Show Notes
In this episode of the TTL podcast, Andy and Mon-Chaio answer a listener’s question regarding the Peter Principle and how to avoid its effects. They explore the origins of the Peter Principle from the 1969 book by Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, discussing its implications for organizational hierarchies. The hosts examine various examples and research findings that both support and challenge the existence of the Peter Principle, including a detailed look at a study on sales organizations. They also provide actionable insights for leaders on how to recognize the symptoms of this principle in themselves and their teams, and share practical strategies to ensure promotions are done thoughtfully. Listeners will learn a surprising method called ‘Creative Incompetence’ as a tactic to avoid being promoted beyond their competence level.
References
- The Peter Principle – https://keinding.com/onewebmedia/The%20Peter%20Principle%20%28%20PDFDrive%20%29.pdf
- Promotions and the Peter Principle – https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/134/4/2085/5550760
- The Peter Principle: A Theory of Decline – https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/379943
Transcript
Andy: Welcome back to another episode of the TTL podcast, where Mon Chaio and I discuss ancient papers and figure out how they apply to your modern life.
In today’s episode, we have a listener question. How do you make sure that you’re not falling victim to the Peter Principle?
Mon-Chaio: The Peter principle.
Andy: So, we’re going to talk about what is the Peter Principle, and what can you do with this knowledge of what it is.
Mon-Chaio: So Andy, I’ve heard the Peter principle in passing a lot throughout my leadership career. And honestly, while I saw that there was anecdotal evidence that the Peter principle exists, I always thought this was kind of one of those things with, ah, I mean, is it really a principle or did somebody just make it up?
Maybe Scott Adams drew it one day in Dilbert or something and then people, it’s passed into vernacular. So I was interested when our listener submitted this question to really dive in and say, okay, what is the Peter Principle? Is it even real or is it just something that society kind of made up and people ran with it?
Andy: Well, let’s talk a little bit about what it is. So way back in ancient history, 1969, uh, in the Summer of Love, Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull published a book called The Peter Principle. And, the Peter Principle, the Peter in The Peter Principle is Lawrence Peter. And the book is, in some ways it’s a satirical book, but it’s, it’s kind of more of a tongue in cheek ha ha, just only serious book looking at the way in which organizations operate and specifically looking at how hierarchies operate. he creates his new area of scientific inquiry called Hierarchiology, I think is what it’s, how it’s
Mon-Chaio: Yes, that’s what he mentioned. Yes,
Andy: This, this new science of studying hierarchies. And this isn’t just like they made up this book. I believe they are researchers and he had done some research and it came up with these ideas.
And so he wrote it up into this somewhat sh strange book, really.
Mon-Chaio: right. I mean, the book doesn’t read like research. There’s a lot of interesting, interesting, what would you call it? Insights, I guess, uh, that he puts out. Um, but it’s actually a pretty quick read. Uh, there’s pictures. Um,
Andy: The pictures really made me think of I was reading a Dickens novel. There was, there’s something about them that that’s what it gave me the feel of.
Mon-Chaio: I can see that. , Is the book out in public domain now, do you know?
Andy: No, it’s not. I just, if you Google it, you can find a PDF of it online.
Mon-Chaio: There you go. Great. I don’t, I guess if you search for it, you can find it. I guess we can link it.
Andy: I mean, I got it from Google Scholar. So if Google is going to link to it, we’ll link to it in the show notes.
Mon-Chaio: All right.
Andy: I’ll use that as my, as my litmus test of, are we going to get in too much trouble linking to it?
So we should probably say what the Peter Principle is, Mon Chaio, before we go too much farther into this. What is it that we’re talking about?
Mon-Chaio: Right and I don’t have the exact definition pulled up here from the book and the research papers will have a different one um, but I think it’s to summarize the peter principle is that everyone will be eventually promoted to their level of incompetence
Andy: I’m trying to find it in the book,
there it is. In, in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Now, the reason, and as you said, in research papers, you’ll find it defined differently. And the reason for that is because they need to come up with a definition that’s kind of true in principle to this, but can be operationalized, can be turned into something that they can measure. And so usually they’ll, they’ll rejig it a little bit, um, but they’re all basically the same.
Mon-Chaio: And you can see why, even though this was a satirical book, that the principle itself is so, is so popular, is so intriguing, and is talked about so much. One of the things I think people love to complain about the most to their spouses, at dinner parties, at social gatherings, is the incompetence of the leadership of their organization, whether it’s their direct manager or their CEO or the like, right? And so immediately then you can use this term, the Peter Principle, it’s well, of course, the Peter Principle. Of course, the CEO is incompetent. Of course the CTO is incompetent.
Andy: Yeah, because, well, because they were promoted there. So that means they’re incompetent, right? Right. Right. Can, can we take it that simply?
Mon-Chaio: In some ways you almost can take it that simply, , if you believe, , Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. But I think there’s a little bit more nuance to it. We can’t just say everybody that occupies all positions in a hierarchy by definition are incompetent.
Uh, first of all, because. Easily enough, you don’t know if they’re done being promoted, right? Uh, they say that you will continue to be promoted to your level of incompetence But if you have promotions to go then you’re probably competent because you don’t promote incompetent
Andy: Ah, but you do.
Mon-Chaio: that’s
Andy: they can’t, they come up with several things because you might say, okay, well, we can find out who’s incompetent because they’ve not been promoted away from that position. But he points out, no, no, they can still be incompetent and be promoted because they The organization may still have competent people who have to do things to get to deal with the incompetent people.
And the possibly only acceptable thing for them to do is to promote the incompetent person into some position. that they can be harmless in.
Mon-Chaio: higher position he mentions or a Sideways position.
Andy: He calls, he calls the sideway position the lateral arabesque
Mon-Chaio: Yes, he does.
Andy: and, and the, uh, higher position the percussive sublimation.
Mon-Chaio: You can already get a sense of the tone and wit. Can I, can I call it wit? I don’t think it’s wit.
Andy: I think it’s dry humor.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, uh, of the book. Mm hmm.
Andy: but the, the, I, I thought there were some interesting things that he also brought up and not only these, this analysis of different ways that people can move in the organization, but also, he has a couple of corollaries. of, of the principle. And one was in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.
Okay. And, and I think a key there is that it’s in time. It’s not immediate.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: It’s just it’s kind of like entropy. The system tends toward entropy. The system tends toward, positions are inhabited by incompetent people. And the other one that I, I took a note of was, work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
Mon-Chaio: Right?
Andy: And I think that’s what a lot of us feel, that, oh, yeah, I’m getting work done and all of these other people around me aren’t getting work done and they’re just incompetent.
Mon-Chaio: And a lot of people feel that about leadership, right? There’s the common trope that managers, that those who can’t do, teach, manage, and managers and leaders are incompetent, and if they would just get out of our way. We could really get some good work done.
Andy: And I can see where that comes from. I actually had a comment from someone I was working with. It was the first time they’d had a manager who knew how to program. They said, I’ve never had this before. None of my managers have ever been able to do this.
Mon-Chaio: I’ve had somewhat of a different experience where I’ve tried to teach and they’ve looked at me as if I were some voodoo magician of sorts. How many lines are you going to delete right now? No, no, I don’t, I don’t feel comfortable about this.
Andy: and I think in some ways we’re, we’re, we’re be, we’re victims of the. people’s belief in the Peter principle, that those people who are promoted above them have been promoted to their level of incompetence. But, just because you’re getting promoted doesn’t mean you’ve, uh, you’re still competent.
Mon-Chaio: Sure, right.
Andy: He had a thing called Peter’s nuance and the nuance is exactly this It’s that some people may be getting promoted even though they’re incompetent Some people may be getting promoted because they’re still competent but those two people may have the same reaction the same day to day kind of like psychological or physical reaction. Because one of the things he talks about in the book is that people getting promoted to their level of incompetence is not just bad for the organization it’s bad for the person because they probably know that they don’t know what they’re doing. And that’s just holding them back and draining them. And they’re like having, heartburn and indigestion and ulcers and it’s just not good for them. But a competent person who is pushing themselves even harder, who’s like trying to figure out how to get this new thing done, but they’re still competent.
They’re just learning a new job. They’re pushed beyond their current comfort zone, can have very similar reaction where they’re feeling a lot of stress and they’re, kind of uncertain what they’re doing. And so Peter’s Nuance is about how do you tell the difference? And he says, you need to ask yourself, is the person accomplishing any useful work?
And he says, if the answer is yes, Then this person has not yet reached their level of incompetence and therefore exhibits only the pseudo achievement syndrome. If your answer is no, then this person has reached their level of incompetence and therefore exhibits the final placement syndrome. And if your answer is you don’t know, then you have reached your level of incompetence. Examine yourself for symptoms at once.
Mon-Chaio: I don’t know that I’ve seen a ton of examples in my own experience around people who actually realize that they’ve been promoted to their level of incompetence. And maybe that’s because According to the book, they’re only in their pseudo levels, perhaps. Um,
Andy: that they’re in their pseudo levels, or it could be that through those pseudo levels They associate those exact same things. with being at the pseudo level, because that they’ve gone through several levels of that. And now they’re just sitting in another level of that and not noticing that actually now they’re just incompetent.
Mon-Chaio: Right. And I think what I see most of is the Dunning Kruger effect, which is people not knowing that they’re incompetent and not knowing what they don’t know. I think that is more common to me in what I see. So he’s right that it doesn’t just affect the organization. It can also affect the person being promoted.
And maybe that’s a maybe there’s cultural differences behind that too. We talked a little bit about that on the podcast, but perhaps maybe the Dunning Kruger effect exists more strongly in certain societies and the self reflection of, Oh, I’m so incompetent. Um, exists in others. I don’t know.
Andy: I mean, he’s America in the 19 well, late 1960s. So it could be a very particular cultural thing there. And we’re
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, and, and time based, too, right? Well, in America in the, you know, late 1960s, early 1970s, was not the same as the United States now, either. Both in culture, work style, and that sort of thing. But I think, um, at least to me, one, I kind of liked his writing style, and I thought it was funny. And so, It made it really easy to get into his idea, uh, and believe in them, right?
Which is probably why no one believes in our ideas, Andy, is because we don’t come across as funny or interesting.
Andy: we need to come up with a way of doing this is a slapstick show.
Mon-Chaio: right. Um, I think our editing program offers us some, uh, like slide whistle,
Andy: Oh,
Mon-Chaio: sound effects and stuff. So should we put those in or? The comedy laughter soundtrack. What do they call that? Canned laughter or something?
Andy: yeah. The laugh track.
Mon-Chaio: laugh track. so I did agree, uh, I did enjoy reading the book, and anecdotally, it feels about right. One of the things that I latched onto was this concept he called the Peter Invert. Peter Invert. This person that has started to just follow the rules of the hierarchy
Andy: Right.
Mon-Chaio: in order to get promoted because the rules of the hierarchy are what their leaders care about and what their leaders, and that’s how that person is going to get promoted.
And working in larger organizations, right, hierarchies, sometimes smaller organizations exhibit less hierarchical behavior. But working in larger organizations, I saw a lot of that. A lot of people that wouldn’t question the strategy, wouldn’t question the technical direction. And would just simply execute as their leaders wanted them to execute.
Especially in these organizations where those execution plans were clearly laid out in a promotion
Andy: Right.
Mon-Chaio: Hey, I’m going to get you promoted in eight months. This is the steps to do it. So then this person, what they do is they simply just execute those steps without really considering whether they are right or wrong for the organization.
So anecdotally, I think I think I’ve seen that. I think a lot of the principles in the book resonate. But Andy, as our listeners know on this podcast, that’s not enough for us, right? To say we feel like it exists and we’ve seen three examples of it. That means it’s universally existing. That’s not enough for us on this podcast.
So is there something more that we can help our listeners to talk about, about does this thing actually exist?
Andy: Well, you asked that question. I don’t think it was a genuine question. I think you know the answer. So yes,
Mon-Chaio: Of course.
Andy: yes, there is some evidence that it might actually exist, but I also know that you maybe have some evidence that it might not exist. So let’s go into the evidence that it does exist first. And this one was a research paper.
They, they did a survey of sales organizations, sales groups. And you might say, but, but Mon Chaio and Andy, we’re, we’re in the software development space. Why are we talking about sales? Well, I actually liked this research paper for so many reasons. And one of them was that they gave a very clear explanation of why for such a broad thing, did they limit themselves to only looking at sales?
And their, their reasoning was, one, they’re studying, companies in the U. S., 9 percent of the U. S. workforce is employed in sales positions of one form or another, which I thought was interesting. That’s a huge number. The other one was because sales is so metrics driven, they could more easily answer the questions that they had.
Because the question that they had, and this goes to their different way of defining, the Peter Principle so that they can turn it into a measure. The, the questions that they had were, is it, is it that a high performing salesperson gets the promotion or do low performing salespeople get the promotion?
And then they had the secondary question or the second question, which was, what is the effect of managers on a sales organization or how can you measure the effectiveness of those sales managers? And they came up with, uh, some surveys and some other measures of things. through a series of that information and some pretty hefty statistical modeling, which as I went through it, I, I, I’m not a statistician, but I looked at it and I was like, well, that I understand at least the concerns that they’re putting together.
I will leave it to a statistician to say whether or not they incorporated that all correctly, but it seemed, it seemed reasonable from a lay perspective. They put all that together and they, they tried to answer this question of. Is the Peter Principle real? And to cut a long story short, the answer was yes.
The higher performing salespeople were more likely to get a promotion even when they had a measure of the person’s likelihood of being good management. So they kind of like, there’s their sales ability and then there’s a bit of their ability to manage a group, which is what they would be promoting into.
And they had measures of both. The, their ability to manage was not predictive, but hitting their sales goals and their sales performance was predictive of them being promoted. And they took this
Mon-Chaio: Promoted into leadership
Andy: to get promoted into leadership, into management positions where they would, they would manage a team of salespeople, I think is what it was. Their, their definition was firms who promote workers who excel in their current roles at the expense of promoting those who would make the best managers. So that, that’s their kind of framing of the Peter Principle. And they found that yes, that is true. And I thought it was actually kind of damning what they found because they, they even did a model of if you had used, they had to do this, uh, counterfactual hypothetical, uh, situation.
If you had taken those people who were more likely to be better managers rather than the people who had been the best salespeople, they think that that would have accounted for 30 percent of the productivity of those sales teams. So by promoting people based on their sales numbers rather than their ability to manage, these companies are sacrificing around 30% of their productivity. But this doesn’t mean that it is it that it is irrational for the companies to behave this way because you have to think if Mon-Chaio, as you were just talking about, it’s like, well, there’s, you gotta play the game. What is the game? And people like the game. So if the best salespeople want to get that promotion and they’re like, you better promote me because I’m the best salesperson. Their game is going to be, if you don’t promote me for that reason, I’m going to leave. So you can’t, you can’t hold on to your best salespeople because they want that promotion if you go with a system that doesn’t promote them.
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: what they found was, workers are much more likely to leave the firm if a teammate with worse sales performance is promoted. 12 months after the promotion event, higher performing sales workers who were passed over for the promotion are 23 percentage points less likely to remain with the firm. So if you try to do this, like ultra rational, I’m only going to promote exactly the people who should be the best managers. You might end up losing also your best people who you want to remain just doing the work.
Mon-Chaio: I really did like that study too. I, we kind of came across it separately and when I first came across it, I was skeptical. I was like, well, okay, so what a sales organization, and then they’re going to somehow measure management potential, quote unquote. How do you measure that? And then they’re going to figure out whether promoting for management potential or sales behavior had a bigger effect on the organization But the more I read it the more convinced I was that although no paper is perfect Especially when you’re studying humans like this and no statistical models are perfect I felt like they had a genuine interest in trying to dig into this issue, um, and had a good way of thinking about it.
And for that, for the most part, I believe their numbers, right? And I can see their reasoning and the reasoning seems to make sense in my mind. And that seems to be a good proof point for the existence of the Peter Principle.
Andy: The, the, the thing that I question about the, the paper
Mon-Chaio: Mm
Andy: last bit that I said about that if you don’t promote the high performers, they’ll move on to somewhere else. I wonder how generalizable that is. From sales to other, other kinds of work, specifically to software development.
Mon-Chaio: hmm. Well, especially with software development, having these sort of dual leadership IC tracks, which I don’t really know for sales organizations, but it doesn’t, my understanding is that this is rare outside of software.
Andy: I think, I, I, I don’t think it’s common for sales as well. So we’ve got that. We’ve also got that, and we’ve talked about this, it is so hard to come up with a metric to say, I’m the better engineer or I’m the better engineer. Whereas in sales, it’s, you look at the numbers, how, how many sales did you, how, what was the value of the sales you made?
They’re, they’re, their work very quickly turns into proof is in the pudding. You, you brought in half a million dollars last quarter, whereas in, yeah. But at the very least, they’re very much incentivized based on that number. And so their entire, their entire ethos from what I’ve seen of sales organizations is like, watch those numbers.
Mon-Chaio: And I think it’s probably easier to correlate the success of those numbers to affirm success. I think there’s less gaming of those numbers, right? When you sell something for half a million dollars, it kind of means what it means. Yes, there’s nuance. Maybe you sold features that don’t exist and the customer comes away angry and then gives feedback to other customers.
But those nuances are much, much smaller than in software. Where you say, Oh, well, did you deliver this feature on time on budget or did you not? And what was the quality bar? So I think, uh, in that way, measuring sales organizations is easier and makes a lot more sense.
Andy: Well, and also when they do, do that, uh, selling something you don’t have, normally it’s the product department that is the one that gets blamed for that, not the sales department for selling it.
Mon-Chaio: right. That’s right.
Andy: I question that generalizability. Can we take that exact result and say that it would play out in the same way?
And I think it’s one of the things we’ve talked about before is like, you don’t promote to a leadership position, your best engineer, just because they’re your best engineer. You promote them because it seems like they would be a good leader.
Mon-Chaio: And I think a lot of organizations, at least the ones that I’ve worked in, I feel like I understand that. They have different competencies and different tracks for both IC and leadership. Interestingly though, there are a lot of organizations that do not understand that. And most people don’t really get a view into this, right? You spend your career at what, six companies, ten companies, and uh, a lot of the time if you’re in a competent organization, you end up going to another competent organization simply because, you know, your friends went there, your, your managers went there, or whatever.
But when you do, Technical due diligence is like we do, Andy. You see a lot of different companies and a lot of different verticals at a lot of different parts of the world. And you get a sense that, yeah, there are a lot of companies, even in software that still say, well, you were a very successful engineer, now you’re going to be engineering manager.
Andy: and there, right there, I think we can even use the dynamics of the Peter Principle to explain what’s going on, and it doesn’t take big theory. It’s often, the company is starting out, and if they didn’t start with some, technical co founder who had gone through leadership positions before, they are immediately in a position where they’re incompetent to judge
who is actually good at leading a technology organization? And so what do they do? Well, they work off of what their notions are, not studying it, because they’re probably a, as you said earlier, a bit of Dunning Kruger effect going on. They’re not even quite aware of their level of incompetence in this.
Sometimes they are. I sometimes have seen them go like, I don’t know what I’m doing. We need to get someone in to help me, please. But more often it’s like, Hey, look, no, I’ve, I’ve got a, I’ve got a startup. It’s going, it’s good. We’re getting, we’re starting to get investment money. And so they kind of start creating this belief that they know what they’re doing.
And, and what starts happening is underneath them, they start growing an incompetent organization because they don’t have the competence to understand what the competent organization looks like. And I think we’ve seen, we’ve both seen that many times when we do our technical due diligence, which is why I think, at least for me, when I write them, one of my most common, things that I say in them is, You don’t have enough experience to do the growth that you’re planning on.
The very first thing you need to do is get some experienced people who have done this before.
Mon-Chaio: There are pieces of research that suggest the peter principle is but a necessary outcome of having promotions And I don’t know the background of this person But they put a huge mathematical formula and model in there of which I understood I don’t know maybe 30 of it. But the, the basis of their theory is that workers are promoted because they have what they call a sum of both permanent and transitory components and those who meet the standard of that sum end up getting promoted.
So, permanent components you can think of as things that are, will carry you through. Maybe hard work is a permanent component. Maybe technical ability is a permanent component. Transitory components. They don’t define as much, but uh, if you think about like, uh, things that might be just there for a specific amount of time.
Uh, so they use a example in restaurants, for example, a transitory component in a restaurant might be the current head chef. If the head chef leaves and a different head chef comes, the restaurant becomes less good. Not through anything of, not through any of the permanent components, but because of a transitory component.
So workers getting promoted, transitory components might be. The time, right? They’re working on AI today and that worker was particularly skilled in AI and the AI field. It might be the customer. The vertical that they were working was automotive and that person had a particular passion for automotive, but now they’re working in marine or something like that.
They say that when a person is promoted, there’s both the permanent and the transitory components, and those end up adding up to a person being promoted, but they posit that in a new role, especially at the start, the transitory component becomes zero, and it’s only the permanent component that takes hold.
And so therefore, because of regression to the mean, their performance is necessarily lower. They also argue that that’s not a bad thing, because companies build that into their performance model. And so when they know that the transitory component between the previous job and the promoted job is large, Right, which is where the Peter principle would manifest itself the most. The bar from promotion becomes even larger. So they say, well, you have to have a huge transitory component such that when you get promoted even if that transitory component goes to zero, you still sort of meet the minimal bar necessary to exist at that promotion level. So that is their argument, that for every hierarchical promotion standard The Peter Principle must exist, not necessarily because of anything that is defined in the book, but just simply because of the fact that the jobs are different, and there is time difference, and that it’s not a problem because we could just raise our promotion bars, and people eventually, by average, meet the right bar, and companies will, by average, figure out how high they need to raise that component bar, such that they don’t have a bunch of incompetent people occupying those positions for extended periods of time.
Andy: Right. And I would say as a model, I think, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s really interesting. That makes a lot of sense. But the thing that they seem to have left out and forgotten is that people have wishes and desires. And, and so like that in, in that sales one, that sales article about, well, but if you don’t promote them, if they feel that they’ve done this stuff, then they’ll go looking somewhere else.
And so you’ve got this downward pressure of all of the organizations because promotion, and I think this, this is probably the key. Promotion is reward in, in most organizations, a promotion is a reward and it’s a reward for being a good employee or being, doing a job well. And I’m not saying that this is the right thing.
I’m just saying that this is kind of, I think, the thing that exists and that they’re, they’re kind of, they’re trying to fight against, which is, they’re trying to say promotion is a reflection of your abilities. And personally, I agree with that. That’s actually how I try to do promotions as well, but it’s in a constant tension with the societal, the cultural belief that a promotion is a reward for being, having been around for a while and doing a good job.
And so, uh, one of the ways I see this play out is, uh, a lot of software engineers wanting to become like a principal engineer.
The, the harsh reality, at least as I see it, is that most software engineers aren’t principal level engineers and may and probably will never be. And so there is a level of competence. They can, they can be senior engineers. They can be competent at that level. Moving up to that, to that higher level may be seen as like, that’s the reward for knowing so much about the domain and knowing all of our applications and knowing how all of this stuff works.
And then thinking, well, that makes me a principal, but it doesn’t. It it’s being used as a reward for that other thing.
Mon-Chaio: I agree. And I don’t think we can really get away from that because I think I agree with you, Andy, that promotion shouldn’t be used as a reward. It should be used as a reflection of ability. And by reward, I think let’s talk about the easiest tangible reward, which is money, right? Everybody understands money as reward. And so you might say, well, I can definitely solve that by having some other reward structure in place. So senior engineers, after working for six years or eight years, can continue to grow their money, their annual total compensation, without having to be promoted. That’s great. I agree with that. And then you can say, well, then the people that meet the principal bar will get promoted based on their ability.
I agree with that too. I also happen to be a very strong believer that the higher you go in an organization, in this case, principal engineer over senior engineer, or vice president over line level manager, The more impact you have on an organization, the bigger your scope and breadth of impact. And because of that, I think organizations necessarily must compensate those at higher levels more
Andy: Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: because they can have more impact or more both good and bad. And so, in that case, to me, a principal engineer, in your example, necessarily, generally makes more than a senior engineer. Now, maybe not a year one principal engineer may not make more than a year 30 senior engineer. On average, principal engineers must make more than senior engineers based on the impact they’re able to deliver to the organization.
And so, while there may be smaller rewards, And you don’t have to get promoted. I think everybody wants to look upward, right? Okay. Well, I’m getting a 10 percent raise, but if I could become principal engineer, that would be 20.
And I don’t know that you can really ever get around that, that human nature
Andy: No, no,
Mon-Chaio: even if you were to build.
What would be a mathematically perfect promotional a reward of promotion structure.
Andy: absolutely. And, and, and I think that’s the thing. And I think that’s probably the thing that they’re missing is that, yes, you, you can have that mathematically perfect explanation of the way promotion works and that if you just raise that bar, it’ll all be fine, but you’re missing, well, actually the entire analysis of the Peter principle.
Which is that it’s about the human nature of what people are trying to do and how things work out and And the I think that was that the paper as well that they talked about demotions that you should see more demotions
Mon-Chaio: That’s
Andy: you don’t see demotions because a demotion would be a loss of face. That would be someone having to say, it’s, it’s not only a loss of face for the person and no one wants to cause someone else to lose face.
We protect ourselves from that. It’s, it’s a loss of face for the person who had promoted that person in the first place to say that they had gotten it wrong. And so there’s all sorts of stuff counteracting that, which is why there was the Percussive Sublimation and Lateral Arabesque techniques to deal with people that you don’t have to go through a demotion.
Instead you go with those, these other things. Mm hmm. Mm
Mon-Chaio: And what andy is mentioning is the paper posits that if promotions were done as poorly as the peter principle posits, then we should see as logical organizations that there would be more demotions than recognizing that these people are actually draining the company instead of adding more value, and they would be demoted back to the level that where they can add value, right?
So it makes perfect sense in a non human system of I want to act the most efficiently, as effectively as I can, uh, in a mathematical sense, but certainly not for a human system. What does this mean for leaders of software organizations? What does it mean for them personally? How can they figure out, Oh, wait, wait, wait, I need to examine myself for the Peter Principle. And what does this mean more holistically if you are hiring a software organization and you’re thinking, well, we’re going to grow 3x over the next five years.
What do they have to do to make sure, tamp down the Peter Principle and make sure that they have competent people working in as many positions as possible?
Andy: I’m going to say that in both cases they should do the same thing. And that thing, I’m going to, I’m going to make it very simple for everyone. I’m going to say that thing is actually go and find this book and read it and pay attention to the descriptions of what the incompetent looks like, because it can show up in many different ways.
It can, it can, uh, manifest itself in, in so many ways. He has, uh, lists and he has stories explaining each one of these. And I thought that those were really useful because it’s so hard for us to tell the difference between incompetence and someone who is competent, uh, learning.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: who’s kind of like pushed beyond their, their current comfort zone versus someone who’s incompetent.
Learn what those signs are and then you look for them in yourself. Go through the Peter principle and pull out these different things and ask yourself, does that describe me? Rather than going with your own fears, because then you can fall victim of the imposter syndrome, you, you try to work from observable evidence.
And then for that question of what do you do, you’re growing an organization really quickly, you can, you can do something similar. You can ask, does this person show competence in the field that I’m looking for? Or are they showing incompetence in that field? And I’m going to give one last thing and then I’ll hand it over to you Mon Chaio, uh, of what you think people can do. I’m going to give what he suggests in the book. Now. I don’t think that everyone should do this, but I think that you could do this reasonably if you find yourself in a position where you believe that you will get promoted beyond your competence and you don’t want to.
And that is what he calls And he even, he even makes it as, this is the only thing that you can do. These forces are so difficult to fight against that this is about the only thing you can do. And he calls it Creative Incompetence. If you find yourself at that level. where you’re very happy, you’re very competent, and you can tell that you’re in an organization that is going to reward you by promoting you into something you’re incompetent at.
What you do is you stay competent on the key things that you need to be doing for your, for your role. And then you find something that doesn’t affect your output, doesn’t affect your ability to actually do your role, but your incompetent leaders will find distasteful and won’t want to promote you. In the book, his example was a gardener who was amazing at gardening and stayed away from promotion into like head gardener or something because he was so bad at keeping track of receipts. He couldn’t do expenses, and so he was considered unreliable, and they wouldn’t promote him. And that suited him perfectly fine.
Mon-Chaio: I think you have to draw the line a little bit all of his examples of the book don’t include software, as you might imagine a book published in 1969. They’re all about governors and steel workers and gardeners and librarians and teachers and of the sort. Sometimes I myself had trouble sorting, well, okay, what does that
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: in 2024?
Um, so you do have to, uh, draw the line a little bit, project a little bit. I think, I think you’re right, Andy. I think reading the book, is a big first step, right? And beyond that, read books like this. As an engineering leader, you should be challenging yourself, the things that you know, and the things that you don’t know. The general guideline that I like to give is continually learn. And don’t just learn from a narrow set of, oh, well my boss says I need to improve in these three things, so like that’s what I’m going to learn about. The last thing that I’ll mention, uh, and this is also a difficult one and less actionable, I think do think about that mathematical paper in terms of this concept of permanent versus transitory attributes for promotion. And this is why it is so difficult just like the sales paper. What is the permanent attribute to being a great leader?
Well, the permanent attribute apparently was things like collaborative sales, right is what they mentioned in the paper how they collaborate with other salespeople people showed that they had a better track to being a good manager than sales ability. There are a lot of these permanent attributes and yet those permanent attributes are also for leaders much more difficult to measure.
Andy: Yeah, absolutely. It has been another fascinating conversation, Mon Chiao. I think we’ve covered a lot of what people can do with the Peter Principle, reading the book, reflecting on their own behavior, reflecting on what they’re seeing in others, keeping a journal so that they understand their own thoughts, thinking about what their own promotion process actually is looking for. Is it permanent or is it transitory attributes of people? The more you think about it, the more you analyze your situation and reflect on it, the, the better you’re going to be, and the more likely you’re not going to be falling victim of the Peter Principle.
So until next time, be kind and stay curious.
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