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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 "Companies use outdated notions of succession to put people in these roles."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.
there are two bedrock norms in America that cause all sorts of distortions in the labor pool:
* you can promote people but not demote them
* you can give people raises but not cut their base pay.
As a result of these norms, it's easier to fire 10% of your workforce then lower all pay by 10%. Similarly they can cut benefits (ie by lowering their retirement contribution or increasing health costs) which is effectively a salary reduction. If you're hourly they also will cut back your hours, but not your pay.
This is how societal norms distort what economists like to imagine is the free market.
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
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.
The Peter Principal is commonly misunderstood.
TFA is accurate but your restatement of it isn't quite right.
You have the skills to do a good job, and you get promoted. That keeps happening until, eventually, you are promoted to a level where your skills aren't quite good enough to meet the requirements. That's where your career plateaus.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
As a result of these norms, it's easier to fire 10% of your workforce then lower all pay by 10%.
I know this may be the exception that proves the rule, but my former company did just that; across the board 10% pay cut to the entire organization, including management. Every one of us hated it, but the smarter of us did realize that it probably saved some peoples' jobs. It had the unintended side effect of taking top performers and encouraging them to perform at 90% (or less), however...
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.
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 work in an organization that struggles with this. One of my guys is a very competent technical resource who deserves to be paid more than we are "allowed" to pay him based on his current title / position. Our company is a consulting company and the compensation model was designed to reward managers who are leading large teams of people on client engagements. The model is not flexible enough to reward people in technical positions who do not have direct reports.
In order to hack the system, we had to setup a bunch of dotted line reports for him on the organization chart. He does not technically "manage" them because he is not responsible for performance reviews and all of those other fun managerial tasks. But since he could technically delegate to them, they count towards his head count requirement.
So instead of climbing the ranks 'til they are useless, the go right from MBA degree to useless?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've never worked anywhere that, if 'they' could identify the right 10%, they wouldn't have increased productivity by firing them.
Companies that fire 10% per year are idiots (the whole place starts politicking the system) but to think that an occasional house cleaning isn't needed is foolish.
The first 'fire 10%' is an opportunity.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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*)
his is how societal norms distort what economists like to imagine is the free market.
That is why there are two areas of study micro-economics and macro-economics. On the micro-scale, it usually is better to fire 10% of your staff. After all the people who are working hard and doing good work usually know it. If you give them a 10% pay cut they will be butt hurt about it, they won't work as hard, or do as good a work. You will most likely see a greater than 10% loss in productivity.
On the other hand hand if you fire 10% of workforce, those that "survive" will feel threatened and if anything the need to continually show how valuable they are. You probably see less than a 10% decrease in productivity, over the short term; inside the limited scope of your organization.
Now on the macro scale all the other firms out there do essentially the same thing. When hiring starts up again its done at the new wage level the market has valued the skill at. So the prevailing wage ends up just at the value supply and demand expect. Economics works you just have to be careful not to zoom in to much when applying maco-principles or zoom out to much when you try and use micro-principles.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
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.
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.
I've worked for one company that I thought did a rather smart thing: They separated out the "manager" and "boss" roles.
So they had one person, a "manager", keep an eye on people, keep an eye on projects, allocate resources, and basically manage the group. The "boss" was a rather technical guy who was not good at managing, and did not want to manage, and who mostly worked as part of the team. The "manager" was treated more as a resource to keep the group working effectively, and really wasn't "in charge". For any substantial decisions, the manager would discuss it with the boss, and the boss would make a decision.
Admittedly, it was a small company doing a rather niche set of work, but it worked really well. There seemed to be something to the idea.