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Yes, You Can Blame Your Pointy-Haired Boss On the Peter Principle
Nerval's Lobster writes: You've heard of the Peter Principle, which suggests that all employees manage to rise to the level of their incompetence. (That is to say, everybody is promoted until their skills and strengths no longer align with their current position.) While the Peter Principle is often treated as a truism, a recent Gallup study (registration required)—the result of four decades' worth of research, involving 2.5 million manager-led teams—suggests that it holds a significant degree of real-world truth. "Gallup has found that only 10 percent of working people possess the talent to be a great manager," the study mentions in its introduction. "Companies use outdated notions of succession to put people in these roles." In Gallup's estimation, there are so many bad managers out there that one out of every two employees have "left their job to get away," according to the study. "Managers who are not engaged or who are actively disengaged cost the U.S. economy $319 billion to $398 billion annually." In other words, there are a lot of pointy-haired managers out there.
...the next pointy-haired boss might be you!
Slashdot comments... splitting hairs since 1997.
Been programming professionally for 18 years and have managed to keep out of the manager roll, where I have no doubt that I'd be truly terrible.
How many of the non-manager employees are rated as "great"? Surely not a whole lot more. Managers clearly have a greater influence, but any second-rate employee can be a morale killer that hurts the economy.
The idea is kind of outdated though. It comes from a time when people were promoted to management instead of like today, taking special useless degrees to become what they are.
Many years ago I was sent on a creative thinking course with some of my colleagues, with the theme being improving the organisation.
Two of the ideas we came up with: First, reviews shouldn't just be manager assessing subordinate, but peer to peer and even (gasp) upwards. Two, promotions should be provisional.
Needless to say, everyone said we were mental.
I thought 'Rising to the level of your incompetence' meant the more the opposite. Dumb-as-a-post employees either get fired or they possess, "soft skills valued in management" and get promoted. The more 'soft skills' (ability to bullshit, take credit for others' work, brown-nose, etc) the higher you rise. This article seem to imply that promotions are based on technical skill and that you get promoted until your skill matches your employment level. In my experience, that is almost never the case.
It seems like much less than 10% of working people would be qualified to do any given skilled non-managerial job. When most labor was unskilled you'd promote dirt-common unskilled employees to management if they demonstrated they had the moderately uncommon talent to manage. Now that most "labor" is actually highly skilled, you should get promoted from common manager to skilled worker if you demonstrate you have the rare talent to do that job. Managers should be lower-level employees who do the administrative tasks to free up skilled workers to concentrate on their valuable work.
The best way to understand the principle is to imagine the counterfactual.
When does a person *not* get promoted any longer? When they are not actually that great at the position into which they have most recently been promoted. At that point, they do not demonstrate enough merit to earn the next obvious promotion.
So, the cadence goes:
Demonstrates mastery of title A, promoted to title B.
Demonstrates mastery of title B, promoted to title C.
Demonstrates mastery of title C, promoted to title D.
Does not manage to demonstrate mastery of D = is not promoted and stays at that level indefinitely as "merely adequate" or "maybe next year" or "still has a lot to learn."
That's the principle in a nutshell—when you're actually good at your job, you get promoted out of it. When you're average at your job, you stay there for a long time.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
In most organizations, going along and not making waves is valued above everything else. The people who would make the best mangers are leaders, not followers. They make waves by challenging the old ways of doing things, so they are weeded out early.
The first line in TFS says "all employees" are subject to the peter principle. The rest of the summary seems to think it just applies to managers.
Why shouldn't the principle apply to all employees? From whence comes the assumption that engineers, sysadmins, and tech support drones aren't also promoted to the level of incompetence?
If nothing else this shows that managers serve at least one useful function: the whipping-boy for all workplace ills.
should never become an Admiral. Also why Kirk sucked at the position.
It's the manager who's TOO engaged.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I think that percentage is actually higher than anyone would care to admit. A lot of people leave their jobs because they can't stand their boss.
...wouldn't it be "You can blame your pointy-haired boss's boss on the Peter Principle"?
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
I had a manager who couldn't hear out of one ear, and refused to listen out of the other.
"People don't leave jobs, they leave managers"
All? Excuse me, but what does this 'promotion' word in which you speak of mean?
I have found that owners can frequently be worse than managers. There is also a trend for the main office to put conditions into effect that cause local mangers to be complete idiots. Quite often owners are so far out of touch with what it takes to get a job done that they create chaos and failure and managers and employees scramble to try to keep the business alive. One of the funnier things that I have seen is a meeting to plan the future meetings because the firm was having too many meetings.
Wasn't the original idea behind business school finding and training good managerial candidates (which are apparently quite hard to come by)? Not teaching piranhas how best to outsource the labor force and High Frequency Hump the stock market?
All I'm saying is, I agree that good managers are hard to come by, and maybe we should have a school for that.
Nothing posted to
I worked as a video game tester for six years. A fellow tester would get promoted to assistant lead tester, lead tester, and supervisor. Those who become supervisors think they're the best testers out of the whole bunch. Not exactly. One supervisor became the QA manager and discovered to his PHB chargin that the best testers got 50% raises. None of the supervisors have ever gotten a 50% raise. I've gotten two 50% raises as a tester and made more money than the guy who became the QA manager years earlier even though we got hired at the same time.
I seemed to gravitate to management where ever I went. I tried to do real work while organizing and directing the folks that worked for me. After almost 2 decades I finally got good enough at real work that they let me stop managing and just go back to working for a living. Much more enjoyable.
Then again maybe they realized I sucked as a manager.
Though since I'm doing a PhD I should really say 'advisor', but same thing. All he cares about is tinkering with his own research code, and because he has tenure he gets away with it.
He does nothing to manage or direct his students. I get emails forwarded from IT and when I see the datestamps I realize they've been trying to get a response out of him for two weeks. Our research group's momentum is best described as Brownian motion. Everything takes massively longer than it should; Every deadline when someone *else* expects us to have done something by a specific time results in last minute panic. There is no expectation or pressure to actually get anything done. No "I expect you to have completed X by $DATE." No "Everyone is going to talk for 5 minutes about what you've accomplished this week." He can't even be bothered to phone it in. The last time he gave a dept. seminar, I attended hoping to see something cool and instead I felt so embarassed-by-association I wanted to die (Not even black-on-white text slides - he spent the first 15 minutes reading paper references and handwriting them onto the board, long form).
I could rant/whine/cry about this situation for pages on end. But the bottom line is, I've more or less realized that not a goddamn thing is ever going to be accomplished here unless I not only remotivate, but take on being a research group manager as well. And I know painfully well that I'm NOT a natural manager so it's going to suck even worse.
The worst part is, angry as I am at him over all this, I fucking hate myself ten times more for being so goddamn stupid I didn't realize this until it was too late to leave.
The only bright point of my time in grad school so far was one summer I got sent off to a national lab to work on a project there; Suddenly, I had a manager who expected me to do things. Colleagues who wanted to build off my output. Who I actually had productive talks with over lunch. It was like life had meaning again. I was able to get up, work out for an hour, get home, shower, have breakfast and still be the early bird in the office and *I didn't even need an alarm to wake me up*. I hoped I could carry that reinvigoration back with me... proving the unlimited capacity of humans for self-delusion.
Obviously that did not occur, which is why I'm writing an anonymous crybaby post on Slashdot on a Thursday afternoon instead of actually working. Not like anybody around me gives a flaming fuck, after all...
I think referring to it in terms of disengagement they have neglected partial engagement or destructive engagement. When my manager is engaged to the point of asking me to have things done tomorrow, and has the mindset "if 1 woman can have a baby in 9 months, 3 women can have 1 baby in 3 months," his level of engagement becomes a destructive stressor. He is engaged to the level of wanting results and offering resources inappropriate to the task at hand, but not engaged to the level of understanding what resources are really available and what concessions he would have to make to meet his timeline. It does not seem proper to call him disengaged, yet he is not fully engaged, either.
The problem here is the assumption that because you worked in dept. X for years that you can manage dept. X. That coupled with the belief that management ability is innate rather than learned leads to people being promoted to management with no training, or the support needed to develop as a manager.
Seriously, give people training an mentoring! Nuffsaid!
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
I'm in the scenario where my work has continued to diversify to the point that my original strongest skills are now outdated. Truly the "jack of all trades and master of none" scenario. That has also put me in more of the position of taking on design and lead roles for larger projects where that diversity in skills is actually beneficial.
That also will mean heading closer and closer to a management position. I'm not sure this is too bad of a thing, honestly. I may not be able to sit down and directly utilizes the latest and greatest, but I do understand it, and understand it well enough to help others do that instead.
As my former boss--who originally wrote software for the Apollo missions--once said, the best advice he was given for management is that you didn't need to know how to do the job yourself, just how to find the right people who could do it and direct them as needed.
I just quit Micro^h^h^h^h for this exact reason.
Over a period of 5 years:
Hired in.
Report to a guy who looks 12, but turns out to be an Excellent Manager*.
Do my best work in a decade.
Excellent Manager reorg'ed from Inspiring General Manager to Disastrous Director.
Excellent Manager is driven out by political fuckery by Disastrous Director.
Disastrous Director is fired for malfeasance.
Inspiring General Manager won't come back, had enough, quits managing to do research.
Report to Microsoft Lifer, old EM's technical manager a who does a passable job leading.
Microsoft Lifer is reorg'ed under General Manager/Bottlewasher who can't stop micromanaging.
Lifer gets ruthlessly fucked with, has entire team's work credited to incompetent Level 67 Blowhard.
Lifer's team is reorg'ed under Blowhard, except for me+handful.
Old EM's peer Last Asskicking Manager quits because he won't work for Blowhard.
GM/Bottlewasher can't stop micromanaging everyone.
Lifer gives up and takes a non-mgmt job.
Report to McManager hired from military, who used to manage 600.
GM/Bottlewasher can't stop micromanaging everyone.
McManager reorg'ed, team reduced to 5.
Blowhard steals work output from McManager, leaving no credit.
GM/Bottlewasher lines up all resources behind Blowhard.
McManager demoted to my peer.
Report to new guy Perennial Survivor, brought in by another reog.
Lifer demoted to my peer.
Old Excellent Manager quits to work for Amazon, because it's saner(!!!).
Survivor admits 80% of Botlewasher's 2015-16 yearly plan is bullshit makework.
Fuck this noise, quit. Even a startup is saner.
*only one in 5 years.
It's easier for incompetence to hide in large enterprises. They used to write books about how great Redmond managers were. Now the entire enterprise is infested with pointy-haired, risk-averse, beige, wannabe-hipsters who can't make any decisions other than to stab each other in the back. And front. And sides. Precious few people do actual work, when so much effort is devoted to bad management and the shielding of productive people from that bad management.
I think not...(*poof*)
Thanks for clearing that up for us lads. Now go and continue that vital research regarding the wetness of water, the blueness of the sky and the greenness of grass and report back with some big colorful charts and a huge bill to cover the costs.
I believe the Peter Principal also ensures that the person who should make that decision is at their own level of incompetence.
"Gallup has found that only 10 percent of working people possess the talent to be a great manager," That about coincides with the percentage of great managers that I've worked with.
for the rise in incompetence and the immoral salary increases that have gone with it
selfishness, greed and irresponsibility undermine every society eventually
And their role. Sadly, many think it's their job to tell people how to do their job. A former boss of mine, who I owe a lot of my knowledge on management, put it best: When you're coaching an NFL team, you needn't tell them how to play football. They know that. You have to make sure they can do it.
Management is not about breathing down your people's back and crack the whip. That's not going to accomplish jack. Maybe it feeds your ego. Ok. But I don't care about your ego, I care about results. And results, you won't get that way. You will get workers that spend more time pondering how to find a new job without a gap in their resume rather than doing any meaningful work. Which will only tell those idiots that they didn't crack that whip hard enough.
Good management is not about squeezing your people dry and getting the last bit out of them. Good management means that this isn't even necessary to get peak performance. Of course, that means that the manager has to actually work rather than just sit or stand there and yell at people.
My job as a manager is to "pave the way". To clear out obstacles for the people working for me to make sure that they can do their job without interruption, distraction or stumbling blocks. I have to make sure they have the resources they need, timely and completely.
Yes, correct. I am working for them. That's the whole point. That's why I have the clout and the "power" that my position carries. They can't go and stand against a department head who doesn't want to cooperate. I can. I can make decisions and I can back them up. And I can get a decision from other departments and I can ensure that they will deliver. I can do that. They cannot.
Of course, cracking the whip and burning your staff is easier, and it sure will not make you appear "difficult" to your peers in management who have to deal with you instead of someone they can brush aside. But that is your damn job as someone who should manage his team. You're the manager not because you're the best in whatever your team is doing. You're their manager because you can get them what they need to do their job!
So do your damn job, manager!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Gosh the box of dangerous generalisations must have been on special this week in your part of the world. While many non-technical managers "will have no idea what their people are doing" that doesn't have to be so.
In my 25 year career I've had the pleasure of having two non-technical managers who were far and away the best managers I've ever seen in action. They used their non-techiness to their advantage and built high performing teams that would walk over coals for them. It's called trust.... "I know you are all supremely clever, and know stuff that I don't.... that's why you're the engineers. My job is to trust you all to do your jobs well, make sure nothing gets in the way of you doing your job well, and by the way you lot being a bunch of arrogant techie dicks, and ignoring me as a "non-techie girl" counts as "getting in the way of you doing your jobs well" "
And to the point of the original article - Two of the absolutely worst managers I've had were promoted engineers who weren't good enough to make it into the ranks of "chief engineer / consulting architect / great poo bah of technicality" and felt their only scope for promotion was to take on management. To the credit of one of them, he realised he was totally crap at this management lark, and re-trained. Over time he actually became quite a good manager - not great but pretty good.
The other doofus left in a hail of "thank god he's gone" and continued to wreck havoc wherever he went.
With today's diverse and specialized labor market a good manager can only effectively "manage" other managers. Their role today is more limited than what it was in the past, more akin the to team coach making sure the star players are effectively able to "manage" their performance.
discrimination of people with pointy hair
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
That said, it seems like the easy solution would be to down-promote this person one final time after reviewing their performance...
Now let's talk about this fabled review of performance: You're the newly promoted manager, and unfortunately you're crap at your new job. I'm the manager that promoted you into that new job - so by definition I'm crap at my job - and I'm doing the performance review.
The great conspiracy of mediocrity means that the unspoken sub-text of the performance review is: "We both know in our heart of hearts that we're crap at our jobs and if we could have our druthers, we would both like to go back to what we were really good at. But we're both trapped, we can't publicly admit we're crap, so we'll just continue to mosey along being mediocre at our respective jobs. Be a good chap and don't rock the boat, and who knows, hopefully there's another mediocre uber-manager who will promote both of us one last time"
A shortage of managers? We gotta import more! The PH1B program is born.
Table-ized A.I.
If you are not getting promoted you have already risen to your level of incompetence.
Of course you can does that mean it is actually true maybe \ maybe not - part of the problem may be you.
Top 10% seems about right to be considered great.
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on *his* pointy-haired boss!
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In my experience, companies don't promote people to having additional responsibilities before that worker has already proven that they are capable of handling those responsibilities, perhaps through a management training program. Such a promotion must actively be sought out by the employee.
The only other "promotions" that I know of are something like annual cost-of-living salary increases that the most respectable companies may offer to their employees, or else performance-based raises, which are not promotions either, being where one's duties and responsibilities remain essentially unaltered, but one has shown that they are providing a sufficient utility for the company to justify paying them more... generally because after factoring in training costs, the company feels they may have to pay more just to replace them and still get the same amount of utility.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I had a manager like that. She couldn't do anything herself but it never stopped her from pointing out how I was wrong or lying. But then she'd let the durkas (she was also a durka) stumble around for weeks on the simplest of tasks like it was no big deal. I used to pray that she'd fall down a well.
In all the years that I've been in the computer industry, I've only had two complete idiots in charge of me, and in both cases I resigned and found a better situation within a month.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Just another guy being excessively positive about Microsoft.
MIcrosoft Org Chart
I don't think the principle is meant as a critique so much as a statement of a regrettable tendency in the way that things in employment situations simply are.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
My boss was just promoted into management after 25+ years of doing situation management...so he has yet to reach his "Peter Principle" plateau. He's still very much involved in our work, we call him all hours of the night to get engaged in various outages. I did however recently see someone reach a bit past their Peter point and go from running all the helpdesks to trying to work on our front ends systems then to the unemployment line. Even more ironic is I had to endure them for over a year when I was on the help desk...she actually fired me, then to see her again in an "equal" position only to get fired a few weeks later was ULTIMATE KARMA.
Place I work at had a single manager over the entire department. Under two expansions, she still managed consistently good performance reviews and kept the idiocy of other departments at bay.
She was replaced by two managers. One was forced to retire early after a near fatal accident she caused, and the other...
There were week long celebrations after her retirement. I can only imagine it was similar to the relief felt when Carly Fiorina was drummed out of HP. It was that bad.
Now we have four additional middle managers. The entire department is a clusterfuck of miscommunication and petty turf wars. They haven't quite grasped the exodus that has been happening with people quitting, and certainly seem oblivious to the contempt the underlings have for them. Lawsuits are starting, and the complaints are written off as the disgruntled.
And of course, since we are short-staffed now with increasing demands, there is talk of... even more managers and dividing the department into smaller departments, since it is too unwieldy for 6 people to handle.
Fuck me.
Remarkably, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? demands that "dealing final blows" be praised as "saving" (short-term "rescue" entrenching the long-term demise AKA "Historic Turnaround"). The sections measuring the merits e.g. of OS/2 (and over the years, pretty much any technological asset) by the same standard as consumer packaged goods are particularly saddening.
Remarkably, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? demands that "dealing final blows" be praised as "saving" (short-term "rescue" entrenching the long-term demise AKA "Historic Turnaround"). The sections measuring the merits e.g. of OS/2 (and over the years, pretty much any technological asset) by the same standard as consumer packaged goods are particularly saddening.
Don't get me started on Lotus notes and what a cluster f**k that has become! Also , when your employees computer security becomes so tight that one can't even use installed programs needed for job functions because the permissions on the employee's computer was adjusted so high that he can't use Microsoft word to write up documentation to train the H1b's how to do their job in 3rd grade english, security is the last problem they should be worried about.. The need to pull a certain unused extreme upper body part out of a certain smelly dark lower orifice.. IBM could have continued to be a shining star, but the ship was not righted in time because the golden parachute jumpers were too busy playing the finger pointing game. Sad.
I'm a low-level manager at a great company as well. For leading a small team of analysts, this is probably not a bad place for me to be. However, I also find myself in need of a web developer who can bring database skills into the mix as well. Such talent will likely cost more salary than I am making, but other people such as my manager and the HR person are concerned that this is an unworkable situation. My response to this is a heartfelt "why?".
If the person bringing special talents to my team is worth x dollars on the general market, what possible difference should it make that he earns more than me in his particular role? My suspicion is that this attitude plays a huge role in attracting morons to ever more influence over other people to chase that dollar when what would be best for the company is for them to chase success in the form of individual contribution.
Is this just word salad? For the life of me I have no idea what you're saying.
To counter that I supply the almost exact parallel of Alan Jones - who knew fuckall about football, not even playing it at school, and took an Australian football team that was one the best in it's type of football (Rubgy Union) claimed a lot of credit when it won a lot after he'd barely turned up, then for some reason after he'd had some time there and got rid of the best players it didn't win any games any more.
To prove it wasn't coincidence he then took the second rank team in another class of football and ran it down to position twelve.
He's a bit of an infamous figure in Australia and a symptom of how much damage an "old boys network" can do when personal connections become more important than ability. If he was in US boxing he'd be the one that would sack Ali at the top of his career for not being "the right sort".
You need enough subject matter knowledge to know what questions to ask your experts - without that some situation is likely to come along and fuck you over.
For example, an NDT manager who worked in the same place as I did came unstuck because he knew so little about industrial radiography that he did not know that you have to clear people out of the way before you start irradiating things. Thus he quoted on a very large project (testing of welds in a blast furnace under construction) without factoring in that a great deal of it would have to be done at night. A couple of weeks of reading or just watching his staff work for a few weeks and getting them to explain things to him probably would have given him enough background for him to do his job instead of mass resignations leading to his firing because he tried to cut wages to make up the shortfall in his stupidly low quote. His attitude didn't help but it's a common one with self declared "professional managers" instead of a managers assigned to a specific group - he never admitted mistakes or ignorance and never asked for help when he was well out of his depth, despite there being nothing to lose by asking subordinates who expected to have to bring him up to speed anyway.
There are no magic words to shout at the universe to do what it's told and the closer management gets to technical issues the more it becomes clear that just telling people to "go do it" isn't going to work when you don't have a clue what "it" is.
The phrase 'Markov chain' comes to mind. :P Although I've got an old uni friend who did way too many drugs when he was younger. Some of his posts on Facebook look just like this.
To be fair, the original poster said it's easy to avoid being a bad manager, that's not the same as easy to be a good manager. There are very specific tendencies that bad managers tend to have.