For two years running, there appear to have been embarrassing mistakes made by Blackburn Rovers staff over technical issues when attempting to sign players on deadline days. There have also been other less high profile issues in regard to the general running of the club which have drawn concern from our fans.
It is being said by some Rovers fans, our club is being run on foundations of the ‘Peter Principle’. This is a theory based on a work by Laurence J Peter in 1969, where managers and executives find their own level of incompetence. The Peter Principle is a clever idea, although it can’t have done a great deal for most workplaces or our national and local government departments or most other large institutions. The whole gist of this idea is that people get promoted one level beyond their ability to actually do a job they were hired for.
It’s bound to keep happening because it makes a strange kind of sense. Do a good job and you get a promotion with more responsibilities. If you do a good job there and you’ll get another promotion with even more responsibilities. Do a bad job there and what happens? Nothing! They don’t send you back. You just stay where you are until something radical happens at the workplace. The daft bit is the person who blagged it isn’t really the one who suffers. After all, they have a job and presumably a nice well paid one. The suffering trickles downwards, poisoning the employer and those staff left behind to deal with the repercussions of their incompetence.
At Blackburn Rovers we had a good example of this on the football side with Steve Kean. From being a trainer, his luck was in and he found himself becoming the manager, albeit our most incompetent and unpopular holder of this position in many Rovers fans opinions. Despite Kean realising he was out of depth and inevitably being given his marching orders, the owners of our club appear not to have learned a great deal from those awful times under his tenure.
This ‘Peter Principle’, or ‘Pune Principle’, as some are calling it, remains there for all to see on the non-footballing side of the club. No doubt our owners in India are very sensitive about their recruitment policy, to the point of dragging even the slightest dissenting voices through the courts of law. They seem to spend a lot of time in these places at the moment.
Perhaps the best examples of seeing repercussions of the ‘Peter Principle’, not necessarily at our beloved football club, are cutting corners, slovenliness, a lack of ability or fear of making decisions and missing deadlines. Many of you might have seen the above examples in your workplaces too. I certainly did.