[REPOST - English Version] Have you reached your level of incompetence? The Peter Principle

In the cheerful digest collected by Arthur Bloch in his volume Murphy's Law (which I have already discussed in another article), under the heading Hierarchiology, an unidentified PETER'S PRINCIPLE is enunciated, which goes as follows "In a hierarchy, each member tends to reach his own level of incompetence." Two corollaries follow, which I will present shortly.

I confess that at first I did not pay too much attention to this supposed law of nature. There are two ways of reading a collection like Bloch's. One is to examine each individual entry, sequentially, weighing up its relevance, at least to our interests. The other is to browse quickly, at the risk of missing something important, but allowing ourselves the luxury of being guided by the inspiration of the moment. Except for deciding to return to the scene of the crime, driven by the vague feeling that something we glimpsed out of the corner of our eye deserves a little more attention. (There is also be a third way, which is to browse at random, jumping from page to page. But that would be asking too much of a soul deeply scarred by five years of rigorous engineering studies).

In hindsight, I must admit that the Peter Principle initially left me rather unimpressed. A statement, it seemed to me, not particularly brilliant, almost bordering on the obvious. So much so that, in my lazy glossing over, I idly wondered whether the "PETER" in the title should be pronounced the English way ([?pi?t?]) or, as I was inclined to do, the German way ([?pe?t?r]). We all have our own perversions. What's more, since some of the "laws" collected by Bloch clearly had their names invented by the author, I wondered if this Peter had ever really existed.

I lived with this existential doubt for several years without experiencing any major trauma. Until one day a slangy but very effective formulation of the "principle" (the cream rises until it sours) convinced me to investigate it further.

The first news is that our hero really existed. His name was Laurence J. Peter, a Canadian psychologist and academic. He had enjoyed a period of international fame in 1969, when, with the help of a journalist (with a satirical imprint) named Raymond Hull, he had published his heterodox ideas in a book entitled, appropriately enough, The Peter Principle (no less than one year on the New York Times bestseller lists). Which I hurried, a few decades too late, to buy.

It was well worth it.

Imagine an organization where new hires are selected from among the best graduates in various disciplines, trained, and introduced to the job through an elaborate common onboarding process.

Alexandra, an honors graduate in nuclear physics, immediately experiences problems with her work, despite her brilliant educational background. A theorist by training, an analytic by vocation, Alexandra finds too little rigor in the tasks she has to perform by her standards. Conversely, the problems she is confronted with often require a mental elasticity and a practical sense that her years of university study certainly did not provide. As a result, Alexandra is often late with her tasks and frustrated by the modest level of rationality she is asked to apply. And like her, her bosses will be frustrated and dissatisfied too. Alexandra, a super-competent student, is now an incompetent employee (at least as far as the work she is asked to do is concerned). Her career, at least in this organization, ends here.

But for an organization that boasts of picking the cream of the university crop, incompetents are just the tail end of the Gaussian. Which, in fact, includes other much more suitable elements for the job. For example, Barbara, also a very good student, turns out to be a very competent employee: her excellent problem-solving skills make her indispensable on many occasions, as well as much loved by her bosses. In fact, as soon as a team leader position becomes available, they recommend that she take the opportunity. But Barbara is a perfectionist; she is as demanding of her staff as she is of herself; it is not uncommon to see her stubbornly trying to personally solve problems that she should be delegating to her subordinates (who in turn stand idly by, arms folded, intent on watching her). While other "management" problems pile up unresolved. Barbara, an excellent student, a competent employee, is now an incompetent boss. She has gone a step further than Alessandra, but she too is halting her career in a position for which she is essentially unqualified. Like Alessandra, she will continue to harm herself, her co-workers, her peers, and her boss. She will not advance in the organization. Nor will she be able to go back, back to her own comfort zone.

You can easily continue exploring on your own. As long as there is enough time and they cannot be demoted, Carla or Daniela may climb a few more steps than their colleagues, but they will eventually get stuck at the first level for which they lack the necessary skills: their level of incompetence, as Peter calls it. In the author's words, "For each individual, for you, for me, the final promotion is from a level of competence to a level of incompetence. So, given enough time - and assuming the existence of enough ranks in the hierarchy - each employee rises to, and remains at, his level of incompetence." To these two conditions I would add one that was implicit in the culture of the time, but which, for the sake of clarity, is better to make explicit today: the impossibility of demotion: no way back. (This is not a detail. In China, where a large European company could not fire unpresentable workers - given the risk of dealing with the relatives of some local bigwig - the solution to "Peter's problem," inconceivable to us, was found in the possibility of moving workers back to their closest level of competence).

If we accept these premises, the two corollaries I mentioned cannot but follow.

1.????Over time, each position tends to be filled by a member who is incompetent to do that job (devastating!)

2.????All the work is accordingly done by those members who have not yet reached their own level of incompetence.

Paradoxical? Certainly.

Already seen, even in your organization? I wouldn't be surprised.

In fact, more than someone thought of it long before Peter. Without quoting the ubiquitous von Clausewitz, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed decades earlier that "all public employees should be demoted to the next lower organizational level, since they have already been promoted to the point where they have become incompetent. And fifty years after Peter, it is hard to argue that the principle has lost its validity. Much of the book would sound very relevant today, except for some of the language (not exactly politically correct) and the obvious obsolescence of some of the examples.

I will return in future articles to pick up on some of the themes that this genuine treasure trove of organizational wisdom hides under a delightful irony. For now, I just want to draw your attention to a few questions that acceptance of the principle necessarily entails.

Is the "Peter Principle" really true?

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I leave it to you to judge. In general, people who have written on the subject, even recently, tend to confirm rather than refute it. Laurence Peter, for his part, is categorical, spending the first few chapters of the book arguing vigorously that the principle admits no exceptions ("there are no exceptions to Peter's Principle"). And that what appear to be cases of refutation are in fact only apparently contrary to it, but in fact reveal themselves to be more subtle forms of "Peterism". Sure, the author plays with the reader, but not too much, I presume. That his assertions have been taken if only seriously is evidenced by the flourishing of variations and parodies of the principle: from Peter's Inversion (internal consistency is far more valued than an efficient service - within the hierarchy, of course) to Seth Godin's paraphrase of it (in any organization, everyone rises to the level where they are paralyzed by fear). Or, again, to Nozick's modification of Frey's modification of Peter's principle: people will have risen three levels above their own level of incompetence before their incompetence is unmasked.

What are its causes?

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Despite what is heralded, many organizations continue to promote people on the basis of past or current performance (when not for less noble reasons) rather than on the basis of the fit between personal skills and organizational role. In a somewhat narrow interpretation of the meritocracy mantra, performance and talent are often considered in a disjointed, if not antithetical, fashion, following the fads in reward policies. Today, in the age of analytics, it is not hard to discern a bias in favor of performance, in the (probably illusory) belief that it is easier and more reliable measuring the performance of someone we can observe every day than estimating how well he or she will be suited to some other role.

To make things worse, despite some recent organizational reshuffling, career lines have not changed dramatically from the past, and the promotions that carry the most value in terms of recognition and money are still those to a managerial role (which, unfortunately, because of the skills required and the scarcity of positions, are not accessible to all); or, to a lesser extent, to sales (with different but similar requirements). Ever since I started working at IBM in the 1980s, I have heard about the opportunity to equate professional careers with managerial careers, accommodating personal qualities irreducible to each other. But it seems that not much progress has been made since then, at least in our culture.

Which makes the brilliant solution Bill Gates proposes to Peter's principle at the very least challenging: "The art of management is to promote people without making them managers."

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What about the people?

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Assuming that Peter's Principle is valid, how should people, from HR professionals to coaches, support people facing - or aspiring to - a promotion at risk of competence->incompetence transition?

I look forward to your opinions.

For my part, I will limit myself to a few stray observations.

·??????Peter's principle amplifies its impact in situations where the need to promote people is particularly urgent. For example, when an unexpected resignation requires an unplanned replacement and external hires are not desirable. Or when the growth is so fast that the time to mature in the role is too tight.

·??????Besides organizational needs, the pressure to make promotions where not all competencies are verified also comes from the ambition of some people to move up the organization quickly. What is the best intervention we can think of, for them and for the organization? (I would gently remind you that one of the most common cognitive biases we are exposed to, overconfidence - the tendency to have exaggerated expectations about our competencies and abilities - is always lurking; and that the overestimation of our competencies is the higher the lower the degree to which we possess them).

·??????Full possession of all the skills required for a role may not always be necessary. Learning is possible, at least to some extent. And the best time for training is not before, but some time after promotion. This is when the motivation to assimilate tools is at its highest, not least because people have begun to face new problems and differences from their previous roles. But where are the institutionally mandated role transition courses?

·??????If I really had to name two skills that I would insist to be present in any candidate for promotion, I would ask: Is he or she able to scale in systemic terms (to move smoothly from a sector view to an interconnected view)? Is he or she able to scale in strategic terms (to move from an organizationally and temporally tactical scope to a strategic perspective)?

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Augusto Carena, [email protected]