🧗 The Promotion That Breaks You
Being great at your job is exactly what gets you promoted into a job you're bad at.
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📈 The Play
The Joke That Turned Out to Be a Real Finding
In 1969, Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull published a satirical book making fun of corporate hierarchies. Their joke: every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. For decades, it stayed a joke — a punchline, not a finding.
📊 A 2018 study of 214 companies and roughly 40,000 salespeople, by economists Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue, found that a doubling in a manager's pre-promotion sales corresponded to roughly a 7.5% drop in their new team's performance.
It wasn't that every star seller became a disaster manager. It was a consistent tilt in exactly the direction the old joke predicted: companies kept rewarding proven performance in one job with a promotion into a completely different job that performance had never actually tested.
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🧗 Get Promoted Without Getting Trapped
- Ask what the new role actually requires before you angle for it — management and individual output often need opposite skills.
- Request a trial run: shadow a manager for a week before committing to become one.
- If your company has no separate track for staying deep in your craft, ask whether one could exist.
- If you get promoted and it feels hard, that's data about the job's fit, not proof you don't belong.
👉 Try This Today
The skills that get you promoted and the skills the promotion needs are rarely the same ones. Knowing that early is the real advantage. 🧗