
Business, on the other hand, tends to conflate these roles in a single position.
> The other is ensuring the team is doing the right thing. The manager is in control of the team in this perspective.
This is what I consider to be the most important part of management. At a large company, you will have thousands of employees working on tons of different features and products and your job is to make sure everyone's incentives (usually through things like quarterly goals) are aligned to the most productive things while accounting for what everyone else will be working on.
I like to think of it as commanding a navy where individual contributors are rowers and managers are overseeing ships of various sizes (different products and features). The battle is constantly changing as some products fail while others are successes, new markets opportunities open up while others close, and good managers will monitor it all and rebalance/incentivize their workforce as necessary.
I wonder if ratio of business skill vs HR skill depends on how political the organization is and how much direct business-oriented impact the management position has on the organization.
And that makes me wonder if there’s a way to (partially) decouple management from power, at least for most managerial positions. Part of what attracts the wrong people to management, be they players or engineers with limited people skills that want to fix things, is power. Would it be possible to have a manager that only dealt with performance, personnel issues and resource management without having any say over what they worked on or how they did things? It seems like there’s elements of that already accepted as the norm (project managers, product owners, etc.) but the effectiveness of those positions varies wildly from org-to-org because of people managers. Sometimes they’re not even distinct roles because people managers won’t surrender any power.
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?
In a similar way, I know a lot of people who do their best to not look good for a promotion. Most of them are coders that do not want to stop programming and start managing teams.
> 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.
I don't the the implication is that it applies to everyone. I think the general idea is that in a large enough organization, there's going to be a relevant amount of people whom it does apply to.
(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.
> At my job, leadership and mgmt responsibilities are given before promotion
This is the principle used in the US military (at least, the enlisted ranks) as well - the promotion signifies not that the person is capable of carrying out the responsibilities, but recognizes that they are already doing so.
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.
The Peter Principle is about being promoted to a job that demands different skills. Athletes are promoted to jobs with the same skills, so the principle doesn't apply.
Does that really happen all that often? Pitchers are usually paid highly. Would a really good catcher get promoted to pitcher? Why wouldn't businesses treat it mostly the same? Of course sometimes people try out a new role, but if they aren't good they are often fired or go back to their old role.
> 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.
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.