The KNN Effect.

One of my Linkedin contacts posted a picture of the fabulous book on management called the “Peter Principle” a moment ago. The Peter Principle was written by Laurence J Peter, who observed that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence.

 

 I’m grateful for this reminder of the Peter Principle because, for as long as I can remember, the Holy Grail of any given career was “rising to the top.” This idea isn’t particularly unique to Singapore. However, as Singapore is small, things that happen elsewhere, are often felt more intensely in Singapore.

We are told that we need to go to school and study hard so that we can climb that ladder. Climbing the academic ladder and getting paper qualifications is supposed to be the sure-fire way of ensuring that you will never have to do a menial job like sweep the streets and you should, at the very worst case, retire a manager of sorts. Back in the 1990s, a reasonably fit a-level student was bound for one of the command schools (Officer or Specialist) during national service. We were told back then that learning to lead in the army was going to stand us in good stead for the day we would lead people in management roles.

So, everyone’s working life is about rising the corporate hierarchy. The higher you are and the bigger the organization, the better. Hence, it becomes the goal of every Singaporean to become the regional director of a multinational or a permanent secretary in a ministry.

In a way, its very understandable why people want to climb the proverbial ladder. The higher up you get, the better paid you get, which means you can afford to live a nicer lifestyle than the next guy and the rest of society looks at you with a bit more awe.

Whilst wanting to climb to the top is understandable, we’ve had a few too many corporate boo-boos happening (think of the losses in former monopoly companies)and we need to ask whether we’ve put so much emphasis on climbing to the top that we’ve neglected glorifying basic competence at the job on hand.

Let’s face it, certain jobs require different skills and whilst a person might be good at the job on hand, it doesn’t necessarily make them good at the next job. Why can’t we reward people for being good at the job they’re doing without the pressure to move onto a “higher” job which they may not necessarily be good at or be happy at doing?

Interestingly enough, the one organization that actually does this is the Ministry of Education (MOE), which recognized that there is a distinct difference in the skills needed to be a good teacher and a good principle. A teacher needs to teach, whilst a principal needs to be a good administrator.

In a normal hierarchy, every teacher should have aimed to become a principal (climbing through the ranks of head of department, vice-principal and so on). However, to it’s credit MOE actually recognized that there were teachers who liked to teach and didn’t want to become school administrators. Hence, they created the “teaching track” where good teachers could advance as teachers. An explanation of MOE’s career pathways can be found at:

https://www.moe.gov.sg/careers/become-teachers/pri-sec-jc-ci/professional-development

Sure, not every organization (particularly commercial ones) can structure themselves in a way to suite as many individuals as possible. However, the recognition that not everybody is suited to be at the top and may simply excel at being where they are is an important step in the right direction.

Everything has been about giving the good things to people at the top, without consideration of whether they had the skills to be at the top. We need to recognize that while its important to have good people at the top, you also need competence at the other levels and those levels need to be rewarded appropriately too.

Covid-19 showed us that many ground level jobs were actually more essential to our daily lives than many executive level jobs. Isn’t it time we acted on the reality and rewarded people appropriately for being competent at the level that they’re at instead of putting so much at the top that everyone would be rushing to get promoted to their level of incompetence? We should not want the Peter Principle to have a KNN effect on the entire system.