I must admit that I have encountered a few meanigful instances of "The Peter Principle" througout my career. The concept seems amusing; in the author's words: “You will see that in every hierarchy the cream rises until it sours.”
In short it goes like this: an employee performs well, is rewarded with a promotion, excels in that role, and is promoted again. This cycle continues until the point where the individual is no longer performing at a level deserving of a promotion, leaving them at a level where they are overmatched by the demands of the job—essentially, "incompetent."
Two simple observations:
- This is not a law - it does not invariably and inevitably reflect how organizations work, or society at large for that matter. It is intentional, a result of a certain way of doing stuff commonly referred as Culture. To illustrate (from my experience): the best salespeople generally become the worst sales managers. Removing a high-performing sales associate from the line potentially upsets his client relationships and puts the revenue of those accounts in jeopardy.
- Hierarchy is not the villain. It is easy to blame the hierarchy as the root cause of the problem. But this is s shallow analysis. Hierarchies, properly understood, are a natural phenomenon: if I am a good developer this will likely establishes me as a leader.
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