The Peter Principle
From time to time I come across old ideas, often from different disciplines, that encompass phenomena that I experience in my professional life. It was a delight then to hear about thePeter Principle, on a recent podcast of the BBC’s Witness History (you canfollow this link to listen), from the world of management studies.
Laurence Peter was an educator who was frustrated with what he experienced as incompetence in hierarchies. He noticed that in any hierarchical structure, people talented at their job would receive a promotion to manage others in the same position. His frustration, as will be known to many of you, was that people who are good at their jobs are not necessarily good at the level above what they do: i.e. managing others who do that job. Management positions are very different roles and involve a lot more investment of time in the people in your team, building relationships and inspiring those around you to work together. Hence a woman who is excellent at selling cars will not necessarily be the best person to manage a team of people who sell cars.
Peter took this idea forward in an interesting way. He reasoned that people who are good at what they do get promoted. But when they stop being good at what they do, they stop being promoted. The Peter Principle then states that people are promoted in a hierarchy until they reach a position at which they are incompetent. Once they reach the level of incompetence, they will no longer be promoted, but rest in that position. According to the Peter Principle then, in any hierarchy we can expect that people in positions up the hierarchy are all actually incompetent at what they do, but would have been competent at the level below.
Douglas Adams had his own particular spin on this idea when he said:
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
It is never particularly hard to see that politicians have arrived in their positions of power through sheer determination and ambition. These are qualities that allowed them to get ahead of countless others both in party politics, but also in attracting votes. Yet, we see on a daily basis that these qualities are not what it takes to lead wisely.
The reality is that people get jobs and are promoted for all sorts of reasons, not purely for their competence in their current role. In academia, a strongly hierarchical system, we know that many academics are highly averse to being promoted away from positions where they teach and research as they are fully aware that they are unsuited to such positions. However, they may motivate very strongly to move into positions that have more power in order to choose the way in which they spend the majority of their time. But the oddities still exist: why would full professors have the lowest teaching load - surely they are the best teachers?
Perhaps where we see academics struggling the most is when they become heads of departments, deans of faculties, or managers of research units. Nothing in their background has prepared them for a role in management. Indeed, one could argue that becoming a good academic has involved a lot of movement away from any training in a management position. Academic departments need heads, and the head is always a senior academic, although not necessarily the most senior. Could it be any other way? Could the head of an academic department be a manager who represents the ideas and thoughts of the academics in their departments?
Nevertheless, academic institutions and funders persist with the notion that senior academics that are competent at research will make good directors. The reality is that competent directors make good directors, and academics will only be as good as the management team that supports them. In my experience, this regularly comes down to a single supporting individual, and if they leave, the resulting void is difficult or impossible to fill. Of course, Peter would say that if they are performing well in their job, then those in the supporting roles have not yet reached their level of incompetence, and so there’s a chance that they will be promoted away from what they do best.
Laurence Peter also had an antidote to the Peter Principle, and he called this creative incompetence: when you create the impression that you have already reached your level of incompetence.
So next time you view those higher up than you in the academic hierarchy to which you belong, remember the Peter Principle, and maybe spare a thought for those that support the academic figureheads.
Happy Birthday Mum!
