The Peter Principle

In 1969, Laurence Peter published a book with a deceptively simple observation about how organisations work. People who are good at their job get promoted. As long as they keep performing well, they keep getting promoted. So they rise until they reach a role they are not good at, and there they stop, because you do not get promoted out of a job you are failing to do. Put sharply, in a hierarchy people tend to rise to their level of incompetence, and over time positions fill up with people no longer able to do them well. It began half as satire, but it named something people recognised instantly in their own workplaces. Later research has taken it seriously and found real support, notably a study showing that the best salespeople were promoted into management and then, on average, managed worse, because selling and managing are different skills and the promotion rewarded the wrong one. It is a genuine tendency, not an iron law, and well-run organisations actively fight it.

The skills that earn someone a promotion are often not the skills the new role actually requires, yet promotion tends to reward the old skill anyway, which is how people end up in jobs they are not suited for. Your best individual performer is not automatically your best manager, and moving them up can cost you twice, you lose a great doer and gain a mediocre boss. Before promoting someone, or accepting a promotion yourself, ask honestly whether the new role rewards what the person is genuinely good at, or merely what they were good at before. The two are frequently different, and mistaking one for the other is how good people get moved into roles that make everyone worse off.

The Peter Principle

Laurence Peter, 1969

Short, funny, and more accurate about promotion and competence than it has any right to be.