Self
Why Taking a Promotion Can Become a Big Mistake
The Peter Principle and why the vines of incompetence grow with success.
Management didn’t know what to do with Steven and it was their fault. Steven was a 28-year-old coworker and assistant project manager. We worked at a corporate construction company and project managers were our most important personnel.
Steven was smart and had stellar reviews, but when prompted about promoting to PM, he said, “No, no, I’m good.” It perplexed our CFO and COO, who didn’t know why a good employee wouldn’t want more money and responsibility.
I knew why. I was the budget manager at his division and sat in on many of their meetings. I saw the grueling pressure put on project managers and saw them yelled at on occasion. It wasn’t an easy job. Steven figured, he was young and enjoying his life and didn’t want that kind of pressure. And perhaps he thought he’d be bad at the job — which is wiser than most realize.
The Peter Principle was first proposed by psychologist Laurence J. Peters and was intended as satire. It proposed that competent employees will be continually promoted until they are incompetent in their new role. Then, they remain in that position for the remainder of their career. Consequently, every role is…
