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You were great at your job. So they gave you a new one.
Now you manage the people who do the job you used to love. The work you were good at is gone. In its place are meetings, budgets and hard talks with people who used to be your friends. Some days you feel like you are faking it. Some days you are sure everyone can tell.
There is a name for this. It is called the Peter Principle. It is more than fifty years old, it started half as a joke, and it turns out to be more true than its own author may have expected.
What Is the Peter Principle?
The Peter Principle is the idea that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.
Here is how it works. You do a job well, so you get promoted. You do the new job well, so you get promoted again. This keeps going until you land in a job you are not good at. And then it stops. Nobody promotes you out of a job you are struggling in. So you stay there.
Do that across a whole company and you get the principle’s darkest joke: in time, many seats end up filled by people who are in over their heads. The real work gets done by the people who have not been promoted that far yet.
The idea comes from a 1969 book called The Peter Principle, by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. Peter was a Canadian teacher and education professor, and the principle is named after him. The book was written in a playful, tongue-in-cheek style, like a fake science of office life.
Almost nobody wanted it. The manuscript was turned down by about thirty publishers. One editor wrote that they could see no commercial possibilities for it at all. When a publisher finally took it, the book became a best-seller. The man who wrote about people being put in the wrong place had, for a while, been judged by people in the wrong place.
Is the Peter Principle Real? What the Data Found
For decades, the Peter Principle was easier to nod at than to measure. People believed it because it felt true. Then economists found a clean way to test it.
In a study later published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, researchers Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue looked at tens of thousands of sales workers across many companies. Sales is a good place to test this idea, because you can measure exactly how much each person sells.
What they found:
- The best sellers were the most likely to be promoted. No surprise there.
- But their teams did worse. The better a new manager had been at selling, the worse their team tended to sell afterward. Put in numbers: a doubling of the new manager’s past sales went with about a 7.5 percent drop in each team member’s sales.
- The people who made good managers were often passed over. Workers with a history of teamwork and working with others turned out to be better managers. But they were less likely to get the job, because promotions were mostly handed out for personal sales numbers.
So why do companies keep doing it? The study offers a surprisingly fair answer. Promotions are a reward. If you promote your top seller, everyone below can see the rule clearly: sell more, move up. Companies seem to accept weaker managers as the price of keeping that simple reward in place.
There is an even stranger result. In 2010, three physicists in Italy, Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo, built a computer model of a company where the Peter Principle was true. In their model, promoting people at random did better than always promoting the best worker. It won them an Ig Nobel Prize, an award for research that makes you laugh and then think. It is only a model, not a real company. But it makes the point sharply: if skill at one job does not carry over to the next one, rewarding that skill with the next job can backfire.
Why Good Workers Get Stuck
The Peter Principle is not really about people being bad at things. It is about a quiet mismatch.
The skills that make you a great nurse are not the skills that make you a great ward manager. The skills that make you a great cook are not the skills that make you a great owner of a restaurant. The skills that make you a great teacher are not the skills that make you a great head of a school.
Promotion usually tests you on the old job and then hands you the new one. It is like choosing the best swimmer to coach the team. Sometimes it works. Often it is a coin toss.
And there is a second, hidden cost that the numbers do not catch. It is the cost to the person. You lose the work that made you feel useful. You lose the daily proof that you are good at something. If you are not careful, you start to believe the new struggle says something about who you are. That feeling has its own name, and it is worth reading about: what imposter syndrome really is, and why success does not fix it.
The Odd Advice Peter Gave Himself
Here is the part of the book people rarely quote. Laurence Peter did not only describe the problem. He suggested a way out, and it was not “try harder.”
He called it creative incompetence. The idea: if you are happy and good at your job, you can protect yourself from a bad promotion by making yourself look a little less promotable on purpose, in some small, harmless way.
It was partly a joke. But under the joke is a serious question most of us never ask: Do I actually want the next step? Not every step up is a step forward. Many people take a promotion because saying no feels like failing. Peter’s quiet point was that staying where you do good work, and are glad to do it, is not failure at all.
What to Do If You Are in Over Your Head
Maybe it is too late for the question. You already said yes. You are already in the job. Here is what tends to help, and none of it costs money.
- Name the new skill. Write down the one thing this job needs that your old job did not. Listening? Planning? Hard talks? It is much easier to learn one named skill than to fight a fog called “I’m bad at this.”
- Stop scoring yourself on the old job. Your value is no longer how much you do yourself. It is how well the people around you do. That can feel like losing. It is really a new scoreboard.
- Find someone who has done it. One conversation with a person two steps ahead of you is worth ten articles. Ask what they got wrong in their first year.
- Ask for help early. Struggling in silence is how the Peter Principle wins. Saying “I’m still learning this” out loud usually earns more trust, not less.
- Know your style. People lead in very different ways, and trying to copy someone else’s style is exhausting. Our free What Is My Leadership Style? quiz can help you see your natural way of leading.
- Remember a step back is allowed. Returning to work you love is not a defeat. It can be the most honest decision in the building.
The Other Peter
The Peter Principle is named for Laurence Peter, and only him. But it is hard to read it without thinking of another Peter, from a much older story.
He was a fisherman. No schooling to speak of. Then he was handed a job far bigger than anything he had trained for: to help lead a movement that would outlive him. And on the night it mattered most, sitting by a fire in a courtyard, he failed badly. Asked three times whether he knew his friend Jesus, he said no three times. If ever someone had risen to his level of incompetence, it was him, in that moment.
But the story does not end at the fire. Some time later, the same fisherman stood in front of the most educated, powerful men in Jerusalem and spoke with a boldness nobody expected. The old record says those men saw that he and his friend John were “unlearned and ignorant men,” and “they marvelled.” And they gave only one explanation for it: “they had been with Jesus.”
Not better training. Not a stronger track record. Better company.
It sits oddly well next to that study, where the people who made the best leaders were not the lone stars, but the ones who had spent time working alongside others. Maybe the deepest cure for being in over your head was never more competence stored up inside you. Maybe it is who you have been with.
Back to Monday Morning
If you are in a job that feels too big right now, the Peter Principle is not a verdict. It is a description of a system, and systems can be worked around. You can learn the new skill. You can find better company. You can even decide the old job was the right one after all.
Just do not let a promotion tell you who you are. You were more than your best numbers before it came. You still are.
Discussion Question
Should companies stop promoting their best workers into management and create a different way to reward them instead? Or is the Peter Principle just the price of giving people a chance to grow? Tell us what you think in the comments. We read every one.
Share This
Got promoted and suddenly feel like you’re faking it? There’s a name for that: the Peter Principle. And a 2019 study found the best workers often make the worst managers. Worth a read: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/what-is-the-peter-principle/
The book that named the Peter Principle was rejected by about thirty publishers before it became a best-seller. Turns out the people deciding were in the wrong seats too. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/what-is-the-peter-principle/
“Not every step up is a step forward.” This piece on the Peter Principle made me rethink the promotion I almost chased. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/what-is-the-peter-principle/
Questions and Answers About the Peter Principle
What is the Peter Principle in simple words?
The Peter Principle is the idea that people in a company keep getting promoted for doing their current job well, until they reach a job they are not good at. Because nobody promotes a person who is struggling, they tend to stay in that job. The idea comes from the 1969 book The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull.
Who came up with the Peter Principle?
The Peter Principle was described by Laurence J. Peter, a Canadian teacher and education professor, in the 1969 book The Peter Principle, written with Raymond Hull. The principle is named after Laurence Peter himself. The book was rejected by about thirty publishers before it was accepted and became a best-seller.
Is the Peter Principle actually true?
There is real evidence for the Peter Principle. A study by economists Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2019, found that top salespeople were the most likely to be promoted to manager, but their teams tended to sell less afterward. Workers with more teamwork experience made better managers but were less likely to be promoted.
How can I avoid the Peter Principle in my own career?
To avoid the Peter Principle, ask whether you actually want a promotion before accepting it, since the new job may need very different skills. If you are already in a role that feels too big, name the specific new skill the job needs, learn from someone who has done the role, ask for help early, and remember that stepping back to work you do well is a valid choice.
What is creative incompetence?
Creative incompetence is a half-joking idea from Laurence J. Peter, the author of The Peter Principle. It means deliberately appearing slightly less promotable, in a small and harmless way, so that a person who is happy and effective in their current job is not promoted into a job they would be bad at.
