Peter Principle: why good people get promoted into jobs they cannot do
Being good at your job is not the same as being good at the next one.
In the mid-1960s, a writer named Raymond Hull went to see a play at the Metro Theatre in Vancouver, Canada. The play was terrible. During the break, he stood in the lobby and complained about it.
A tall stranger standing nearby joined in. He had a theory about why the play was so bad, and that chat would give the world the Peter Principle.
Everyone who worked on it, the stranger said, had once been good at a smaller job. Because they were good, they were promoted. They kept getting promoted until they reached a job that was too hard for them. And there they stayed, doing it badly. That was why the play was a mess. He believed every organisation works this way, not just theatres.
The stranger was Laurence J. Peter, a teacher. Hull liked the idea so much that the two men wrote a book about it. Today a plaque outside the Metro Theatre remembers their conversation.
The Peter Principle says that in any organisation with levels, people keep getting promoted as long as they do their job well. Sooner or later they reach a job they cannot do well. Then the promotions stop, and they stay stuck in that job. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull wrote about it in their 1969 book The Peter Principle.
Where did the Peter Principle come from
Peter was born in Vancouver in 1919. He taught in the city’s schools for more than 20 years, and later taught teachers at two universities. Over the years, he noticed something odd. Many teachers, school principals and education officers did not seem to know what their jobs needed, and did them badly.
He wanted to know why. His answer was a simple loop.
You do your job well, so you get promoted. You do the new job well, so you get promoted again. One day you get a job you are not good at. Now nobody promotes you, because you are not doing well. So you stay in that job, for years.
If this happens to everyone, Peter said, then over time most jobs end up filled by people who cannot quite do them. The useful work gets done by people who have not yet reached that point.
Getting the book published was hard. Britannica says about 30 publishers said no. CBC News says it was more than a dozen. Peter later joked to the Toronto Star newspaper that he thought he had reached his own level of incompetence. When the book finally came out in 1969, it became a bestseller.
The book was meant to be funny. It was satire, which means it used humour to make a serious point. Peter even invented a pretend science for it, which he called “hierarchiology”, the study of levels in organisations.
Today, many people use the Peter Principle as an insult, to say their boss is useless. That is not quite what Peter meant. He was not blaming the person. He was blaming the system. The person did nothing wrong. They were good at one job, so they were given a different job as a reward.
Peter Principle examples from sales teams to cricket
For 50 years, nobody had solid proof either way. Then, in 2019, three researchers, Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, tested the idea. They looked at the records of nearly 40,000 salespeople in 131 American companies.
Sales is a good place to test it. Selling and managing need different skills. A good salesperson needs confidence and the energy to keep trying. A good sales manager needs to plan and to help other people sell better.
Here is what they found. The best sellers were the most likely to be promoted. Someone who sold twice as much as a colleague was about 15% more likely to be promoted in a given month. But once promoted, the star sellers turned out to be weaker managers. Their teams’ sales grew more slowly than the teams of managers who had been only average sellers.
The companies also missed a better clue. Some salespeople often shared sales with colleagues and worked well in teams. These people went on to become better managers. But companies did not promote them any more often.
Why do companies keep promoting the best sellers? Because promotion is a reward. It keeps people working hard. If companies stopped promoting their best sellers, those sellers might stop trying.
Indian cricket has a well-known example of the same gap. Sachin Tendulkar is widely seen as the best batsman of his time. In 1996, he was made captain of the Indian Test team. India played 25 Tests with him as captain. They won 4, lost 9 and drew 12. In 2000, he gave up the captaincy. He said it was hurting his batting and that he could help India more as a player. He then played Test cricket for another 13 years.
Tendulkar’s story shows two things. Leading a team needs different skills from scoring runs, however brilliant the runs. It also shows a way out that few people take: going back to the role you do best.
You can see the same pattern in ordinary workplaces. The best teacher becomes a principal and spends her days on budgets and complaints. The best coder becomes a manager and stops writing code.
Is the Peter Principle true
Partly. The research gives a mixed picture.
In 2004, the American economist Edward Lazear pointed out something else. People are often promoted after a very good year. But part of any good year is luck. When the luck runs out, their results drop back to normal. That drop would happen even if the new job needed exactly the same skills. So some of what looks like the Peter Principle is just luck evening out.
In 2010, three scientists at the University of Catania in Italy, Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo, built a computer model of a company. In their model, choosing people for promotion at random worked better than promoting the best performers. Their study won the Ig Nobel Prize, a joke award for research that makes people laugh and then think. The researchers themselves admitted their model left something out. If promotions were random, people would have less reason to work hard.
Benson, Li and Shue also found that companies are not completely blind to the problem. When the manager’s job was bigger, with a larger team to lead, companies paid less attention to sales figures when choosing who to promote.
So the fair answer is this. The Peter Principle is a real risk whenever the next job needs different skills from the current one. But the claim that every job ends up filled by someone who cannot do it is a joke, not a fact. People learn on the job. Some move to other roles. Some leave. Organisations adjust.
How to avoid the Peter Principle
Promote people for the skills the new job needs, not for how well they did the old one. If the new job is managing people, look for signs that they already help others and share credit.
Reward good work without always promoting. Pay rises and recognition can reward a star performer without pushing them into a job they may not suit. Benson, Li and Shue point out that Microsoft and IBM have long had two career paths for engineers. One leads to management. The other lets them rise as experts without managing anyone.
Let people try the job first. Running a small team for three months tells you more than a year of great results in the old job.
Make it normal to step back. If going back to your old role is seen as failure, people will cling to jobs they are bad at.
If you are the one being promoted, write down what you will actually do every day in the new job. Then ask yourself honestly how much of it you have done before.
A promotion is a guess about how someone will do in a job they have never done. Treat it like one.
Daily Reflection
Think of the next job you would like to have. Write down two things it needs that your current job does not, and find one way to practise the first one this month.
