The "Peter principle" rests on the assumption that organizations are rational meritocracies, and will reward people that are competent at their given task. And those organizations may (still) exist, but they are not the norm, at least not in my experience.
I propose another, more important, principle as an explanation for the obvious incompetence of many managers:
Competent people are a source of pain to higher levels of management, because they don't just say "yes boss", they will tend to point out the risks of flying blind, offer a better solution than what was recently clubbed at the board of directors meeting, and have ethical guardrails regarding what chemicals to put in the product, how to treat coworkers, etc. They are brilliant at their tasks, but have opinions that go beyond their designated area, they are expensive and demanding. And they usually end up getting the can, with or without a severance pay. And the incompetent, but "yes boss"-employee gets the promotion instead.
There you have it.
This is, fortunately, not my experience. In all of my jobs, the most highly regarded people, including by management, were/are those who have an informed opinion and are confident enough to voice it, and potentially take responsibilities outside of their job description in order to steer the business in the direction they are convinced is the right one. Note that this handful persons I am referring to _also_ accept criticism and correct their understanding when new information ia given to them: they are not dogmatic jerks. Actually, all my managers were this kind of person, with crazy ideas and not affraid to disagree with anyone.
I also had one colleague who was brilliant and had strong opinions about the product, which were expensive and demanding, and was affected by a lay off wave. I think him being original, not "focusing on the core product", and a strong character had something to do with it, so of course it happens.
The other side of the coin is the needlessly defiant people. These believe themselves to be those that "have an informed opinion and are confident enough to voice it", but in reality they just disagree with everything and everyone except themselves. From a third party's point of view they're easy to discern, however.
Oh those people disagree with themselves very often, that's how you can recognize them
Finding a reason to echo someone's own opinion back at them after a suitable time where they've forgotten they voiced it is a very effective test for disagreeableness, I've found. You don't need to chase them down about the contradiction. Just note it and take appropriate future actions.
It can even be a bit amusing, if they are insulting about it, to watch them vigorous call themselves stupid for expressing their previous opinions.
I find many of my previous positions to be stupid.
Right, as should we all. The key question is, when you're confronted with one of those opinions, do you defend it, deny it, or renounce it?
Agreed - and you will find not a single living person will pass this test over time. Therefore, it's a worthless, but deeply amusing, test. Human ignorance is so pervasive it even applies to people like you :)
I can tu quoque right back at you; can you conceive of a person who expresses some opinion (and this includes technical matters, things within the scope of your job, opinions you are being paid to have, not just random political things) only and solely because it is their real opinion? No, if you came at with me with my own opinion two weeks later, you would not find I have radically shifted very often, and even less often without realizing I've shifted, and virtually never insulting whoever held the opinion I held two weeks ago.
I don't base my opinions on whether or not I get to contradict someone else. Clearly some people do.
I'm probably one of these defiant people, so I want to speak in their defense.
I really just want to be heard. I want to be heard and have a response from someone who has comprehended my point of view and fully engaged with it, but that rarely happens.
At my last job I was defiant because the company was storing plain text passwords and PPI in the test database, and every developer had access to it (I'm certain there is a reader of this comment whose password I had access to along with a good amount of PPI). I said this should be fixed but nobody really engaged with what I was saying; we had important product enhancements to work on. So I got defiant and pushed really hard and burned some of my political capital, made myself appear a trouble maker in some people's minds, and in the end the PPI was removed from the test database. This caused the test environment to break and some tests needed to be fixed. They still store plain text passwords though, because that assumption was spread throughout the code. I would have continued pushing to do the work and stop using plain text passwords, but I was laid off.
If a company prioritizes profit over ethics you will find trouble makers who are justifiably defiant. Judge for yourself how many companies do that.
The bottom line is that you failed to achieve the goal you set out to achieve and got laid off.
How is that ”speak in their defense"? Can you think of an alternative approach that would have delivered the result over time without you loosing your job?
It's also necessary to be able to accept that others have other opinions and that to make progress everybody needs to be pulling in the same direction. A decision must be made and most of the time it's not going to be exactly what you're convinced is the perfect direction. Yet, having said your piece and perhaps having influenced the direction, it's necessary to then support the final decision even if you don't precisely agree with it.
A large proportion of people with the qualities you describe are unable to do this, and therefore tend not to be highly regarded by management.
Of course if you consistently find yourself at odds with the eventual direction then you're better off being elsewhere.
The problem here being that if you are competent you’ll find it a strain to work in an environment that (often) does not listen to your advice, even if that means everyone is pulling in the same direction.
It’s nice for everyone else if they’re all contentedly pulling in the wrong direction, not so much for the one that sees that direction for what it is.
In that case how are you sure that you are correct and everyone else is wrong?
Experience. Can only suffer from imposter syndrome so many times before you start to see a pattern.
Of course, any given instance may be right or wrong, but the balance of probability has shifted.
It’s especially egregious when you have literal years of experience with a subject and some person without any of that makes, or gets people to make decisions their way instead.
And you may be right and you may be wrong. But you'll probably be happier if you go elsewhere.
I'm happy for you. I have also had such workplaces, healthy and dynamic organizations. Are they in the majority, or somewhere in the middle in a normal distribution? Not sure, but my guess is not.
My experience in very large organizations is that, other than CEOs who can go either way, the very top levels are extremely bright, surprisingly well-adjusted people. Tensions arise because, from the perspective of the senior leaders, VPs and below are indistinguishable from the most junior employees, while from the VPs’ perspective they are themselves senior leaders, leading to all sorts of friction.
It’s a bizarre environment and I cannot believe how much time I’ve spent in it.
Sounds great! Care to share the places you've seen this at?
You absolutely have people who are very competent but just not interested in what management (rightly or wrongly) thinks should be the current priorities. Sometimes things advance to the point where there's no longer a good fit. Not necessarily anyone's fault but it may be time to part ways.
At the risk of seeming like an asshole:
I think for every highly competent person who just lacks a bit of social graces and is unfairly punished by a defensive bureaucracy, I have encountered many more incompetent people who, due to Dunning-Kruger, don't recognize their own incompetence, and instead ascribe the rejection of their (mediocre) ideas to the unfair defensiveness of the bureaucracy above them.
Or, in meme form: https://imgflip.com/i/8ks5kq.
How have you ever gotten the full story so many times to know that these people exist in such numbers? You'd have to hear their bad idea (apparently be intelligent enough to understand them completely) and then you'd also be there to hear them griping and blaming management and again finding their complaints uncompelling.
Hmm, let me put it this way:
I have often run into people who seem to think management is stupid for not accepting their idea, which they then explain--and which I also think is a bad idea.
Maybe I'm also just dumb, though!
I consider myself one of these people (let's say above average competency). I don't think management is stupid for not accepting my ideas. I begin to have an issue when they disregard the concerns my idea was meant to address. Too often, it feels as though they choose the path which leads us straight into what I think are clearly foreseeable and avoidable problems, and then I'm at fault for describing them as such after the fact.
Amusing anecdote: On average, people think they are above average.
This isn’t meant to respond directly to your statement because I’ve seen the same thing. BUT one fascinating thing I’ve learned is how scale plays into things. That $50 million project may be a Senior Director’s most important, career-making project … but less than a rounding error to their EVP.
Dunning-Kruger seems like an overused framework to explain just pure "lack of self-awareness due to immaturity / ego / lack of intelligence, etc."
Not to mention that if someone isn't a psychologist they shouldn't be spouting off about the Dunning-Kruger effect anyway because arguably they don't have enough competence in that particular domain to be able to talk about it intelligently.
I don’t think the takeaway from the Dunning-Kruger effect is "don’t invoke basic aspects of human nature on internet discussion forums unless you’re a trained academic psychologist"
Isn't people who don't know enough about Dunning-Kruger confidently spouting off about it...sort of evidence of Dunning-Kruger?
I kid of course. Or do I?
Hell, I have a PhD in psychology and I don't know enough about this effect to talk about it intelligently.
You are right of course, I am myself a living proof of that, and I would not wish it on my worst enemy organization to give me a promotion. That said, this doesn't really explain why so many incompetent people end up being promoted, which Peter (I believe correctly) documented. His theory is admittedly a bit more elaborate than mine, but it obviously builds on an endearing naïveté regarding the nature of organizations, especially large and mature such.
1/ it’s not rational to promote someone competent at their tasks
2/ there are either ways to reward than promote to a higher level in the management pyramid
Hence it's not rational for an employee who wants to get a promotion to be competent at their work.
I've seen this happen. Start pushing off the work of the old job and doing the new job before the promotion.
And that's why the GP's #2 is so important.
Organizations where it exists tend to work much better than the ones where it doesn't.
At middle management levels that approach may be the way it works, because of the incentives.
But once you start presenting to board rooms and people who have zero skin in the game of office politics, but 100% skin in the game of the firm’s profits (and more broadly firm profits at large), you absolutely will not succeed unless you are delivering value through competence
I've definitely worked for people who violated that rule to the detriment of the company. They could _appear_ competent, but in my view, corroborated later by the view of the market, they were actually not.
It still works that way for anyone who values anything else above profit. If you believe ethics are more important than profit, the board won't like you.
My experience is that people being good at the job tend to be promoted to managerial positions, but being good at certain tasks does not make you necessarily good at managing people, even if they just do these very tasks.
I also have been in companies with two career paths: managerial and technical, both respected and rewarded, to the point you can be paid much higher than your boss if you are senior and performing. Might not work in every sector/size though.
IMO, most orgs believe more in scaling via adding people vs scaling via tech.
This doesn't discredit what you say. It does, however, explain why it's much easier to move up on the management ladder vs the IC ladder.
I'll add on to your point: moving up the IC ladder is often slow because it takes more to both become an expert in a field and to prove it to your leadership. Each step up the IC ladder is harder to actually obtain those skills, and harder to prove that you have obtained those skills to management.
On the flip side, the management ladder is more delivery focused (though not exclusively): are you getting your team to get their work done? It's somewhat easier to demonstrate success on the management side, and because you're leading a team, it's possible (though not necessarily true in most cases) for a manager to get promoted on the strength of their team and not their ability as a manager.
Rational meritocracies do not exist in the present, have never existed in the past, and will never exist in the future. However, the idea that a meritocracy can or does exist is a useful tool for those with leverage over others. It justifies their decisions, which in reality simply boil down to a combination of their "gut" feeling and what they can get away with socially given their position in the hierarchy.
you seem very sure of your declarations here; im not sure you've looked too far beyond your bubble. i have worked within a rational meritocarcy for the past 15 years.
You're confusing competence with disagreeability.
I want to agree because I see myself in this, particularly the conclusion of the career arc, but I try to remember that market conditions are beyond my control and aren't productive to dwell on.
I had a boss who cut his teeth at one of the largest AEC firms in the US. He frequently said, "the two most dangerous people are an incompetent that everyone gets along with and the highly competent that nobody gets along with. Both can destroy an organization." I knew who he had in mind on the former, which I thought was pretty callous. I realized that he saw me as the latter after I was fired.
I think we should not infer rules about business behavior from market forces because management in large organizations have enough insulation to develop their own hard to explain customs.
Isn't this just another definition of the original principle. People rise to the level where their noise is just enough to not worry the people promoting them i.e. the lesser their noise is the more they will be promoted. What you are offering seems like an explanation rather than a new observation.
I agree, but I think it's even more subversive. Large corporations tend to develop internal fiefdoms with rules that aren't always aligned with the larger company's objectives. These fiefdoms develop unspoken rules, which competent people tend to question. "Why are we padding every task by 75%?" "Why are we saying X tasks are 'hard' and require additional staffing when we know they're easy?" These new unspoken rules misalign rewards.
Competent individuals often question practices like these and are either coerced into submission or shown the door. This leads to a gradual subversion of the corporate culture, transforming what was once agile, resourceful, and, importantly, truthful into a culture of internal lies and self-deception. "Everyone lies on this report, so you must too. Everyone exaggerates their evaluations, so you must as well. Everyone inflates sales predictions by many multiples; you must do the same." Rewards given under the de-facto misaligned system favors the incompetent. This further estranges competence from leveling.
the stares at goats principle has been in effect most of my career... and this is not me saying "I'm so smart" - I'm really not. I do care about doing the basics well. But that's asking too much of a lot of organizations.
This is true, but it's also subjective. The question of competence and correct behavior is subjective. There could be validity in the "yes boss" perspective. I say that despite having a very strong bias against the "yes boss" personality myself.
Ultimately both sides of this need to approach with humility and understand how little they can see and influence, and how all perception is subjective.
Fits the MacLeod/Gervais pyramid of losers / clueless / sociopaths.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
> Competent people are a source of pain to higher levels of management, because they don't just say "yes boss"
This sounds more like they aren't competent at the kind of politicking and development of political capital required for middle management.
In other words, someone competent is promoted and which they are incompetent at because they lack the skills necessary for the new job - the Peter Principle.
Hmm, that’s a great summary of what I meant when I recently told my coworker I couldn’t help him because I’d recently burned through all my political capital.