Why? Because the boss is the one with the greater power to act. The analysis resonates powerfully: Who’s never had to consider these questions in the course of their career? But what’s to be done? Recognizing the tensions is certainly the first step, but then Neilsen and Gypen do just what they say previous thinkers and managers always do – address their suggestions to the boss. Guess wrong, and calamity may ensue, so subordinates spend a lot of energy in self-protection. Should our relationship be friendly or strictly professional?.Do I want to emulate this boss, or should I distance myself from his poor example?.Will my boss reward - or punish - me if I make improvement suggestions?.Can I correctly work out what my boss wants or am I stuck second-guessing from what he’s actually saying?.Is my boss interested in my welfare or does he see me as a competitor who needs to be neutralized?.The heart of their argument is this: In dealing with superiors, subordinates must navigate through a minefield of potential disasters by continually asking themselves six questions. This, one might argue, is a sort of reverse Peter Principle, in which people learn to rise above their incompetencies (or at any rate other people’s) as they move up.īut the message here is still that incompetence is rife, and for Neilsen and Gypen subordinates inhabit a very dangerous world. But, they observe, most managers address the bad boss problem by getting out of the subordinate role as quickly as possible and, by improving their own leadership skills, becoming a good boss. And indeed in The Subordinate’s Predicaments, Case Western Reserve management professor Eric Neilsen and then-doctoral candidate Jan Gypen make that point explicitly. This seems surprising since of course every manager is a subordinate as well.
#Peter principle meaning full
It wasn’t until 1979 – a full decade later – that that HBR addressed the question of managerial incompetence from the subordinates’ point of view. These two pieces were squarely in line with HBR’s focus on improving the practice of management by focusing on the managers. The second, from 1976, ”The Real Peter Principle: Promotion to Pain,” argued that what really happens is that managers are promoted, not to their level of immutable incompetence, but to their level of anxiety and depression, which overwhelms their ambition and desire to succeed.
The first, from 1973, “A Postscript to the Peter Principle,” suggested that certain groups of managers – notably women and minorities - were exempt from the insidious effect because they often weren’t promoted despite their competence and so didn’t get the chance to reach their level of incompetence. HBR took it seriously enough to offer up two straight-faced contemporary responses, both of which were remarkably quick to accept the book’s premise.
The book struck a chord with the general public, staying on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, and it’s still in print 45 years later. So given enough time and enough promotion levels, every position in a firm will be occupied by someone who can’t do the job. Taking the form of a serious work of business research, complete with entirely fake examples, it purported to have discovered the root cause of manager incompetence: Everyone in an organization keeps on getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. Nowhere was the problem stated more acutely, it could be argued, than in the wicked 1969 satire, The Peter Principle. Management journals would not exist if managers were always perfect, so it’s no surprise that HBR has long been exploring the reasons behind manager incompetence and whose responsibility it is to compensate – the boss or the subordinate.
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