The Real Reason You Aren't Being Promoted

Bunfights, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Peter Principle and Raised Eyebrows

In the year I was promoted, interest rates rose to 5.25%. International markets went downhill on a black bin liner, and it wasn’t long before the world experienced an almighty financial crash. The worst economic disaster since the Great Depression of 1929.

House prices fell and mortgage costs spiralled. Ordinary folks lost lots of money and some lost the roof over their heads. All from the subprime mortgage crisis that started in America and spread its diseased tentacles across the globe.

Only a few observant money-men saw it coming and scooped up billions of dollars by betting against the accepted investing wisdom. Banks struggled, and some failed in a spectacular fashion.

The Dunning-Kruger effect was like a virus; it spread with epidemic proportions across the banking sector. Bankers, blinded by their greed and incompetence, couldn’t see it coming.

They needn’t have worried.

Politicians shored up the finances of banks they owed allegiance to (future cushy high-paying jobs). They dished out bailout packages amounting to trillions of dollars to keep the banking Dunkers in their fortified towers, who continued to pay themselves bonuses that would support a small country.

When a politician retires, resigns or gets voted out of public service and gives a talk to a group of estate agents in New York about Brexit or the like, and gets paid twice his yearly salary for an hour or two, it makes me think; ‘What the hell did they do to deserve that?’

It was enough for me to raise an eyebrow at the politicians — others raised a similar suspicious eyebrow at the police promotion process.

This could be any organisation

You would think performance has an eeny-weeny-tiny part to play in a promotion. It didn’t. As far as I could see, there was no connection between performance and promotion.

There are those who will tell you the two are connected, but that is only the view of gullible hard-working hopefuls, naively giving their all for the false promise of future rewards.

There have been many promotion processes, all variations on a theme. When I started out, long before I was to consider going for promotion, they had the ‘bunfight’.

This involved senior police officers and heads of department getting together in a locked room to discuss who they should promote. There would be a ding dong argument and whoever shouted loudest for their favourite would get him or her promoted.

I’m not sure why they called it the bunfight, but I pictured several of our more intimidating senior officers throwing various choices of patisseries at each other.

You might think it a fair method of promoting someone, particularly if you were a member of the police football team — a disproportionate number ended up with scrambled egg on the skip of their hats.

That might be a surprise to conspiracy theorists who thought it was the Freemasons who ran the show. The police had, long ago, moved on from funny handshakes. Now it was communal baths. For all I know, that’s what the Freemasons did too. I can only surmise.

As time moved on, favouritism was decreed as an improper way to run the police force. So they introduced another promotion process, a complete revamp of our traditional ways.

They consigned the bunfight to a metal storage container at the far reaches of the rear yard where it remained under lock and key — only ever to see the light of day again if all common sense and rational thought were to vacate the premises.

The Human Resources Department (HRD) spent months researching the subject and came up with a new system.

This new system was, of course, abandoned by the next Chief Constable, whose preference was for something he had more control over, something that happened with every new Chief Constable. As soon as the new incumbent took up the role, HRD would be tasked to come up with something new and better.

Our new Chief Constable was of the opinion we had promoted every single senior officer beyond their ability — the ‘Peter Principle.’

The Peter Principle is a management theory that states employees stop getting promoted once they reach a rank in which they are incompetent. It explains why so many short-tempered, unsympathetic, social-inepts end up in positions of power.

If a multi-national company finds itself saddled with an ineffective executive it nudges the underachiever into a job in which he can do no harm.

“Steve, we need you to sort out our branch office in Timbuktu.”

It happened in the police, too.

Competent cops earned a promotion to sergeant; competent sergeants received deserved promotions to inspector, and so on.

However, they did not get promoted any further if they were bungling idiots — Inspector Clouseau’s of crime-fighting. That is the Peter Principle. Once they no longer perform effectively, they stop being promoted. Thus, managers rise to their level of incompetence.

The police didn’t have a branch office in Timbuktu, but they had meaningless projects — which were the same thing.

For those of you who disagree and consider you did not or are not being promoted further because of some other reason, it’s probably because your immediate boss is incompetent and doesn’t appreciate just how dazzlingly brilliant you are.

See how the Peter Principle works!