Back in 1969, Laurence J. Peter published the Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, where he hypothesized that “[i]n a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”. When I first read this – I must admit – I was a bit confused.
What helped me grasp the idea a bit better was an example, so here’s one: In most organizations, if you do your job well, you get promoted. Let’s say you are an academic working at a university. You teach well and you publish many highly cited articles, so you get on a tenure track. You bring in some funding along the way and before you know it, you’re a full professor, perhaps even chairing your own department (congrats)! But this is where the Peter Principle might creep in. The job of being a good researcher (e.g. publishing, securing grants, etc.), does not necessarily require one to be a good leader or a competent manager.
So even if you are a good researcher that gets promoted from an assistant to an associate professor and eventually to a full professor, at a certain point, when you are asked to take on managerial, administrative, and/or other organizational responsibilities, the competences of a good researcher no longer serve you in the new position. While various managerial crash courses do exist, partaking in them does not ensure competence nor excellence. Thus, you rise up the ranks, until you reach the level of your incompetence and that is the Peter Principle in a nutshell.
My intention here is not to throw any of my bosses – past or present – under the bus. I, for one, consider myself quite lucky to have had some very nice bosses that are both outstanding researchers and wonderful managers. So the Peter Principle is not an absolute nor inevitable. The point that I do want to get across though is to argue Bearing in mind the conversations surrounding the Recognition & Rewards initiative at our University, it is crucial for us to bear in mind that (even though Laurence J. Peter initially intended his 1969 book as a satire) there is plenty of empirical evidence to prove that the Peter Principle is in fact very real. If this is left untreated and ignored, it can have debilitating and corrosive impacts on organizational growth.
With this problem in mind, I posit that perhaps – just maybe – the implementation of the Recognition and Rewards initiative could be a way for the UM to avoid succumbing to the undesired manifestations of the Peter Principle. This is because by diversifying the career paths of academics and paying more attention to leadership development from an earlier stage in our careers, we will be able to work towards promoting not just academics that churn out publications, but also those who are good leaders, impact makers, and community builders.
There is no doubt that the implementation of the Recognition & Rewards initiative will require herculean efforts, as it would be a major cultural shift from the status quo. However, the cost of not doing it and remaining complacent or stagnant could potentially result in a much more dire situation down the line. As the Peter’s Corollary suggests “[i]n time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties,” but let us hope we never reach that level.
Mark Kawakami, assistant professor at the Faculty of Law