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Employees tend to “rise to a level of respective incompetence,” being promoted “until their performance declines,” a report found.
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In explaining the data, Gallup cited The Peter Principle, a concept introduced by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull in 1969. The idea suggests that employees tend to “rise to a level of respective incompetence,” being promoted “until their performance declines,” the report said. Employers often leave those workers in place “instead of moving them into roles that better use their talents.”
The result, said Gallup, is that management and leadership roles get filled with people “whose past success does not align with the demands of managing a team.”
While front-line supervisors in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare and retail are promoted based on individual performance or experience as front-line workers, Gallup cited data from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found a 7.5% decline in subordinates’ sales performance “when organizations promoted high-performing sales representatives to managerial roles.”
Supervisor engagement also influences employees who report to them, per Gallup’s research, which found that managers’ “engagement, effectiveness, and natural talents account for at least 70% of the variance in team-level engagement,” even when taking into account other factors. Meanwhile, U.S. front-line employees already experience lower levels of engagement (26%) than the U.S. workforce broadly (32%).
Gallup found that less than half of front-line supervisors (45%) said they had participated in supervisor training or education in the past year, and another 32% said they had that kind of training, but not in the past year. A further 23% said they’d never taken part in that kind of training.
In order to mitigate the effects of the Peter Principle, Gallup suggested hiring and promoting workers based on supervisory talent instead of only basing the decisions on individual performance or experience in a role.
“A meta-analysis of 136 studies in which structured interviews and assessments were administered to 14,597 managers found that hiring based on managerial talent increased sales or revenue by 21% per manager and profit by 32% per manager,” Gallup said.
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The survey was part of a broader analysis into the impact of cargo theft on trucking, which ultimately found the industry could be losing billions of dollars annually due to the problem.
Provided by Schneider National
In just over a year since the combination, both companies have seen how scale can open new business opportunities, according to executive Steve Wells.
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The survey was part of a broader analysis into the impact of cargo theft on trucking, which ultimately found the industry could be losing billions of dollars annually due to the problem.
Provided by Schneider National
In just over a year since the combination, both companies have seen how scale can open new business opportunities, according to executive Steve Wells.
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