For a Quantum Jump in Career beyond Peter Principle

Age-old tried and tested Peter’s Principle says ‘a person rises to his/her level of incompetence’. For a business executive, this is matter of great sadness as this tells him/her to ultimately get proved a failure someday at the end of his/her career. But the story may go beyond boundaries of this principle. Here is how to achieve that.

Business environment up to the middle level of management remains segmented into various segments based on respective skills such as – Engineering and Technology, Accounts and Finance, Administration, Material management, Marketing, Resource allocation and Strategic planning, Communication, Human resource management, etc.

Further, as we go down, these segments have further subdivisions, but as we go up, these segments have no common grounds. Therefore, for a manager to move up the ladder, he/she must develop competency in another field, and the easiest to do this is to choose a field which is complimentary to his/her field of his/her original expertise and develop skills into that.

With each of these core expertise fields, there is one that is complimentary to each of these and that is dealing with people to drive maximum out of them through inducing and inspiring them to do their best. Indeed, this skill is required at all levels of management, but its significance keep on rising along with the hierarchy of the organization.

The complimentary field of skill for a person depends on three factors –

Person’s own bent of mind and choice

Every person has some individual characteristics, traits and tastes and accordingly finds some field more interesting than others. It may depend on his/her family background too. Such a diverse field of interest of the person may or may not be allied to his/her main field of expertise, his/her additional skill in this new field may prove useful to him/her in career development provided the new field is related to business interests of the organization he/she is working for.  

In such a diversification of skill development, the person may even find that the new field suits him/her better than even his/her original field of expertise, and that he/she should have started his/her career in this new field itself. Such a self-discovery by the person makes it easy for him/her to become expert in both the fields.   

Organization’s working

Working of a particular organization and their field of business makes some fields of expertise more close to others. For example, for a manufacturing organization fields of engineering and materials management are found to be closely related and complimentary to each other, while for a trading organization, fields of materials management is found to be complimentary to marketing management.

Therefore, any person looking for a complimentary skill for him/herself must take into consideration the organization’s field of working into consideration for his/here career development  beyond Peter’s principle.    

Interactivity of fields of expertise

Irrespective of personal choices of an individual and working of an organization, a field of expertise is found to be interactive with another field, hence thus becomes a natural determining factor for developing complimentary skills by a person.  For example, fields of Administration and Communication, Materials management and Marketing, Engineering and Strategic planning, make mutually interactive pairs of fields of expertise for a business executive.