bringing sanity to the office
Question:
Managers, have you ever looked back and longed for the days when you could just do your best work and get stuff done? You’re not alone.
The Principle of Peter
A friend and I geek out about management. A lot. One of the games we play is picking apart phrases people use at work and wondering whether they mean what we think. We mostly debate corporate jargon like “bandwidth” or “touch grass,” which I think is akin to “smell the flowers,” but we weren’t sure.
Recently, we argued about one of the classic management phrases: The Peter Principle, coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. The basic concept is:
People tend to get promoted to a level at which they become incompetent.
If you’ve ever had a manager you felt wasn’t quite up to the job, you’ve probably experienced it.
But nearly 60 years after Peter and Hull introduced the idea, I think there’s another perspective worth considering.
Promotion as Policy
We all have career aspirations, and that may mean more money, influence, autonomy, recognition, or bigger problems to solve. And at some point, if you show enough know-how and success in your role, someone will take notice and want to reward you. And in many organizations, there’s a predictable way to reward high performers: promote them.
But many organizations aren’t able to give someone a promotion while keeping them doing the same work. The individual-contributor track eventually tops out, so the easiest option – perceived to be more prestigious, more influential, and better paid – is to move high performers into management. This is a design problem.
Former High-Performer
Recently, I was talking with Becky – not her real name – who had been promoted into a management role at a large company. She’d been excellent at her previous job, and the promotion was recognition of that. She was grateful for it but found the role challenging in ways she hadn’t anticipated and wasn’t prepared for. She felt like she was failing, especially with the people-management aspects.
This is where the Peter Principle tells only half the story. Becky was good at her job, and maybe she’ll be an excellent manager and enjoy the people side of things. But to advance within the company, she had one path, and it required her to stop doing what she loved and start managing people who now got to do it instead.
I call this the Petra Premise, meaning:
Organizations reward high performers by promoting them away from the work that made them high performers in the first place.
For someone who’s spent years becoming great at their craft, there’s a legitimate sense of loss in being asked to step away from it, even if it’s for what’s presumed to be a better job. They miss the work they used to do and start to struggle in the new role. From the outside, that struggle might look like incompetence.
It’s Complicated
Doing the work and managing the people who do the work are two different professions. Some of the skills transfer, but being great at one doesn’t automatically make someone great at the other. One can become a perfectly competent manager and still miss doing the work.
The problem isn’t always incompetence. Sometimes there’s a problem because companies bundle career advancement with people management, even though someone might want more money, influence, autonomy, recognition, or bigger problems to solve – without the responsibility of managing others.
So before promoting the next high performer to a management role, companies should ask:
Companies have a habit of assuming the answer to the first question is yes. And they don’t have an answer for the second.
Have you ever experienced the Petra Premise – either as a manager or working for one?