Performance-Potential Mismatch
Past success predicts future success only when the next role depends on the same abilities. Promoting people for excellence in one job can manufacture incompetence by placing them in another job they were never assessed to perform.
An organization can reward its best employee by turning them into an incompetent one. The move looks deserved: promote the person who succeeded. But the promotion was awarded for performance in the old role, not potential in the new one.
E1The evidence belongs to the old job
Performance is evidence about a particular person-task fit. A promotion changes the task: execution may become supervision, technical judgment may become negotiation, or individual output may become responsibility for other people’s output. Unless those jobs draw on the same abilities, the original performance record answers the wrong question.
The organization then mistakes a ranking for a forecast. It knows who performed best where they are, but acts as though it has measured who will perform best where they are going. This is Skill Specificity ignored by a career ladder: competence does not automatically travel with status.
E1Promotion is not the problem
Current performance can be relevant when the new role preserves the old role’s core demands, and unfamiliar duties can sometimes be learned. The mismatch appears when success is treated as sufficient proof of potential despite a material change in the abilities required.
Assess the destination job
Before accepting or awarding a promotion, write down three recurring tasks in the new role and ask for separate evidence that the candidate can perform each one. Do not let excellence at the current job substitute for that assessment.
Episodes that teach this
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How The World Chooses To Be Incompetent - The Peter Principle - FutureIQ
· explained at 4:10
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Employees were promoted “based on their success in the current role” and “not based on potential in the new role.”