The Peter Principle posits that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. What happens after that point? The implicit assumption is that they stop getting promoted and linger at whatever level they’ve arrived at, and surely all of us can point to mediocre leaders who seem to exhibit exactly that circumstance. But in fact, that situation is not stable but subject to career pressure, as Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf define it in Making a Career in Dictatorship. Unable to move up, and very possibly unable to meet expectations, the person who is subject to the Peter Principle is at risk of losing their job, or even their entire career. Which means they might take an even greater risk to save it. Gläßel and Scharpf write:
The logic of career pressure also offers a compelling twist to the Peter Principle. The Principle posits that individuals in hierarchical organizations are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, where they can no longer perform effectively and cease to advance. In contrast, our logic shows how these individuals may surpass this point and climb the hierarchy even further. Career-pressured individuals often take on high-risk, labor-intensive, or morally contentious tasks. By loyally executing the organization’s dirty work, they can reestablish their value, regain competitiveness, and even outpace peers who were previously ahead of them. Alternatively, they may resort to sabotaging superiors or higher-ups by making false allegations or revealing secrets to create vacancies above them and forcibly advance their careers.
Gläßel and Scharpf, Making a Career in Dictatorship, page 182
In other words, someone promoted up to their level of incompetence, sensing a threat to their own livelihood, becomes a threat to everyone else. I’m reminded here of David Graeber’s theory in Bullshit Jobs, that a great many management jobs are basically feudal retainers—people kept around in order to make the folks above them look good. Very often, making someone else look good may well mean tackling the dirty work for them so that they can keep their hands clean.
The petered leader has in effect been made an imposter—a real imposter, not a “syndromed” or perceived one. They must seem competent, to preserve the appearance that they belong in the role; while in fact they are not capable of delivering on their actual responsibilities and may have been quietly tasked with unrelated services both illegal and unethical. As a result, one of the primary tools of the real imposter is obscurity. Imposters cloak themselves in a fog of obfuscation and busyness, so that the people around them can never say for sure what it is they are doing, or how well (or not) they are doing it.
What we call imposter syndrome was originally termed imposter phenomena, a term that makes plain that it is something that can be observed, not merely felt. The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm. But perhaps there’s even another, more diabolical move here. What if the popularity of imposter syndrome is, in part, a means of obscuring the actual imposters in our midst? What are we missing when we look inward instead of around?