1d ago

It's not illegal to be ineffective

55 comments

can't wait to be accused of being a collaborator just because i've been peter principled into a position i don't understand
- That’s the neat thing about dictatorships, your behavior is completely irrelevant to how you are treated. If they want to end you, they don’t need a justification.
- They can't fire you, because it would mean they have to fire hegseth with his "flawless opsec"
- peter principled?
  
  The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
  
  Thank you for telling me that the Peter principle wasn't named after Peter Griffin
  
  The Peter Principle is a concept where people get promoted up to their highest level of incompetence.
  If you're good at your job, you get promoted. If you keep being good, you keep getting promoted. But eventually you land in a position that you're not good at.
  
  The Peter principal is the idea that anyone good at their job will keep getting promoted until they are no longer any good at the job they were promoted to. The idea is that anyone who has been in any position for any significant amount of time must be terrible at it otherwise they would have gotten promoted to a different position already.
  Personally I think it definitely applies to some people but I don't believe it's the universal rule people make it out to be.
  
  In my experience it most efficiently explains lower and middle managers who were internal promotions from the ranks of non-supervisory or regular staff.
  In some jobs, like academia, you will run out of regular promotions and will just end up plateauing, especially in salary. The only way out of this is to become a manager of some sorts: department head, assistant manager, section head, project manager, etc. or to do a lateral transfer to a different job where you can renegotiate salary, benefits, and job description. Or in the case of true academics, supplement income with book tours, speaking fees, consulting, etc.
  Some of the worst managers I’ve encountered were people who had been doing their jobs for about a decade and needed that “promotion” to management to get a raise or move away from a job they physically or emotionally couldn’t do anymore.
  But bad managers are a bell curve with MBAs and career management types on one end and “Bob, who finally got that promotion” on the other.

55 comments