There are lots of potential reasons why this might occur, says Shue. The personal drive – even aggression – that is needed to boost your own individual sales doesn’t necessarily translate to the people skills necessary to motivate others, for instance.
“It could be the types of experience or the types of people that are drawn to have very high sales and also to work on their own that makes them less effective managers,” she says. Along these lines, Shue found that the sales workers who already had a record of working collaboratively tended to be much better managers.
Although she does not yet have the data, Shue suspects that the problems described by the Peter Principle may also be rife in science, technology and engineering. “The best scientists and engineers – and this includes all those start-up founders – may not be the right person to eventually lead the organisation or to lead a team,” she says. “You can see how there’s a difference in skills required to be a top scientist versus a top manager of scientists.”
As Lawrence J Peter had originally noted in his book, the rise of incompetent managers is also a common complaint in academia and education. “The best researcher or the person who’s best at teaching may not be the best dean of a school,” says Shue.
Who’s the boss?
Given these findings, we might conclude that we should overlook people’s current performance and promote them solely on things like their people skills. Yet that strategy can also come at a price.
The possibility of a promotion is a positive incentive for many people, boosting their individual performance. Removing that motivation could lead to reduced productivity across the workforce. There’s also the sense of disenchantment that comes after an uninspiring colleague has been promoted ahead of you. Shue’s analyses of the sales teams’ data found that high-performing candidates are about 23% more likely to leave a firm if they have been overlooked in favour of a less competent colleague, for instance.
The reality is that we often find it personally reassuring to be managed by someone who has already proven their own competence at a job, as Amanda Goodall at the Cass Business School in London recently found.
