The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
#2The dots on the plots tell an even more compelling story than the fitted lines.
Re: The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
#3The dots on the plots tell an even more compelling story than the fitted lines.
Wow, indeed! That outlier at the 5-ish% sales mark needs more study.
Re: The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
#4The corollary to the Peter Principle, I think, has always been that it's caused by bad management. Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy. You are not considering the person/what they're good at. You're just using an easy shortcut to reward them for their performance.
One problem is high-contributing ICs who think they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reason: it's how things are done, they really want to do it, etc. There needs to be a separate, equally status-conferring, career track for them if they're really not going to be good at managing people. They need to be convinced that the best thing for them is to stay where they are, being awesome. Which is probably hard. The idea that you are awesome, therefore you become a manager, get an office, etc. is pretty pervasive.
(The bonus would be that those of us who never, ever want to be managers no matter how much our directors want us to would have that career path available too.)
Re: The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
#5The corollary to the Peter Principle, I think, has always been that it's caused by bad management. Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy. You are not considering the person/what they're good at. You're just using an easy shortcut to reward them for their performance. One problem is high-contributing ICs who think they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reas…
My favorite thing is seeing people I wouldn't hire to be a low level IT tech as CIO/IT Director because they're a "network guy".
So not only do they end up not understanding 90%+ of IT's functions in any real sense, they are typically not even trained on how to manage.
I work with one such moron at my current job. The entire company goes around the fool, yet they keep him. Why? The acting CEO is likely embezzling and competent IT might shine a light on it. That and the CEO outsources work to her husband's company for 10s of thousands a month with no deliverables or results (beyond what I suspect is the normal embezzlement in other areas).
I've been in this field for ~25 or so years. Maybe I'm jaded by working in consulting/contracting for most of that (and working for myself). I have never worked with an IT Director or CIO that I would personally hire for my own business in that entire time. Being technical enough to make the right decisions and having enough managerial experience/knowledge to be a good manager at the same time is extraordinarily elusive.
Another question is, how do people hire a CIO, when they themselves don't understand IT (or even want IT it seems). They guess or outsource it. I've never seen that work either.
Re: The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
#6Re: The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
#7The dots on the plots tell an even more compelling story than the fitted lines.
Wow, indeed! That outlier at the 5-ish% sales mark needs more study.
Hypothesis:
High outlier @5pctl - outstanding graduates groomed for management.
Low outlier @10pctl - family/friends/favours groomed for management.
Re: The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
#8The motivation, and reason for their perfomance, of some "high performing salespeople" might be to get out of the ditches and into a comfy management job. They might not be able to keep up such a pace for long, but consider it more of a sprint. In other words, the direction of causality might be inverted.
Re: The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
#9The corollary to the Peter Principle, I think, has always been that it's caused by bad management. Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy. You are not considering the person/what they're good at. You're just using an easy shortcut to reward them for their performance. One problem is high-contributing ICs who think they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reas…
I don't care about status so much as compensation. With most IC roles, you cap out pretty quickly in salary and equity pretty quickly regardless of performance.
If you want better money, or just to get paid the equity you're worth, you are forced into management roles.
Re: The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
#10The dots on the plots tell an even more compelling story than the fitted lines.
Wow, indeed! That outlier at the 5-ish% sales mark needs more study.
It looks like evidence of the Dilbert Principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle