Peter Principle

It’s almost the end of the year and if you are a manager of people you may be thinking about:

📊 How your team have performed

🏆 Incentives/Promotions

🎯 Objectives for 2025

Maybe it’s all these things. Either way, it’s important to remember the ‘Peter Principle’.

Dr Laurence J. Peter wrote his best seller in 1969 which delved into ‘Why Things Always Go Wrong’.

The 'Peter Principle' goes broadly like this:

1. Sales person does really well in role, beats targets and clamours for a promotion.

2. In order to keep the colleague happy, they are promoted to being in charge of the sales team.

3. They continue to be promoted to the point at which they are no longer competent.

4. They are no longer promoted, thus leaving them in an ineffective position.

5. The organisation suffers from ineffective leadership.

Sound familiar? I'm sure we have all seen this happen, I certainly have. It’s a tricky cycle to stop.

Dr Peter did offer some guidance:

📖 Before promoting someone send them on a leadership course in order to prepare them for the new responsibilities. This allows both the organisation and the person to be aware of what their new expectations will be.

🤔 Rethink how you are doing promotions. Don’t just assume that a person doing well in a role will translate into a great manager of others doing that role.

This last point is key. I can name on one hand the amount of great football coaches who were great players and vice versa. Also, for example, a sales organisation, it is key to recognise that by taking a great sales person away to do more management, that it could be counterintuitive to making more sales!!

I’ll leave you with some wisdom from Dr Peter:

“The noblest of all dogs is the hot dog; it feeds the hand that bites it.”