The Identity Architect – Positioning & Personal Branding Blog

Do you ever look back fondly to the days (sometimes not so long ago) when you were just able to get things done – so easily that you almost felt guilty?

Or do you wonder what happened to your star employee who was the best at what he or she did, but now seems to be continuously bogged down?

Sometimes were our own worst enemy.  Really.

Think back to the time when you were able to get things done, or when your superstar employee was really making it happen.  What changed?  Let me guess.  You either took on more and more work yourself or you gave your superstar a promotion.  In both cases the cause can likely be tracked back to you.

Of course there are other possible reasons, but really think about this.  As you start out in your career you generally have a high ability and aptitude, and in the beginning the demands are relatively low which allows you to take what work you’re given and produce a favorable result for yourself, your client, or your employer.

As you continue on in your career, your abilities continue to grow as does your workload and responsibilities.  But over time the growth of your abilities and skills will naturally decline or stop growing at the same rate as the increase of your workload and responsibilities.  At some point the demands of the work and responsibilities will overtake your ability to produce the same outcome you were so easily able to produce earlier in your career and you become (for lack of a better word) incompetent.

There is a name for this phenomenon.  It is called The Peter Principle.

The Peter Principle

The Peter Principle is the principle that “in a hierarchy every person tends to rise to his level of incompetence”.

It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous treatise which also introduced the “salutary science of hierarchiology”, “inadvertently founded” by Peter. It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently (or even are given more work so long as they are able to produce a result).  Sooner or later they are promoted to a position or obtain a workload in 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 his duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.

Incompetence is a harsh word.  Perhaps it would be better to clarify that by incompetence he isn’t incompetent as a person or an employee, but that he isn’t able to accomplish everything that has been piled on.  Kind of like the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  The camel could have been carrying hundreds of thousands of individual straws – but a single straw more than he could handle is enough to make it all come crashing down.

In real life, the graduation from competence (and being a hero) to incompetence (and being fired) can be as singular and small as the tiny straw, so when it happens it is often difficult to determine what happened.

Sometimes it can look like laziness or burnout.

Just like with the camel, there is a fine line between being able to use your expertise to produce better than expected results easily and being unable to do anything effectively.

It’s always better to operate just this side of that line.  But you have to know where yours is, and sometimes the only way to find the line is to have crossed it once or twice.

You just have to be able to recognize when you’ve crossed the line and be able to pull back until you’ve regained control.  It takes a lot of guts sometimes to say no to a client, a new project, or to be frank with an employer about what your limitations are.

Unfortunately, most people’s ego’s won’t allow them to admit that they have limitations, so they continue on until they reach their level of incompetence.  But if you trust yourself, being frank with a client or employer, establishing boundaries and limitations won’t make you look bad, in fact, it will make you look even better.  You’re paid to be good at what you do.  Being good at what you do isn’t just about what you can do, it’s also about being able to know what you can’t do.

Remember, there is a fine line.  Know where yours is.