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💃 Salesforce Consulting and the Peter Principle 🕺
Is It An Issue? What Can You Do About It?
Salesforce ChaCha
October 11, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! The Peter Principle may be one of the worst byproducts of traditional organizational structures.
How bad is it?
Bad enough that you can name a handful of people, off the top of your head, who are members of the Peter Principle club 😅.
So, let’s dive into this principle and then you can fill a notebook full of those who’ve been Peter Principle’d 👀 ⬇️
Agenda for today includes
Salesforce Consulting and the Peter Principle
Daily Principle
All the Memes
Salesforce Consulting and the Peter Principle
Today we will discuss-
💃 Peter Principle Scenario 🕺
💃 What Is It?🕺
💃 Why Should You Care? 🕺
💃 Takeaway 🕺
SCENARIO
Connie is a Salesforce Consultant. She is a great consultant!
✅ She takes good notes!
✅ She keeps her clients updated with all the things!
✅ She takes time to develop herself!
Her greatness gets her promoted to Senior Consultant 🎉. She brings her competencies to this role and has success.
Some of her new responsibilities, like influencing clients to invest in additional services, and coaching junior resources, are not in her areas of excellence, but she is doing OK 👌!
So OK, in fact, that she is promoted to Manager 🎉!
However, it quickly becomes apparent that she is firmly outside her areas of excellence.
💢 Her team is disagreeable to her management style 😬
💢 The realization rate on the revenue backlog of her client-base is trending down 📉
💢 Her client escalation count is increasing at an outsized rate 📈
Ruh roh….🫣
Connie’s skills that made her an excellent consultant do not necessarily make her a competent manager 🤷.
Welcome to the Peter Principle….👋
WHAT IS IT?
The Peter Principle states that workers will rise to their level of incompetence.
As we’ve just read, Connie is an excellent consultant.
As she rose through the ranks of consulting, cracks in her armor appeared, but she was never less than proficient.
Then, she is promoted to Manager.
Managing people is a different skillset than Salesforce consulting. And Connie, while a competent consultant, is not a competent manager.
She was promoted to her level of incompetence 😢.