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The Peter Principle Posting Date: Oct 20 2007 9:46PM Ever wonder why Christian Slater stopped being a big movie star and starting making guest appearances on My Name is Earl? It’s the Peter Principle. Christian simply got promoted to his level of incompetence and the movie-going public rebelled against him like a bad bean burrito repeating on long-haul truck driver.
The Peter Principle, postulated (and apparently named) by Dr. Laurence J. Peter, provides insight into the way hiring works. Let’s pretend you get your first job. You’re a sales associate. You sit at a desk all day, taking calls and orders from sales people and customers. At this, you’re a cracker jack. You make all the other sales associates look like cold liver and onions. In about six months, you get promoted to sales.
Out you go onto the road where you dazzle customers, close deals and move product faster than hotcakes at a syrup convention. A year later, you get promoted to sales manager.
But you suck as a sales manager. You don’t manage people well. You’re not good with a budget. You hate being tied to your desk and you don’t know how to delegate or communicate. What happens to you? You remain the sales manager for the next thirty-five years and retire leaving a wake of underperformance and dissatisfaction as wide as Lake Erie.
The sum or your career goes like this … Total time kicking ass and taking names: eighteen months. Total time stumbling through the work day like a drunk tuna: thirty-five years. That’s the Peter Principle – everyone gets promoted to his or her level of incompetence, and there we stay. In the type of traditional employment situation that dominates large corporations, institutions and government, once you start to suck, you’re stuck.
In a serial employment situation, however, the Peter Principle works in reverse. Instead of being promoted to your level of incompetence, the level of competence, like gravity, pulls people toward it irresistibly. Christian Slater had no business being a movie star. He was a decent actor in a couple of good movies and a few studio executives thought he could top-line their movies. They were wrong. If Christian worked in government, however, he would have remained a movie star and today he would have Matt Damon’s or Johnny Depp’s career, and that wouldn’t be fair to any of us.
Luckily for cinephiles everywhere, actors are employed serially. They go from one job to the next, getting hired multiple times every year (they hope). The same thing happens for athletes on short-term contracts, most small business owners, and – theoretically at least – politicians (on about a four-year cycle). These people may luck out or be in the right place at the right time to capture some work at a level above their comfort zone, but if they fail, the next job drops right back down to their established level of competence. It’s a beautiful system, now it just needs a name. Since Dr. Peter created an eponymous and alliterative principle, we could go with “SundayMonkey Syndrome,” but that’s a little unwieldy and SundayMonkey is nothing if not wieldy.
Instead, when competency gravity returns someone to his or her natural level of success after a fleeting leap beyond the place where track records apply, let’s call it the “Slater Syndrome” in honour of our favourite one-time-A-list movie star.
Now that this condition has a name, we can apply the label across all manners and walks of life. Whoopi Goldberg, Milli Vanilli, Kim Campbell, Ben Affleck, and the entire Spelling family are seriously afflicted with Slater Syndrome. Lindsey Lohan, John Tory and anyone who plays goal for the Toronto Maple Leafs is Slaterizing their careers as you read this. The Coreys (Feldman and Haim) and the Davids (Schwimmer and Hasselhoff) have crafted careers so exemplary of the Slater Syndrome that when the next round of research funding comes through, we’re going to name scholarships at the Slater Syndrome Institute in their honour.
As dangerous and powerful as it seems, we should not fear the Slater Syndrome. Rather, we should embrace it as a force of nature capable of restoring the world to its state of organic order and balance, sort of like an ecosystem of achievement. |
