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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 "Companies use outdated notions of succession to put people in these roles."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.
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 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.
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*)
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.