The quote may not be exact. What was the exact quote and who said it?. Created by Richard. education-reference-en - quotations-en

Who said “a person will rise to their level of incompetence?”?

Verified answer

For many, the Peter Principle (PP) was a revelation. For me too. I was, I realised, not, after all, the unique victim of bloody minded destiny. And neither are you. Our positions of oppression were, and are, produced by a natural law of the universe. Yes indeed. Someone had at last explained why it is that so many people in positions of authority seem to be incompetent. They are. In case you missed this gem of insight, let me recap.

The Peter Principle states that -

In a mature bureaucracy people are promoted to their own level of incompetence.

When a person, working in a hierarchical bureaucracy, does his or her task competently, he or she will gain promotion to a higher post which is more demanding. If the person finds this new task beyond his or her capabilities he or she will then perform that task incompetently. No further promotion will be gained and the person will, from that moment on, be stuck in that post. The PP has about it the simple elegance of Darwin's theory of evolution. When it is explained, you see that it must be so and you wonder who you didn't think of it yourself. And yet ... it contains an insidious flaw.

Deficiencies of the Peter Principle.

(1) When a person is promoted (the promotEE), there has to be another person (the promotER) who does the promoting. The Peter Principle depends crucially upon the promoter's job being performed competently. The promoter must be able to distinguish competence from incompetence in candidates for promotion. So what happens if the promoter has already reached his or her level of incompetence? And there are other sources of error in the Peter Principle -

(2) PP contains a hidden assumption that the difficulty of a task, at any level in a hierarchy, increases with increasing level. And we all know that that is not always true. The hardest task in any hierarchy is the one YOU are doing. Everyone else is getting a ride on your back especially the person who is just one level above you.

(3) PP also assumes that there is only one kind of difficulty and only one kind of competence. Again not true. As predicted by the PP the best football players do not always make good managers but is it not also true that some of the best managers were indifferent players. Further -

(4) PP predicts that when a person reaches their incompetence level they will be only marginally incompetent. The theory does not begin to explain the ubiquitous presence of super-incompetence. How, for example, can it explain how John Major became the British Prime Minister when he had already reached his incompetence level when he was a trainee bank clerk? So there has to be more. The PP may be a valuable insight, it may explain why so many people in high places are incompetent, but it not why they are so abysmally incompetent.