As a young manufacturing engineer aspiring to a successful career, it drove me crazy when my seniors would suggest I needed more time to mature and develop foundation skills to become a strong leader. My argument, like many young people, was that the only way to get experience was to do the higher level job.
This all seemed to make sense and I stuck with this belief. This weekend I read Robert Sutton’s article in Business Week about the 40th anniversary edition of “The Peter Principle” by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull that might have swayed my opinion. The general rule was “anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails.” You might have heard the narrow career version where “managers will be promoted to their level of incompetence.” Sutton’s point was that sometimes we should praise and reward competence.
If we believed we had some level of best performance, would we be more patient in our careers?
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
“Simple Competence” – Leadership and the Peter Principle
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17 comments:
Aspirations as a young, energetic, intelligent and articulate individual should be cultivated through mentorship and shadowing. Too often, potential leaders are stymied by archaic protocol. If we allow employees to grow at their rate, making the mistakes through OJT(albeit minor as we are monitoring), we will position our future in a more prosperous manner. It also encourages risk taking and new ideas, as the young are not jaded by the past.
John,
In my opinion, whether the "Peter Principle" is valid or not the day we become more patient with our careers is the day we need to look for a more exciting one. As leaders we need to constantly look for greater challenges and teams to champion them. Learning foundation skills is of course important but it is the continual re-application of those foundations in creative ways which keeps us going. We aren't leaders because we can tie a knot well. We are leaders because we know in how many different ways those knots can be used to tie a team together.
Patience? BAH!
Alex Kersha
John,
This is an excellent point. One of the ways I can tell a great leader from an average one is to ask their fellows, so what happens around here when you do things right?
So many times the answer is, huh? When you probe, it's the classic case of good behavior being ignored and bad behavior getting punished. When you find a leader who recognizes and praises "ordinary competence" you almost always find a high functioning team where members are engaged and committed to each others success.
I agree, let us endeavor to praise and recognize competence. In no way should we not recognize excellence or outstanding performance, but to ignore right behavior is a formula for frustration and disengagement.
Best
Tom
There are two schools of thought ( 1 ) A top personal producer need not be a good leader and ( 2 ) a good leader needs opportunity to blossom.
In the real world, the producer gets dumped in a leadership role to the frustration of everyone. An average personal performer but with leadership traits never gets the chance to ascend.
do you have to be old to be good?
In the book "Outliers" Malcom Gladwell looks at the time spent mastering various disciplines. Whether computers or a musical instrument it takes about 10,000 hours. (5yrs in standard 40hr work weeks)
In the psychological study of Creativity the general rule is 10-15 yrs to achive "eminance" (which isnt so much a recognition of ability as transcendant ability. that which makes their contemporarys look comon)
So what is it exactly that makes us believe that someone who is intellegent hard working and capable with a side of ambiscious who also happens to be "young" cant be a "leader"?
and why should we be patient? fortune doesnt favor those who sit back and do their job quietly, it favors thoughs who sing their own praises. Those who "market" themselves the most effectively to those with the power to promote them. Those who quietly and dillegently go about their business get grouped in the middle 70% and go no where.
Would I be patient if i thought if all the numbers pointed toward me being the "best performer". NO. It doesnt work.
But that doesnt mean that i am not OK with being the best and being left behind. the trick is recognition and how managment recognizes people. The problem with the Peter principle is that people get promoted to incompetence, its that if leadership had taken the time to listen they would have known they already had been.
John,
Thank you for an insightful comment/ question.
Bhaskar
Great analogy to the knot tying, Alex. I think there are few things more frustrating in life than working for a leader with a narrow focus. And John, I can't believe how skewed the premise for the "Peter Principle" has become over the years. It's such a fixture in our lingo. I'll have to read that article.
Leslie Kohler
theseminarcopywiter.com
Interesting mindset,
if we really belief, we will manifest this into the material world,
everyone wants to enlarge it’s confort-zone, that the nature of a human being,
nothing wrong with this, until what extend ? might be a valuable question to reflect on,
what I mean is, we want to perform better and better and indeed
we can improve our performance until a certain level,
then we might find out that the cost for improvement is too high in relation to our benefits, that might be the time to switch and invest our energy in other areas of competence,
look forward reading your next comments
ronald
entrepreneur and creative mental power thinker and actor
www.ronaldgoovaert.com
Indeed patience is a great virtue. Never the less, in some circumstances the only best option is to quit.
Thanks
"If we believed we had some level of best performance, would we be more patient in our careers?"
That's a mighty big "if."
My experience with and memory from youth is that we did not believe there was any limit to the level of our performance or competence. We were immortal and invincible.
'Tis so true, youth is wasted on the young!
On a different twists, I was leading the implementation of a Constraint based planning solution. Adapting this Mfg solution to a service organization Disaster Recovery scheduling application.
I engaged all support groups in the process of defining the requirements, since this business rapidly changed the idea was to teach the inidividuals who did the work to know what the needs of the CBP were.
Engaging them in the process assured that as new assets were acquired they would redefine the constraints, assuring the solution was up to date, for I knew at some point I would be leaving, and it would be up to them to keep the application current.
Thats how I measured if I had been a success, knowing the business would carry on without my input.
The flaw with the Peter Principle is that it assumes one level of competence at different levels of promotion.
The reality is that we need different competencies as we step up to leadership positions.
I am just about to do an international tour speaking to newly promoted VP's of a major bank on "What got you promoted is not enough at the next level."
Wish me luck getting the point across :)
Further to my comment on competencies changing the higher we go in an organisation - I wanted to say something about 'intentional or deliberate practice.
Most people plateau in their career because the don't practice the things that make a difference.
In sport this happens when people can perform the basic moves of that sport. Those that go on to excel practice, old and new skills with a high level of intention and awareness about what they do well and what they could do better. The mediocre don't notice these things.
In business we rarely think about practicing our interpersonal or influencing skills, let alone think about getting a coach for these things.
This is the way to accelerate performance and beat the Peter Principle.
Interesting mindset,
if we really belief, we will manifest this into the material world,
everyone wants to enlarge it’s confort-zone, that the nature of a human being,
nothing wrong with this, until what extend ? might be a valuable question to reflect on,
what I mean is, we want to perform better and better and indeed
we can improve our performance until a certain level,
then we might find out that the cost for improvement is too high in relation to our benefits, that might be the time to switch and invest our energy in other areas of competence,
look forward reading your next comments
ronald
entrepreneur and creative mental power thinker and actor
John,
Peter principle has been around for decades and is still actively used in a mojority of organisations. When recession hits all those that have been promoted beyond their competence level are the first to be made redundant.
Pete McLean
Ok maybe but how do you factor in Corporate Politics? Is that still in the category of competency? For instance the Principle states that “members are promoted so long as they work competently” so if there are political storms you need to maneuver around you do so and are their for more competent i.e. promotable?
Just a thought.
Best performance? A metric assuming the past is all there is?
There are at least two types of promotions. Promotions which recognize that the employee is working above current responsibility levels, and promotions to a new level above the employee's current exposure. The first type shouldn't be able to invoke the Peter Principle.
But new-level promotions typically have a learning cycle with improvements and setbacks. Only when the improvements stop (when people don't move up to the new level, and don't appear to have the capacity) should the specter of Peter Principle be invoked.
Type 'a's tend to get impatient when they aren't striving for more. Pshaw to patience... Seriously, though, sometimes people aren't close to ready for the next level, and not mature enough to see it. Companies can't afford to have everyone in sink or swim mode.
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