Blog: HR Periscope

According to the Peter Principal, People are promoted to their level of Incompetency and sadly I can’t count the number of times that I have seen the Peter Principal take place and work to the detriment of both of the individual concerned and the department or an organisation as a whole.

This is particularly true, when an employee who is very good at working on an operational level is moved into a managerial role without being prepared for what it entails.

To avoid the Peter Principal and its implications there are certain questions that need to be answered before a decision is made to move them into a managerial role. Specifically are they prepared to:

· Act more like a coach than a player?
· Step out of the limelight and let their employees take the glory instead?
· Both organisation and motivate both themselves and their employees
· Handle paperwork and details?
· Spend a lot of their time planning and analysing rather than being with people?
· Listen to complaints and resolve their employees’ problem?
· Handle personnel issues, inclusive of disciplinary issues which could amount to firing them?

If the answers to any of these questions is “no”, it is not to say that an employee should never be moved, but that time should be taken to prepare employees so that the answers become “yes”.

This indicates the need for talent management, whereby there is an extended time to prepare employees for the moves and at times to develop more creative ways of promoting and fully utilising employee skills, without giving them responsibilities that they will never be comfortable with or readily able to cope with.

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
Human Resources Consultancy
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2007 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: Human Resources, Peter Principle, Succession Planning, Talent Management, Workforce Planning

I recently read an article in the CIPD magazine that stated that according to a report by MPs, “Workforce planning in the NHS has been a disastrous failure that has led the service from boom to bust”, due to a lack of strategic planning by the Department of Health which led trusts to recruit more staff than they could afford.

The report goes further to explain that between 1999 and 2004 nurses in the health service increase by more than 67,000 – 48,000 of which were unplanned.

I don’t know much about the workforce planning that has taken place in the NHS, but I am aware of the positive impact of the planning or in some cases lack of planning in organisations that I have worked with.

Workforce planning is a strategic part of Human Resources as it involves planning for the future. Unfortunately, Human Resources departments are often too caught up with the day to day operational aspects of business to have time for future planning.

This unfortunately means that staffing plans are made based on the basis of short term and present requirements. Subsequently as medium/long term plans are not taken account there is a need to change plans on short notice leading to the need to suddenly increase or reduce staffing levels.

This could, however, be avoided or at least minimised by both medium/long term planning and more flexible working structures.

Ref: Personnel Management 5^th April 2007

Susan Popoola

Conning Towers

Human Resources Consultancy
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2007 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: HR Strategy, Human Resources, NHS, Succession Planning, Workforce Planning