The Peter Principle - The Level of Incompetence

Inspired & Credited by Boss's blog "Do you know The Peter Principle"

To be Frank, this blog I have to give all credit to the boss's blog which inspire me & understand "the Peter Principle" which is my compass where I should explore after this... Since this story is so impressive, thus I didn't interrupt my idea / words on it in order to learn from the original story.

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Do you know " The Peter Principle"? 

The Peter Principle formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull is the principle that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence."It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain.

 Peter's Corollary states that "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties" and adds that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence".

Why this phenomenon happens?

It will even happen to the persons who graduate from the same university and are deployed at a similar job. Normally, they will reach at the same level until 30 years old, probably manager or dept head position for a just less than 10 years after joining the company.

How about their position after another 10 years, in case that everybody has no special events like family issue etc.?

Some of them reach at general manager or Div head position, some are at senior manager position and surprisingly some of them are still at the same position as manager!

 I think this difference comes from the diverse job experiences. The more diverse job experiences the person has, the more successful his/her career is.

 When a person join in the new organization and start to do a new job, she should adapt herself to a new environment and get a new knowledge. So she learns new things, which will strengthen her ability eventually.

 If you stay at a same job, it is not so necessarily to get a new thing in order to complete the job. In this case, you learn less and go to a fascinating comfort zone.

It usually takes 18 months to be able to manage a new job. So it is an ideal to change the job contents each 3 years. It means that it is ideal to have around 10 different experiences during an entire company life.

In this sense, "job rotation" is crucial for talent development especially at the early time of the career.

However, the more capable you are, the more the boss wants to keep you with a seduction of the comfort zone. When you realize that you need a change after a long comfort zone life, it is too late to sell you to the other position.

OOTMAN WALKER
26 September 2012