“The Peter Principle” by Lawrence Peter.
Giving us a clear picture of the career advancement bottleneck problem, he pointed out that everyone will be promoted in the hierarchical organization until they are no longer competent.
In other words, no matter how smart you are, no matter how hard you work and enterprising, there will always be a position waiting for you that you are not qualified for, and you will definitely reach that position. This is the famous Peter Principle.
In various organizations, there is a tendency for employees to be promoted to a position in which they are incompetent. The Peter Principle is sometimes called the “climb up” principle.
This phenomenon is ubiquitous in real life: a competent professor is promoted to university president but is incompetent; an excellent athlete is promoted to an official in charge of sports but does nothing.
For an organization, once a considerable number of employees are pushed to their incompetent level, it will cause the organization’s personnel to be superfluous and inefficient, causing mediocre people to stand out and development to stagnate.
Therefore, this requires changing the corporate employee promotion mechanism that simply “promotes based on contribution.” It cannot be inferred that just because someone has done an outstanding job in a certain position, that person must be qualified for a higher-level position.
Promoting an employee to a position where he cannot perform his talents well is not only not a reward for him, but also makes him unable to perform his talents well, and also brings losses to the company.