Meet Peter Principle

Mike Hickman, Leadership Training and Development Manager at Community First Yorkshire, invites you to meet Peter (or Petra) Principle. What happens when someone is promoted to the point of incompetence? Mike explains why this isn't necessarily a bad thing with the right support to help leaders to grow. He explains that, if you are conscious of what it is you can’t do, if you’re conscious of your incompetence, it just means you don’t know how to do something yet, and with the right development, you’ll be able to progress in the next phase of your career. 

Transcript

Meet Peter Principle

[00:00:00] Hi, welcome to the Ordinary Extraordinary Leaders podcast. You may recognize this voice. I've done two previous podcasts in this series. My name is Mike Hickman. I'm leadership development and training manager at Community First Yorkshire and, actually, I'm not important in this story, Peter is - or, if you prefer, Petra.

Do you remember the Mr. Man and the Little Miss books, written by, what was it, Roger Hargreaves? The children's books and a children's TV series from a while back - Mr. Happy, Little Miss Sunshine, Mr. Nosey? All of those different characters representing different character traits so that children can pick up on how people are.

Well, that's it. Peter, or Petra if you prefer, is an example of this. The Peter Principle is a [00:01:00] character trait in principle. Ha, no pun intended. Um, so I want you to imagine for a moment a little bit like the Mr Men or the Little Miss coming towards the camera in that lovely cartoon with Arthur Lowe's gorgeous voice - which I can only envy - and you're watching Peter or Petra approach the camera and they've had a wonderful career. Peter and or Petra, they've been, maybe a financial officer. Maybe they have worked their way up the rungs of the organisation, promoted and promoted and promoted. They've done well. They have a nice suit; maybe some nice appropriate jewelery to go with that.

Peter might have a beard. Petra might have a gorgeous bouffant. They look the part. And they get promoted to the point, and here's the thing, where they arrive in a job with an office, and a name above a door, and a set of responsibilities, and a staff of however many, and they think, perhaps for the first time in their career, [00:02:00] "I don't know how to do this."

That is the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle comes from the writer Lawrence J. Peter; and it's a few decades old now. And it comes across as a somewhat unpleasant, perhaps, view that what will happen to you in your career is you will be promoted to the point of incompetence. And why do we mention this?

Why is that important to us? It's very important to us. It's very important to what we do here with the Leadership Hub. It's very important to our community. It's very important to the whole of North Yorkshire and beyond. And we might be thinking of leaders in lots of areas other than VCSE. 

I came across an article. It was in the Guardian. You can go and look if you want. It was the 5th of March, 2024. See always give your sources, always give your references. It's an article called Burnt Out Britain. Now, normally, I avoid the comments on articles because, well, let's face it, comments are not where we find our [00:03:00] friendliest people, really.

And I've also read, by the way - this is amazing, you get a free bit of information that you may not have have heard before - that some of the news providers who've stopped allowing people to leave comments, have done so because they crunched the numbers. NPR in the US found that something like 0. 06 percent of people who read an article actually comment on it.

So. I'm about to share some comments with you, and I want to just state, these could come from a much smaller number of people than perhaps you might otherwise think. So, they're things that come across as received wisdom. And yes, we will be heading back to Peter Principle in a moment, because it's exactly here that I was inspired for this podcast. So I'm reading this article about burnout and why burnout happens and why people struggle in their jobs whether it's because of them being at management level or at [00:04:00] any other level within an organisation and I came to these comments. I can't name the individuals because I didn't write them down. They're probably relieved.

“There are too many managers promoted because they are good at their existing job or because they are friendly with the right people, not whether they're actually good at managing.” Hmm, I have some thoughts about that. There are too many managers promoted because they are good at their existing job.

Okay. Logically, if you promoted someone for being bad at that, anyway, we'll get there. We'll get there. Then the next one leapt straight in. This person had read the other comments. I know that's rare on the internet. People don't do that. That's how you get on Facebook. 98 people answering the same question in the same words.

No one reads these things, but this person had. They leapt in and they said the Peter Principle in bold. People are promoted to the level of their incompetence, exclamation mark. We know he means it, or she means it, exclamation mark there. [00:05:00] Then the next one: “The biggest problem I've encountered in various workplaces in recent years is the seemingly inexorable rise, gosh that's difficult to say with your teeth in, of the accidental manager.”

Now, I don't know if this is peculiar, says this person, to the hospitality trade, but I've been mismanaged, unsupported, and undermined by managers whose only qualification for the job is their relationship with the recruiter. Sharp, very, very sharp. And we can understand that there are all sorts of stories underlying this, all sorts of experiences.

And I wouldn't want to go anywhere near denying anyone's experience, but isn't it interesting that the Peter Principle, as old as it is, is still there, is still being waved around as, well, you see people get promoted to management and leadership positions, but they don't know what they're doing because they didn't have experience of those things in previous jobs.

Pause for a moment. If we believe in leaders at all levels, and if [00:06:00] people have been given responsibilities during their time working for whoever - and we are, of course, thinking about our sector - if that's true, then it becomes harder to claim that people don't have any leadership experience or haven't picked up those skills or haven't successfully utilised them is if this is true, that someone gets promoted for being good at their job.

Amazing. Think of it for a moment, then almost certainly there will be some aspects, some transferable aspects from the previous role to the new one. So what's really going on here? And yes, possibly there are sour grapes of the sourest kind in all of this. Some people not happy with their working experiences and I will sympathise with that.

But what's really going on here? To the Peter Principle who feels a little bit of an imposter, because we've got imposter syndrome in this one as well, to the staff maybe looking at that individual thinking they don't know what they're doing - [00:07:00] I'd like to suggest a few things. 

Because far be it from me to suggest that those who comment on an online article might not necessarily be correct, but, you know, it is something people notice occasionally about comments. So, are these bad things? I was at one stage in my life, and I won't repeat previous things from previous podcasts - you can go and listen to them, they're wonderful -  but I was promoted very young. And very much as an accidental manager, to use that person's phrase, because my predecessor left.

And I took on a role, not expecting to keep it, and knowing very little about what I was doing. Could I have been about to prove the Peter Principle myself? Well, possibly. But there's something else here, isn't there? How do you, how do you challenge that? Where are the positives? Well, if you are conscious of what it is you can't do, or don't know how to do, or haven't yet received advice on, or [00:08:00] haven't yet done - because if we believe, you know, learning is experiential as much as anything - if you haven't done it, how can you have learned how to do it? If you're conscious of those things, then you can do it. If you’re conscious of your, to use the word, incompetence (because it doesn't have to have edges, that word), it just means you don't yet know how to do something. And if you can bring that to your conscious awareness and think, ‘Well, what can I do?’, there's one thing that might help challenge the Peter Principle and the imposter syndrome. 

If you are being supported in that, Who could mentor me? We'll get to that in a minute. Who could coach me? Who could I be buddied with? Who can I talk to about? You know what? I'm finding this tricky, but I don't want to tell my team this yet.

I'd like them not to worry. And we all understand that as well. Don't we? I was lucky. Go back to my personal experience. They knew this guy's not done this before. [00:09:00] He's not headed a department before. So they found me in the same organisation, another head of department, totally different area, who was relatively new into the job, but just those few steps ahead, just knew the ropes that I was encountering and tangling myself in for the first time. And if I was nascently consciously incompetent about some things, those conversations, very friendly, enabled me to unpick the other things I didn't yet know I didn't know. 

When we do mentoring here, our wonderful mentoring scheme, just about to hit cohort six by the way, as I record this, and I hope we go on for a very, very long time, but on our wonderful mentoring scheme, we're supported by various individuals such as at the moment, Coaching York, and we use tools to explore how we come across what we understand about each other, how to support people.

I was thinking, and I don't want to hit [00:10:00] you with this too heavily, so, you know, if this isn't your thing, lie down now. But I was thinking of the Johari Window. If you know it, you know that it comes in four quadrants. And that in the top left quadrant we've got what you know yourself about yourself. And what is known to others.

So the top left quadrant is what you can see and what they can see. That's sort of like the public you. So public, no one would miss it. You could identify yourself, so could the other person. We also get, though, the blind spot, it's called on many of the diagrams. What you don't know, but is known to others.

I reckon that's the Peter Principle. I reckon that's the ‘He doesn't know or she doesn't know or they don't know what they're doing.’ That's what we need to try and push back against. Maybe imposter syndrome lurks in that part of the diagram. There's also the facade, by the way, bottom left on the Jihari Window - what [00:11:00] is known to you but not known to others, which includes ‘Help. I don't know how to do this thing.’

Clearly, if you exist behind a facade, and that's why I said Peter probably has a nice suit because nice clothes can be part of a façade, but if you exist behind the facade the whole time, how are you going to learn? How are you going to grow? How are you going to not feel the imposter syndrome and actually succeed and progress and move on? Oh, and then there's the unknown, unknown, not known to you, not known to anyone else. And that's for Donald Rumsfeld. And anyone who gets that reference gets a pineapple right now.

Why do I mention all of this? Let's go back to the mentoring and why it's important. I talked about how I was buddied as a senior leader. It was another head of department. It did not need to be someone who was in the exact same area as me because we had to reach an accommodation and understanding of those things that are, were commonalities.

[00:12:00] It's very useful to look for understanding rather than be presented with someone who has had exactly the same experience as you. That's harder to communicate, I think. In our mentoring program we asked [participants] recently about the key themes we cover. So, poor Peter Principle, if you're listening, the key things that have been supported include conflict, tensions in working relationships, difficult conversations.

If you're on the Johari Window and you don't know you're not good at difficult conversations, but everybody else does -that's an obvious problem for development, for work, for support, for a mentor to give you a safe space to look at these things. Our mentors have provided emotional support; support with finance, budget, partnership development, just positivity.

This one got an exclamation mark and I will let the writer have it because a positivity boost definitely deserves an exclamation mark. It's helped people progress onto the next phase of their career, of their [00:13:00] life, helping them with relationships with employers, trustees, clients, giving them a toolkit. I was slightly, you know, I was being a bit unkind to the Johari Window and I'm being a bit unkind to the Peter Principle as well, frankly.

But these things are useful if you're able to draw analogies from them. How does that relate to me? What's that saying about my development as a leader? And what does it suggest about where I might want to go? And, by the way, if people think that, what's the answer to it? How do I develop further from here?

I wrote a lot of other things down about being an ex teacher. I immediately wrote down Zone of Proximal Development. If you're lying down, you now probably need to move to the floor, but just the idea that if we want growth and I'm very fixed, I'm very firm on the Growth Mindset - I nearly said fixed mindset, which is the opposite! - that Carol Dweck talks about the idea that we're learning at all times.

And if you're engaging in mentoring, then you're learning and [00:14:00] you're learning at all times. Peter might be a chief exec. He's still learning. But there's the idea also of the Zone of Proximal Development, which teachers, and I am an ex teacher, will know, which is that you learn best in that area just above what you can do.

Now think about that thing about giving somebody a job who is apparently incompetent at that next job. Would you give them the job if they knew everything already? Is that actually a good idea? Don't you want someone actively engaging in learning something new, being creative, exploring boundaries safely?

That's the point of the Zone of Proximal Development and it's Vygotsky if you want an extra pineapple. But the point of that is we operate safely just above the what we know, not miles away from what we know. And that's again where mentoring can be very helpful. Buddying can be very helpful. Putting someone with an experienced other, [00:15:00] but not someone, and we all know the teacher who is way, way, way ahead of us and therefore can't communicate what we need to know.

What we need is someone who's just those few steps ahead and who we can communicate with well. Okay, I think we're nearly at the point now. So, so let's return to Peter, right? Go back to Peter. That's where we started. If you're imagining Arthur Lowe's voice, good. It's relaxing, isn't it? What can he do?

Nothing, perhaps, about what people think of him in the short term. That's not necessarily something he can control. We can't control what other people think the whole time. But he can work on what he thinks. He can work on himself. He can interrogate the extent to which he's confident or comfortable and competent in the new role.

And it doesn't have to be the worst news in the world if there are things he can't do. If you find yourself in Peter's position or you know someone else who is, consider looking at our [00:16:00] leadership mentoring offer. This podcast series, along with the others available, can add to your research.

And if you're interested, and you'd like to be a mentee, or you'd like to be a mentor, check out our leadership pages, www.communitysupportny.org.uk/leadership or you could google that you'll find it easily. Or you can drop me an email at leadership@communityfirstyorkshire.org.uk 

Gosh, it was a lot there wasn't it?

Well, I hope Peter at least is feeling better. Thank you ever so much for listening. Do join us for future podcasts. We have some really good ones coming up for you. Thank you.

Me again. No, you don't escape that soon. One more thing to say. If you are not yet aware of the Ordinary Extraordinary Leaders Conference, which runs in parallel with this podcast series, [00:17:00] then here's a chance for you to look it up. It occurs on the, occurs? How formal? On the 22nd of May at the Pavilions of Harrogate, that's a Wednesday. It's an inspiring event with some superb speakers, chief execs, leaders at all levels, lots of interactive opportunities, and some lovely elements designed to bring to life one of the key themes of this series and the day, which is generosity.

Do have a look at the conference. Do consider booking. I look forward to seeing some of you.