Table of Contents

· The Peter Principle — rise to your incompetence · The Dead Sea Effect — bad situations get worse · What can we do to avoid these effects? · Check your job for the Peter principle or Dead Sea saltiness ∘ Have you ever dealt with a boss or job that matched one (or both!) of these concepts?

For a while, my significant other worked at Google. She's a hard worker at every job she holds (and definitely puts in more work than I do, most days), but her stories about Google make me envious.

I won't go into details, but the company provides stellar perks. Even though she was working in a contractor position, rather than as a permanent employee, she regaled me with tales of their cafeteria offerings, their fitness equipment, and other perks.

Even beyond the employee perks, Google was a great place for people to work. It offers excellent pay, recognizes and acknowledges its employee contributions, and it tackles a lot of complex, real-world problems. Another friend of mine works on YouTube, helping build better methods to automatically remove hate and banned content. That's something that has a real impact.

But even the best perks sometimes don't make up for the people and the attitude of the workplace. Many of us can probably recall a time when we worked at a place with a toxic coworker or boss.

And what happens over time, at a workplace with a toxic culture?

We see two closely related business principles applied: the Peter principle, and the Dead Sea Effect.

Let's take a look at them, and how we can recognize them and avoid the worst of their effects.

The Peter Principle — rise to your incompetence

The Peter principle has been around for more than 50 years; it was popularized by a professor in a book with the selfsame name, published all the way back in 1969.

The Peter principle states:

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence… [I]n time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties… Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

That's a depressing outlook!

Breaking it down, the idea is that an employee will keep getting promoted… until they hit a level where they can not competently perform their duties.

1. A new developer joins a company as a junior programmer. His work is great, so he gets promoted.
2. He's now a senior programmer, and he keeps doing great coding work. He gets promoted again.
3. He's promoted to be manager of a small programming team. He's not as good at managing, but he manages to perform decently, and he gets promoted.
4. He's now a director. He's no longer close to the programmers and he's bad at managing, so he doesn't do a very good job as a director. He no longer gets promoted.

Now you have a director who's not very good at his job. He won't get promoted any further, but he's not likely to be demoted back down to a programmer role, where he excels. He's climbed the ranks… until he hits the level at which he's incompetent.

Prof. Peter argues that this happens for every employee at every company, over time. Employees are promoted out of jobs that they're good at, but they can't get promoted out of jobs they suck at, so they get "stuck" in those levels.

It can help explain why there are so many stories of incompetent managers or bosses. "How did this person get put into a position of power, when they suck at it?" you lament.

The answer, according to the Peter principle, is that they were great at their job… up until they were promoted to the point that they weren't.

The Dead Sea Effect — bad situations get worse

The Dead Sea is a landlocked body of water — a salty lake. It's fed by the Jordan river, but there isn't enough water flowing into the lake to maintain its level. It's slowly shrinking over time, as the water evaporates faster than the lake can refill.

The problem is that, while the water evaporates and leaves, the salt cannot do so. The salt is left behind, and over time, this means that there's less and less water but still the same amount of salt. Result: increasingly salty lake.

The same thing can happen in business. At a company with a toxic culture, or with a bunch of incompetent bosses (perhaps benefactors of the Peter principle?), there will be pretty fast turnover…

…of the good employees.

The good employees are able to leave. They have the skills, whether soft or hard, that can aid them in getting hired at other companies. And since their current employer is toxic, they're going to bail as soon as they get a halfway decent offer.

But some employees will stay at the toxic company. These are the ones who are too incompetent, too offensive, or too shady to land a position anywhere else. They either blow their interviews, or they just don't bother, knowing that they'll be fired practically anywhere else.

The result is, over time, a toxic company culture will actually grow more so, rather than less so. The company loses its skilled talent, while it retains the "dead weight" who are unable to leave. The idea, called the Dead Sea effect, was popularized by Bruce Webster in 2008.

Sometimes, we might look at a company and see warning signs of toxicity. Will they clear up on their own?

If the Dead Sea effect holds true, those warning signs will just be the start; if left alone, they'll get worse and worse.

What can we do to avoid these effects?

There's a big leap from spotting a concerning situation at a company to making an effective change. And for many of these changes, they can't be done by rank-and-file employees; they'll need to come from leadership (which may be difficult, especially if leadership has also been contaminated by incompetence or toxicity!).

To combat the Peter principle, we can focus on recognizing that different jobs require different competencies, and that a promotion doesn't always mean "doing the same thing but at a higher level". An individual may be a great programmer, but that doesn't mean that they're a good manager; these are different skillsets.

If someone does get promoted, training — each time there's a promotion, for the new role — can help ensure that the person has at least some background in their new assignment.

On the other shoe, if you're up for a promotion, consider what skills will be needed from you in the new role. Is it really something you want to take on?

Battling the Dead Sea effect, on the other hand, is much more challenging, because it requires an organization to address issues at the highest level downward, before they become systemic. If executives start to see troubling toxic patterns emerge, they can stamp them out before they have a chance to fester and grow…

…but often, these issues aren't a priority until they bring everything to a halt, and by that point, the majority of the organization is tainted. The only way to stop the effect is to either fire or adequately retrain every problem employee, which may have huge costs.

As an individual, the best thing we can do is keep our eyes open at any new company to figure out whether we've landed in a salty situation. If we see systemic issues, our best move is to make sure that the skills we learn are transferrable, and then flee to a better, less toxic workplace.

Check your job for the Peter principle or Dead Sea saltiness

Catchy terms aside, a workplace — like a gut microbiome, which happens to be my main field of study — is a dynamic environment that varies, place to place, and is constantly in flux. When it's healthy, it's great, but it can enter dysbiosis and be thrown off by various factors, making it a terrible and toxic place.

When someone gets promoted at your workplace, do they get training for their new position? Is there a clearly communicated understanding that the new role requires different skills than their past role?

When someone shows unprofessional work traits (sexism, racism, micromanaging or other bad management choices, etc.), does leadership step in and correct their mistake? Or is that kind of behavior allowed to flourish, to the point where good employees start looking for other work?

Ultimately, there's not too much that most of us, as non-leadership individuals, can do to fix these issues. We can alert the leadership team, and we can look for a new job in greener pastures.

Have you ever dealt with a boss or job that matched one (or both!) of these concepts?

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