Why your competent coworker got promoted into misery
Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull meant it as satire in 1969. Then it turned out to describe something real.
In 1969, educator Laurence J. Peter and writer Raymond Hull published The Peter Principle, intending it as satire of corporate life. Its claim: in a hierarchy, people get promoted based on how well they do their current job, not how well they'd do the next one. So they keep rising until they land in a role that finally exceeds their ability, and then they stop — stuck at what the book calls their level of incompetence, still employed, no longer good at the work.
Peter and Hull meant it as a joke about bureaucracy, but readers recognized their own offices in it. The best teacher becomes a mediocre assistant principal. The best assistant principal becomes a principal who can't handle the school board. Nobody demotes them, because demotion isn't really a tool most organizations have, so they simply remain, one rung too high forever.
The uncomfortable part isn't the pattern. It's the corollary the book draws from it: eventually, every post in a hierarchy tends to be filled by someone who is not quite equipped to do it, purely because the promotion system rewards the wrong track record. Competence at one level was never a qualification for the next.