Do What You Do Best And Partner With Others Who Do What They Do Best

For a long time, everything I saw suggested that people in organisations rise until they reach a sustainable level of incompetence.

For the first time, I think that’s no longer the case.

The idea, as you probably know, is based on the Peter principle, developed by Laurence J. Peter that suggested that success leads to promotions until you reach a point where you are no longer competent – and this is where you plateau.

But why would you plateau?

There are two reasons.

First, you’re too senior to do the work so you hire others to do it for you and oversee what they do.

Inevitably, your skills fall behind, until one day you no longer know enough to understand what others are doing.

You did that to someone else, and one day it will happen to you.

The second is that as you rise in an organisation success is less about the work and more about the politics.

This is a well-understood, well-researched phenomenon that derails the best laid plans of well-meaning leaders.

They spend so much time on the politics of their organisations that’s there’s no time left to learn and develop their own capabilities.

So what’s different now?

It’s that you now have a friendly AI to help – to be there and support your learning journey – a supportive system that has your back.

It means that you can figure out how to do something in a few hours that would have taken you six months the old way – where you had to hunt down the information.

I cannot begin to express how transformational this can be – if you use it right.

The key is using these tools to help supercharge your learning rather than seeing them as tools that you can offload work onto.

Why did you hire someone to help you in the first place – presumably because there was a task to be done that was taking too much of your time and the value equation didn’t add up?

But now, if you can spend less time to solve that problem than it will take to go through the pain of recruiting someone – shouldn’t you just do that?

But there’s one more thing that will make the difference between doing this well and getting overwhelmed.

When you can learn anything – you should focus all your time and energy on what you can do best and partner with others on what they do best.

That, I think, is the future of teams – in companies, boutique consultancies and all kinds of organisations.