The Michael Principle
I’ve been rewatching The Office (US version) recently. I’m somewhere in the middle of Season 6 and it’s just as good as I remembered. I do, however, suffer from something of a sense of betrayal every time I watch it, as I adore the UK version of the show (which I have rewatched more times than I care to reveal) and think it is a work of genius. Everytime I watch either version, I’m always startled at how radically different they are from each other, and, in particular, the very different flavours of the lead characters Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) and David Brent (Ricky Gervais). David, in my opinion, has very very little to recommend him throughout the vast majority of the UK Office, whereas, in order to survive for as many seasons as it did, Michael had to have something about him that audiences could root for. And one of those things is that he’s actually a little bit good at his job.
The bit that he’s good at, however, is the bit that he technically doesn’t need to do anymore: sell paper. Michael is a great salesperson. He keeps a rolodex (hello early 2000s) with notes on each page about that contact's family or hobbies so he can reference them whenever he calls. When we see him with clients, he’s charming, compelling and persuasive in a way that no one else in his team seems to be. The comedy arises from the fact that Michael has been catapulted from a job that he seems to be excellent at (selling paper) to a job that he is clearly terrible at (being a boss).
It is one of life’s great ironies that the better you are at your job, the more likely you are to get promoted out of it into a different kind of role that you may or may not be suited for. My parents, who were both teachers, often used to comment on the number of exceptional classroom teachers who made terrible Heads of Department because the skillset needed to be an effective teacher of children is not the same as that needed to be an exceptional organiser and motivator of a group of adults who are trying to accomplish something together. This irony is known as the Peter Principle (defined as being promoted to the level of your incompetence) and it’s remarkably common across many walks of life, including, I think, the arts sector.
I have never worked in a big, corporate organisation - those that have, please do write in and tell me if I’m wrong in what I’m about to say - but I get the sense that they approach things slightly differently. Whilst I’m sure there are still plenty of people to whom the Peter Principle might apply, from what I’ve heard, at least some thought is given early on in a person’s career as to how they might progress within the organisation. Friends who have trained as lawyers, or who have been on graduate schemes at major big banks or financial services companies, have a sense that this might be a company within which they could stay for a considerable portion of their career and, as the years tick on, some thought seems to be given about how best to keep them there. This often involves some sort of management or leadership training to skill them up for higher level roles, teaching them first how to manage a person, then a team, then perhaps being put into a position where they have some sort of strategic input or decision making power. If done in a thoughtful way, by the time they get anywhere near a job title with the word Executive in it, they’ll hopefully have built up some skills and experience that will enable them to thrive in a leadership role.
This is not the experience that I, or, really, anyone I know, has had in the arts sector. There is no defined career track through the arts - people come into leadership roles from a variety of different positions and, often, completely different kinds of work experience. This is great in many ways, but, in combination with small to non-existent training budgets, there’s very little out there (apart from the perennially over-subscribed Clore Leadership scheme) in terms of leadership support and training. This is precisely the territory in which the Peter Principle is likely to creep in. I can think of examples of people who have been, for instance, an exceptional General Manager or Head of Operations - someone who gets stuff done, is organised, can work quickly and efficiently - who go on to become an Executive Director or CEO and, frankly, aren’t particularly suited to it. As I wrote about in my very first post, I still remember vividly the shock of discovering, on starting my first leadership job, that all the things that I’d hitherto been told were my strong suits couldn’t help me in this brave new world where I was required not just to implement but to envision what the future might look like.
I think that this is an eminently solvable problem. Lots of informal mentoring already happens within the arts and voluntary sectors - if you’re someone who’s interested in leadership but is wondering what it might entail and whether you’d truly enjoy it more than the thing you do now, then reach out to a leader you admire and see if they’ll mentor you whilst you figure it out. I’d love to see more work-shadowing schemes available, opportunities for, say, a Marketing Manager at a small touring theatre company to go in and shadow the Director of Marketing at the National Theatre, to see what they get up to day to day and whether this is something they might fancy doing in the future. But, on a much deeper level, part of the fix is to make continuing to do the kind of job that you already do an exciting proposition.
Let’s go back to our classroom teacher example. It might be that, without taking on a Head of Department position, your progress up the payscale is limited. It might be that, unless you have the words ‘Head of’ in your job title, no one takes your opinion seriously. It might be that the messaging you get from an early stage of your career is: ‘you’re headteacher material’. All of these things leave you with the distinct impression that, in order to be successful, you need to get promoted into other kinds of roles, beyond the one you’re doing now which happens to be the one you love. It’s not enough to be a really good classroom teacher. To earn more money, to gain more respect, you have to climb the ladder.
Michael Scott and David Brent both want to stay as the manager of their respective branches because they enjoy the status that being the boss brings them. In many company and sector cultures, this is often the only way to achieve status. It is under this condition that the Peter Principle can thrive - brilliant salespeople, or heads of operations, or customer service staff, who find themselves no longer doing the thing that makes them brilliant, but being paid more to do something they don’t really enjoy pretty badly. For those of us who are leaders, our challenge is to set up multiple ways that the people within our companies can develop and progress, whether that’s new areas of responsibility that they could take on where they are, or, when they’re thinking about what’s next, proactively helping them to find career routes that allow them to increase their salaries whilst still utilising the skills that make them brilliant. The lack of a structured career path through the arts is a challenge but not necessarily a curse and, with a little imagination, could be turned into a blessing.