Member-only story
How To Deal With Incompetence In Your Business
Applying the right business tools to become more efficient, effective, precise, productive, and self-aware
Early in my career as a business consultant and executive coach I was introduced to a concept known as the Peter Principle.
The Peter Principle. is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in any hierarchy tend to rise to their “level of incompetence”.
What he means here is that 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.
Peter and his co-authors intended the book to be satire, in time it became that Peter was really onto something serious.
Imagine an organization where a person reaches their level of incompetence and then trains new people in his/her department. Over time this pattern of incompetence spreads like a virus throughout the organization infecting middle management, lower-level employees, and possibly the executive suite. Of course, executives are focusing on the wrong area, the entire hierarchy may collapse below them, and they never saw it coming.
