The problem with promotions

MANY congratulations on your promotion. It’s probably downhill from here. This deflating prognosis is not true of every job, person or organisation. But, too often, a promotion is a precursor to problems.

That is partly because promotions are often a tool for rewarding past performance, not a way of selecting for future success.

A paper published in 2018 by Alan Benson of the University of Minnesota, Danielle Li of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Kelly Shue of the Yale School of Management sought evidence of the Peter principle – developed by Laurence Peter, a “hierarchologist” – that people are promoted to the level at which they are no longer competent. They found it.