The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly
The corollary to the Peter Principle, I think, has always been that it&#x27;s <i>caused by</i> bad management. Taking &quot;is good at IC duties&quot; as the measure for &quot;should lead a team of ICs&quot; is sloppy. You are not considering the person&#x2F;what they&#x27;re good at. You&#x27;re just using an easy shortcut to reward them for their performance.<p>One problem is high-contributing ICs who <i>think</i> they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reason: it&#x27;s how things are done, they really want to do it, etc. There needs to be a separate, <i>equally status-conferring</i>, career track for them if they&#x27;re really not going to be good at managing people. They need to be convinced that the best thing for them is to stay where they are, being awesome. Which is probably hard. The idea that you are awesome, therefore you become a manager, get an office, etc. is pretty pervasive.<p>(The bonus would be that those of us who never, ever want to be managers no matter how much our directors want us to would have that career path available too.)