Creative Incompetence

Is it the Peter principle, which suggests that people are promoted to levels of incompetence. I argue that this is certainly aggravated by the fact that management values management and often values task and financial management more than people management skills. These factors in the selection process often means that subject matter expertise becomes lost to the management layer and people management skills are untested.

In some organisations, this is ameliorated as they create mechanisms where personal performance workers and domain experts are recognised & paid for being good at stuff. These people can stay doing what they are good at.

I pursued a career aiming at being at the top of an IT department and when I had to move on had a long look at whether I wish to remain in that sort of work. The truth is finding similar roles was not easy at that time and so I returned to highly technical personal performance work which I enjoyed much more, and I found it easier to avoid dealing with unreasonable managements; every manager has a boss, some of whom are uniquely unqualified to manage & motivate people, particularly in privately owned companies.

On researching, for this article, I discovered that Peter had actually written a book, with fourteen chapters! Chapter 13 suggests that over-promoted people are unhappy, and Chapter 14, talks of ways of avoiding the final promotion, through the exercise of “Creative Incompetence”.

Perhaps I or we should have some sympathy for those trapped by the seeming inexorable of career path of transition from knowing stuff to telling people what to do, but the choice to do some thing else is always there and in most cases, they remain wage slaves!

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.