Aside from its alliterative appeal, the Peter Principle makes a basic kind of sense – any skilled employee is destined to be repeatedly promoted until they surpass their level of competence. Most people “get” the Peter Principle because everyone can recall working with someone who has been elevated past their abilities, asked to demonstrate a broader range of skills than the ones that earned them the promotion.
Ironically, we think of the Peter Principle as applying to other people, never ourselves. It’s natural to think of our own capacities as limitless, not bound by the limitations we see in other people. Any leader that wants to define for themselves what their ceiling is must face the single largest impediment to professional growth: our unwillingness to experience professional discomfort or uncertainty.
What the Peter Principle misses
What assumptions make the Peter Principle true? Or, said differently, what would it take for the Peter Principle to be untrue? At it’s foundation, the Peter Principle assumes that competence is fixed. It asserts that professionals stop developing **and our level of potential achievement is an inalienable trait given out at new-hire orientation.
No one would take a child at ten and try to guess their “level of incompetence”. Similarly, no one should take a college freshman at eighteen or a professional at twenty-three and predict their professional achievements. We naturally assume they are still developing. Similarly, as more fully “baked” professionals, in order to reject the Peter Principle’s restrictive boundaries, our capacities must be dynamic, constantly changing and evolving, making our potential unknowable. We should find the limits of our competence just in time to learn and improve, unlocking another wave of promotions and achievement.
The only situations where the Peter Principle cleanly applies is when we allow ourselves to believe we’re “fully developed” and don’t need continued shaping and new experiences. If you believe your level of development is fixed then, naturally, your level of achievement is also fixed.
Two things are true about our potential: everyone has a ceiling based on their level of development and that ceiling is constantly shifting **if you’re committed to additional development. While new sets of experiences unlocks potential growth and learning, it takes a specific level of awareness and conscientiousness to embrace these opportunities.
So then, what prevents us from continuously embracing the learning and exposure that helps us unlock continued achievement and growth? It’s hard to imagine anyone willfully avoiding opportunities for development, but that’s exactly what many professionals do. Because while everyone wants to be developed, many are unwilling to endure the tension and anxiety required to get there. They reject the discomfort and uncertainty that comes with growth and change.
Defeated by success
One of the few advantages young professionals have over their future selves is resilience to the bruises and scrapes it takes to learn and grow. Youth and young adulthood is a time of constant change and evolution, where we constantly reinvent ourselves. Unfortunately, as the pace of change in our lives diminishes, we become calcified and tell ourselves to play it safe and avoid the very experiences that grew us into the professionals we are today.
Young professionals have a seemingly tireless capacity for enduring the “baby giraffe” stage of professional development, throwing themselves into professional work and pursuing opportunities and responsibilities they’re wildly unprepared for but doggedly willing to pursue and grow into. These experiences are painful, with stumbles that many of us would never want to repeat, yet they were essential to our development and we wouldn’t be where we are today without our most painful slip-ups. It’s easy to forget that it’s the most challenging experiences that encourage us to grow and learn. Instead, as we settle into comfortable roles with knowable boundaries, we trade the uncertain-yet-limitless prospects of the young for the safe-yet-limited prospects of the experienced.
Our success undermines us, making us less likely to risk our ego, status, and reputation, preventing us from the growth that helps us attain our next set of goals. This leads us to rely exclusively on the skills that got us here, ignoring what could get us there, making our level of achievement fixed.
There’s nothing wrong with accepting a finite level of success or embracing the stability and certainty of a knowable future. But most of us don’t tell that story about ourselves. We see a future CEO in the mirror every morning and harbor ambitious hopes for our professional future. We seek a larger purpose, outsized impact, and a chance at career-defining success. And in order for that vision to be true, we need to live in a world where the Peter Principle doesn’t apply to us, our competence is constantly changing, and we’re consistently willing to work outside of our comfort zone.
Good luck out there.
Patrick