If you’ve ever worked in an organization, you’ve no doubt come across someone in senior management and asked yourself how they ever got promoted. The Peter Principle, coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, contends that, in a hierarchy, people are sooner or later promoted to positions which they are no longer skilled to handle. This is their “level of incompetence.” This is where they stay.James March offers some compelling insight into why this happens.I n his book High Output Management, Andy Grove points out that this is largely unavoidable because there is no way to know a priori at what point the person will be incapable of handling further promotions. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Ben Horowitz discusses the Law of Crappy People.
Source: The Law of Crappy People
Kevin, the peter principle is not about competence or incompetence which is why most employers still suffer with it.
The key challenge is handling the peter principle with real data – what, empirically, is your level of competence or incompetence? And how can you assess that and continue to make progress? Nobody has any defined limits, they just choose to stop growing or to grow more slowly or even to regress; and so the leader’s job is to encourage them to keep growing – ideally with a decent, objective set of data rather than opinions and factoids…
The Peter Principle need not be endured.
“there is no way to know a priori at what point the person will be incapable of handling further promotions.”
That is true for people for who don’t know how to assess for job talent.
The so-called Peter Principle is not a “principle” at all. it is a symptom of organizational incompetence when it comes to training people into their new managerial/leadership role. Akin to throwing a child into the deep end and expecting it to know how to swim. Death awaits. gurgle. gurgle.