The Peter Pan Principle

Briefly, the Peter Principle states that an employee will be promoted to the level of his or her incompetence. Good performance in one position does not necessarily correlate to good performance as a manager, but hierarchical merit rewards tend to work that way.

It’s easy to see how that might happen unwittingly: a person is good at a particular position, and as a reward for that productivity or what have you, he or she is promoted to the next step up. Often, the next step up is more managerial with different responsibilities and requisite skill set. The Peter Principle in action is fraught with cascading bad decisions and decreased productivity.

So I wondered if there should be such a thing as the Peter Pan Principle, and how that axiom might play out!

The theorem would go thusly: that a person will be promoted to his or her own level of imagination. I think that could indicate something good, or something bad…

Good

Not to be too banal about it, but the good interpretation could be something like: follow your dreams; or, if you can dream it you can achieve it. Well. That sounds pretty unlikely, doesn’t it?

One variation on the Peter Principle is that employees seek out inappropriate promotions because of tangential benefits or rewards like higher pay, status, or even a desire to work less or relax.

So the Peter Pan corollary to that could be that a person who imagines himself in a position has considered what it is like to be there and has the ambition to perform well in that setting.

Surely it could also apply to making the best of the position you are in by conceptualizing its importance, or apply to ambition more generally: an ambitious (or imaginative?) person is more likely to excel in promotion opportunities and learn to overcome obstacles or deficiencies.

But Peter Pan really is about not growing up. So perhaps the negative application fits best.

Bad

Imagining yourself in, say, a leadership role is far, far different that actually being there, or having experience doing it. I can imagine myself as an Olympic skier, but actually qualifying and competing is so far away from my skill set right now (ow, snow cuts my hand!).

Never-never land is not rooted in reality. It is principally escapist. There is certainly a benefit in many jobs to having a thriving imagination, but if that imagination is not somehow tethered to the facts at hand it can’t really be very useful in a job setting.

Or, the Peter Pan principle could be simply that your job is not what you think it is?

What do you think? How would you define the Peter Pan Principle? Can you use it in a sentence?