The Sunday News
HAVE you ever dealt with someone who just isn’t up to the job they’re doing and wondered, “How on earth did he/she get that job?”
If so, you’ve probably seen the Peter Principle in action.
The Peter Principle is a special case of a ubiquitous observation: I will look at it from a commercial perspective and state that anything that any organisational activity or resource that proves cost effective will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. This is the “generalised Peter Principle”. There is much temptation to use what has worked before, even when it may exceed its effective scope.
In an organisational setting, assessing an employee’s potential for a promotion is often based on their performance on the current job. This eventually results in their being promoted to their highest level of ability and potentially then to a role in which they are not competent, referred to as their “level of incompetence”. The employee has no chance of further promotion, thus reaching their career’s ceiling in an organisation.
According to Peter “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties” and that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.”
He noted that their incompetence may be because the required skills are different, but not more difficult. For example, an excellent engineer may be a poor manager because they might not have the interpersonal skills necessary to lead a team.
Rather than seeking to promote a talented “super-competent” junior employee, Peter suggested that an incompetent manager may set them up to fail or dismiss them because they are likely to “violate the first commandment of hierarchical life with incompetent leadership: (namely that) the hierarchy must be preserved”.
Here are the core principles of Peter’s bungling world of management:
1. When you’re great at something, you might get rewarded with a promotion . . . into something you’re terrible at. A typical example, Peter said, is if you’re a great rule-follower who suddenly is placed in charge of making rules and decisions. You may well freeze up in your new role or gum up the productivity of everyone else.
2. Once you’re promoted to your level of incompetence, you probably won’t get fired and replaced with someone more competent. Instead, others will work around you. Why aren’t you fired? Perhaps because you probably know too much about your boss’ business to be booted out too casually. Or because people have sympathy for you because you’re working so many hours. Or because the people who are supposed to judge you have reached their own level of incompetence, and damned if they’re able to realise how unproductive you are. So you now have reached the ominously termed station called “Final Placement.”
3. When you’re competent, even a dummy can see your output. And you’re being rewarded for that output. But once you’re reached incompetence, there’s little or no output from you. At this point, you’ll be judged by your input — by how early you arrive at the office, by how cheerful you are, by how you’re a good citizen. Rest assured, incompetence is usually not enough to get you fired; only “super-incompetence” is enough to get you fired. And, ironically, “super-competence” will get you fired too, because now you’re just making everyone else look bad. As Peter said, the hierarchy must be protected at all costs.
4. Incompetence is perhaps inevitable. So you have to decide whether you want to rush toward the oblivion of Final Placement (it does have its share of perks and benefits, after all). Or you have to decide whether you want to forestall it as long as you can.
5. If you do decide to rush into a sterile future, Peter said you need to exercise the power of “pull” — by attaching yourself to superiors who can help pull you up quickly. And he offered some unnervingly witty advice on how to manipulate them into a promotion.
6. If you’re smart enough to realise that you don’t want to be pulled up the ladder to career limbo, you’ll find a happy place where you can be productive and useful, and you’ll fight like hell to avoid getting promoted.
You can’t just refuse promotions, Peter said. It creates too many problems. Instead, you have to fight incompetent fire with incompetent fire, by mastering the art of “creative incompetence.”
This magnificent, high art involves pre-emptively scuttling your chances for promotion. You do this by demonstrating incompetence at something irrelevant, something that won’t get you fired, but which will get you removed from the short list for upper management. Peter offered a few helpful suggestions, such as being marginally rude to the boss’ spouse at the holiday party, dressing just slightly inappropriately, or occasionally accidentally parking in the CEO’s spot.
7. Because incompetence is inevitable, we shouldn’t be trying to fire all the incompetent managers. We’d only replace them with deadwood anyway. And being a social species, we realise these people have families to feed, cars to buy and vacations to take. They’re job-creators, if you will. Peter argued that incompetent people will do the least damage to competent people’s productivity if we maintain the benign illusion that they’re useful and have a bright future.
There’s a humble and light Zen wit to Laurence Peter’s philosophy. We’re human, in the end. The Tony Robbins types try to sell us the life-hacks, the super-food diets, the meditation techniques and the mantras to transfigure us from mortal to immortal. That only sets us up to fail in a different and delusional way.
Let’s allow Peter, from the introduction to his book, to have the final word:
If man is going to rescue himself from a future intolerable existence, he must first see where his unmindful escalation is leading him. He must examine his objectives and see that true progress is achieved through moving forward to a better way of life, rather than upward to total life incompetence.
Man must realise that improvement of the quality of experience is more important than the acquisition of useless artefacts and material possessions.
He must reassess the meaning of life and decide whether he will use his intellect and technology for the preservation of the human race and the development of the humanistic characteristics of man, or whether he will continue to utilize his creative potential in escalating a super-colossal death trap.
Man, on occasion, has caught a glimpse of his reflection in a mirror, and not immediately recognising himself, has begun to laugh before realising what he was doing. IN OTHER WORDS WE DO NOT OFTEN CARRY INTROSPECTION OF OUR CURRENT SELF AND ACTIONS. ‘‘UKUZINUKA AMAKHWAPHA’’ It is in such moments that true progress toward understanding has occurred.
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