A friend of mine touched a chord in my mind during the weekend when he mentioned Peter's Principle.
Peter's Principle originally published in 1969 declares,
"In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence"
In most of the companies, promotions are based on the performance at the lower level, not taking into account the ability and skill sets of the employee to perform well in the 'promoted level'. This leads to an employee doing extremely well, say as a Salesman, but failing miserably when he is promoted to the post of a Sales Manager, for the skill sets required for both the jobs are totally different. And incidently, work in an organization is normally done by those who have not attained their level of incompetence.
I remember couple of classic cases from my HPCL days. One was a senior ex-Caltex (HPCL was formed merging ESSO and CALTEX) guy, who joined as a clerk but later went on to become a hard working Sales officer. Towards the fag end of his career, he was promoted as Dy.Manager (I&G), where he was a disaster. His experience had all along been as a retail Sales Officer and he was totally ill equipped to handle the I&G sector. Also, he just did not have the managerial skills required to extract work from the younger high profile Sales officers..
The second was a ESSO sales officer, who had handled Coimbatore Sales Area for a decade, later came to the Region as the Regional Manager. Unfortunately for me, I was handling the same Sales Area. Instead of behaving like a Senior Manager, he started acting like a Sales Officer and started meddling in my day to day operations and showering favours on his old crony dealers. It took some deft politicking, blunt speaking (you might wonder whether a junior officer like me had the guts to take on my Regional Manager! but I was a brash wild young MBA those days who brooked no interference. In fact many of my old HPCL dealers whom I met recently couldnt believe that I have mellowed so much over the years) and fistfights to re establish my rightful authority.
It is noted that stable companies are more likely to have a higher percentage of incompetent managers as compared to fast growing companies. Companies dont make any effort to groom the employees to take over from their seniors these days. One of the reason is that, with employees jumping jobs at the drop of a hat, no one wants to invest on grooming a successor, for he is not sure whether the chosen guy will stay back or not. This leads to unprepared people being forced to take over additional responsibilities without having a clue as to how to go about it.
Another reason attributed to why Peters Principle is rampant in organizations is 'negative selection'. This happens when the person in top of the hierarchy is insecure and wants to enjoy the power. Towards this end, he chooses his next level of managers whose prime attribute is incompetence. The idea being that they must not be competent enough to move up and replace him from his post.
We see this in politics. Manmohan Singh was chosen over Pranab Mukherjee to be the Prime Minister because of negative selection by Sonia Gandhi. MMS do not have a mass base (he do not even dare to enter Parliament through Lok Sabha, but gets in through the backdoor Rajya Sabha way) and has always been a career beureaucrat, always obedient to the political masters. Another classic case was the erstwhile Home Minister Shivraj Patil- a classic case if ever there was one. The current Chief Election Commissioner and I suspect even the current Chief Justice of India are other two classic cases of Peters principle in work.
How do you avoid this trap? Look and plan ahead. See where you are headed 3 years down the line. Find out the skills, both hard and soft, required for the job and invest in training/acquiring knowledge. Avoid the PP trap.
