If you’ve been involved in the world of business for long, you’ve probably heard of the Peter Principle. In short, the idea is that most employees get promoted to the level of their incompetence – that is, a step above where they are actually effective. This is largely because many employees who are promoted to a higher position rely only on the skills that got them the promotion in the first place. If you want to avoid falling prey to the Peter Principle and continue your upward trajectory in the business world, it’s important that you keep growing in your new role.
Perhaps the biggest reason that people get promoted to a new position is that they got results in the old position. Unfortunately, the metrics of your new position are unlikely to be the same as the metrics in your old position. That means that your old skills are likely much less useful and acting upon your old information will be less effective than it might have been before you were promoted. In short, failure to grow after a promotion means that you continually rely upon skills that no longer matter in order to succeed in a job that’s wildly different than where you learned those skills.
It’s also important to keep growing after a promotion because you’ll want to keep climbing the corporate ladder. Look at every step along your journey as moving into what’s effectively a brand new career. If you stop with what got you promoted the first time, you’ll never gain the skills you need to do the next job effectively. Learning how to do your job now is important, of course, but so too is learning what you need to know in the next stage of your career. If you can effectively grow in your current position, you’ll be better prepared for what comes next.
It’s vital that you keep growing after you’re promoted to a new position. Not only will this help you when you’re up for your next promotion, but it will help you to become more competent at your current position. Every person deserves a chance to advance at his or her job, but doing so means buckling down and learning that the skills that got you to your current position aren’t the skills you’ll need to succeed in the future.
