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Hello everyone, welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast.
Today I’d like to share with you something about an article that I read recently on BBC, and it's called the Peter Principle. And I need to be honest with you. I had never heard about it. And the first moment I read the article, I said, oh God, what is that? And the bold statement is every employee tends to rise to his suffer level of incompetence.
And the book and also the article has a very interesting example about a salesperson. Usually, who becomes the sales manager. Most of the time is someone that is a very good salesperson. Someone that sells a lot and as a he or, he or she becomes a sales manager. And there is a belief, this is a problem that many HR areas and many recruiting areas failed is that they believe that being a competent salesperson makes you a competent sales manager.
The first one is the permanent desire for growth. So no matter where you are, you always think, OK, what is my next move? And do I have the competence to do my next move? One thing is to be a great, for example, a doctor. The other thing is the management of, for example, a cardiology of a hospital, where there are 200 doctors. It's a different competence by doing the surgery, a heart surgery and managing two hundred people and trying to deal with them. The other thing is to be an excellent accountant. The other think it is to manage a bank.
When you become a sales manager, you are not able to do that anymore because then you need to lead the team. You need to motivate the team. You need to handle conflict among the salespeople. So it's a different ability.
The second is your desired for learning. Learning for me is an endless journey. I remember when I was young, and my father was a professor, a teacher, and he always says, you need to learn every single day. You need to learn, learn, you can never feel; oh, I know enough because the day you feel you know enough, you are ready trapped, you are ready trapped.
The third one is humility. So you need to be humble. When you fulfill a new position, you don't need to prove to everybody that you know everything. You need to be a fast learner. You need to understand which are the skills I need to do that job. Are these skills something that I already have or something that I need to pursue? So you need to be humble. And the problem is that if you go up on the ladder, it's a tendency that people become less and less humble, more arrogant, more self-sufficient. They listen less, and they talk more. They think they know everything. And this is the trap that will stop you from going anywhere. And if you reach an incompetent position, I feel very sad for you because you will be unhappy. You'll not like your job. You'll be on the defensive. You’ll be stressed, and you will feel incompetent even if you don't tell these to everybody.
And last but not least is the passion. And for me, one of the biggest indicators, if I'm on the right position is the amount of happiness in the amount of joy I'm doing something. And these sense of purpose, the cents of reason, the sense of learning and doing things. It's something that helps me a lot. If you, for example, are not passionate about what you are doing. If you're feeling the fancy, if you're feeling threatened or the time you should rethink, how do you have the competencies to do that? Or are you are becoming a victim of the Peter Principle?
Think about that and see you next week with a lot of five minutes podcast.
