If you are in any managerial position (thanks to promotions) and this is the first time you’re hearing of the Peter Principle, then you are already a lost cause.
Close this tab and go back to scrolling Instagram reels. Bye-bye.
According to Wikipedia (remember that old relic, before ChatGPT became the de facto encyclopedia? Remember encyclopedia? Never mind).
According to Wikipedia, the Peter Principle “observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to 'a level of respective incompetence’”, which means your promotions are based on how good you are at your current role. You continue to rise the rungs of corporate till you reach a position where you, and you will, suck at your job. At some point in your career, you will end up rotting away at a level you are least competent at; some place where you barely scrape by, unsure of where you’re faltering because the barometer for quality is hidden behind a thick veil of your own incompetence.
Hence, the burnout.
And the desperate need to break free.
And the gross fetishization of farming, or setting up tea stalls, or country chicken farming among middle-aged, middle-management folks who age at least 1.072x faster than they actually should.
This is the adult version of scoring distinction throughout school, barely studying, and your grades plummeting in college because you never really learnt how to study.
The logic is flawed. Why would you want to take someone out of a role they are good at and force them into a box that’s alien to them and expect them to even contribute meaningfully, let alone flourish? No training. No mentorship. Not even a pamphlet that outlines how you’re expected to perform. This whole circus mimics a science experiment, fuelled by hypotheses piggybacking on assumptions that go beyond your STP.
Schrodinger’s cat is alive, but it wishes to be dead.
A whole generation of people were made to believe that transitioning into managerial roles is the path to stable career growth. That’s just being lazy with a generous dash of zero creativity. Corporations hardly carve out bespoke roles befitting individuals. They expect people to mould themselves into whatever cookie-cutter shapes they have lying around.
Most (all) organizations fail to realise that managing a team requires a specialised skill set. People management is not the same as project development. Well, maybe now it is, considering how we’re training machines to do everything, cutting out people from the process, writing a prologue to a Skynetian future, but I digress.
Why not create specialised vertical streams that enable the individual to nurture their core skills, instead of getting them to embrace the prickly truth - you are not cut out to be a manager.
With the rise of AI, organizations are valuing generalists over specialists. People who can do a bunch of things fairly well. Sacrificing perfection for good enough. When it should have been the other way round. Fuelling the rise of the classic, “inch deep and mile wide” subjects matter (in)experts. Resulting in solutions, much like a ChatGPT response, that swivel into generic, worthless drivel.
The old adage, "don't put your finger in every pie", still holds water. Why let someone half-ass 10 different things when they can whole-ass 1-2 things?
Besides, one needs to realise that no amount of artificial intelligence can compensate for human stupidity. Combine it with the first taste of a soft power over others, and a complete lack of self-awareness - it is the perfect cocktail for a never-ending trip.
Maybe, sometimes, that little voice of self-doubt that creeps up in the back of your mind isn’t the impostor syndrome. Perhaps you really are just an incapable fucking nincompoop.
The last two paragraphs are completely out of sync with the rest of the blog, which itself is out of sync with reality, but those were some cool-sounding phrases I wanted to plug in somewhere.
Until next time.
Schrodinger’s cat is alive, but it wishes to be dead 😂😂
ReplyDelete