Recently Came across a few nuggets of wisdom from wikipedia:
The Peter Principle states that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”, meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position at which they cannot work competently. It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous [1] treatise which also introduced the “salutary science of hierarchiology.”
The principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Eventually they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. Peter’s Corollary states that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”. “Managing upward” is the concept of a subordinate finding ways to subtly “manage” superiors in order to limit the damage that they end up doing.
The employee’s incompetence is not necessarily a result of the higher-ranking position being more difficult — simply, that job may be crucially different from the job in which the employee previously excelled, and thus requires different work skills, which the employee may not possess. For example, an engineer with great technical skill might get promoted to project manager, only to discover he lacks the interpersonal skills required to lead a team.
Thus, “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.
Peter also suggested that ‘super-competence’ in an employee is more likely to result in dismissal than promotion, which again is a feature of poor organizations, which cannot handle the disruption. A super-competent employee “…violates the first commandment of hierarchical life: [namely that] the hierarchy must be preserved…”.
–Which eventually lead me to read this entry:
The Dilbert principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing. In the Dilbert strip of February 5, 1995Dogbert says that “leadership is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow”. Adams himself explained,[1]
“I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don’t want doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know, the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart people—aren’t in management. That principle was literally happening everywhere.”
The first time I heard of the Peter principle was during my first job out of college, my boss at the time used it as a humorous explanation to why middle and upper management could at times seem hopelessly deadlocked, and at times totally incompetent to make key management decisions, even in times of fiscal crisis where decisive leadership is called for. It was an interesting concept, that over time as an unintended consequence, you end up with the level of incompetence of individual workers being directly correlated with the higher pay and fancy sounding titles.
The Dilbert principle I think actually is much more on point, but it is almost like a symptom of an institution that has gotten so deteriorated that it can’t even operate rationally, let alone efficiently. Then instead effectively managing incompetence by moving people to positions that they are a better fit for, or by training or disciplining the problem, you just push it aside in the most perverse way, through a promotion.
I’ve actually observed and witnessed both of these up front and personal. Had some managers so insanely incompetent that I was left scratching my head as to how the hell they got promoted to management, knowing that at one point they were in my position, yet over time they seem to have forgotten even the simplest aspects of the job entailed. I’ve also seen individuals that are rewarded for having skills at negotiating office politics to their favor as relative to possessing actual skills relevant to the work, but they get the token rewards – no real power other than a fancier sounding title, and a nominal pay raise. When systems start acting in these ways, there is a major hit to workforce morale for the rest of the workers in the system, as it flies contrary to what most workplaces like to promote as how promotions and bonuses are handed out, based on the individual doing a good job, and being good at what they do. The worst is when I’ve experienced a mix of both an incompetent manager that has some real power, and they resist being “managed upward” .
Together, these principles pretty much sums up one of the critical flaws of so called performance-based / merit-based compensation systems, or meritocracies. The naive assumption is that in the best interest, institutions would want to strive for greater efficiency, producing better goods and services for their customers. Under this theory, anything or anyone who gets in the way of this goal should be reassigned or replaced, especially policies that erode morale. You want to motivate your workers with incentives, namely higher pay and bonuses. However in reality the self-enforcing nature of the system or hierarchy itself, which is a form of corruption at the institutional level. Hence, what promotions are really looking for are to a varied extent, conformity to the norms of the institution. Or more importantly, the perception of upper management to the individual’s ability and willingness to conform to the norms of the institution.
Over time things degenerate to the point where system is spending a lot of time managing the individuals that have risen to their level of incompetence with more and more promotions, instead of trying to capitalize on their relative strengths and recasting them in the most beneficial position in the company, in other words, truly developing them. If this continues on long enough it becomes ingrained into the culture of the institution, inefficiency, incompetence, favoritism, corruption becomes the status quo, the unspoken rule. Outsiders, reformers, or just newer, motivated workers coming in are then handicapped from making any contributions that might have been a net benefit. Thus, you don’t get very far in an institution or system by talking or promoting change. It does make for a good campaign slogan though.
Maybe a solution is to approach promotions and pay incentives differently, keep the pay increases the same, but maybe demote the individuals to their level of competence. Stop referring it to a demotion, rather make it a transfer, or repositioning. For those that have a knack for office politics and ass kissing, but lack the core work skills and management skills, maybe capitalize on their skills into marketing and public relations.