MZMORALE ZEROthe antithesis of employee engagement
DIRECTIVE 022 / GROWTH

PROMOTE THE BEST PRODUCER

Management potential is difficult to measure. Yesterday's sales number is already in the system.

Promote the highest-performing individual contributor into management. Treat excellence in the current job as evidence of readiness for a different job involving coaching, allocation, judgment and responsibility for other people's work. If managerial performance falls, explain that leadership takes time.

Primary: GROWTHFEEDBACKPOWER
RATIONALE
Current performance is observable, defensible and useful as a promotion incentive. Future managerial fit is less cooperative.
SUCCESS INDICATOR
The organization repeatedly removes excellent producers from production and discovers that their former ranking did not include a people-management section.
COMMON FAILURE
Evaluating promotion candidates on the capabilities required by the destination role rather than using current-role performance as the dominant proxy.
STATUS
Canonical / approved

Reconstructed Handbook series.

THE UNFORTUNATE PART

Unfortunately, the research…

Claim

Large-scale field evidence from sales organizations is consistent with the Peter Principle: firms often place substantial weight on current sales performance when promoting managers even when other observable characteristics better predict managerial performance.

Evidence

Research using worker and manager performance data from 131 firms found that promotion decisions prioritized current worker performance in ways consistent with a trade-off between promotion incentives and managerial match quality.

Strength: Strong

Sources

The Directive is satire. The research summary is not. Evidence is stated separately and qualified to the underlying literature rather than treated as proof of the joke.

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