The Peter Principle at Work: How We Excuse, Promote and Allow Failing Up in Progressive Politics

Written by Audra (Tafoya) Grassia, edited by Loryn Wilson Carter

This is the seventh post in a series about racism in the progressive political ecosystem. You can read my previous posts here.

My focus is how we — in the progressive and Democratic political ecosystem — reinforce racism by virtue of how we recruit people; how we promote (or fail to promote) people; and how we retain (or fail to retain) people.

In each part of this series, I’ll dive deep into a particular issue in a campaign career life cycle. I’ll offer ideas and solutions on how we can address and work towards creating more antiracist policies.

Expanding the Conversation on Toxic Workplace Culture

Last week’s post about toxic workplace culture really seemed to hit a nerve. I received amazing feedback from colleagues, friends, and people I’ve never met. So, first — thank you for reading and for sharing your stories, experiences, and perspective.

One thing that was clear from the response I received was that workplace toxicity needs some additional airing out.

Not surprisingly, the stories I am hearing from friends and colleagues center around

• Consultants and political advisors who blow them off, don’t actually deliver the work for which they were hired, or are just plain rude;
• Managers (not just campaign managers, but people in management positions) who commit egregious errors in judgment; repeatedly demonstrate an inability to effectively do their jobs with little to no repercussion; and/or fail to demonstrate even basic management skills by not understanding how to provide feedback in a constructive and productive way;
• Possibly worst of all, a system where there’s no support or mechanism for them to address their concerns or think through their options to get out of the situation.

Today, I’ll continue to write on how toxic workplace culture promotes racism within the progressive political space. Specifically, I will discuss how the Peter Principle manifests itself in politics and why it can be so damaging.

I’ll also suggest some solutions to how we stop these things from happening before they start.

The Peter Principle: What Is It and How Does It Apply to Politics?

The Peter Principle is the idea that employees rise to their level of incompetence: people continue to get promoted until they reach a job that they are incapable of doing. And that is where the employee will remain.

Politics defies the Peter Principle, and not in a good way. In politics, people often get promoted beyond their level of incompetence. That’s because politics and campaigns have pretty hierarchical structures, and if you’ve done one job (whether you did it particularly well or not), you are expected to continue to rise and do the next job. What’s more — people promote as often (if not more often) across organizations than they do within an organization. So, the information about their performance is relatively limited as they move into their next job.

In my professional networks, we call this failing up.

Failing Up is Usually a Privilege Reserved for White People

Let’s start with a few facts:

• According to a Georgetown University report, Black and Latinx workers are paid less than White workers — -even with the same level of educational attainment. As a result, Black and Latinx workers are less likely to have a job with family-sustaining earnings.
• Men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the criteria, women will only apply for jobs if they meet 100% of the criteria, according to an internal report at Hewlett Packard.

The consequence of these biases is a system that promotes White people to higher-level positions ahead of their potentially equally or more qualified BIPOC counterparts. And for many years, it also meant promoting more men ahead of equally or more qualified women. In recent years, there is more gender parity, but racial parity hasn’t followed.

All of the research named above is specific to the private sector, but we see the same dynamics play out in progressive politics all of the time. In fact, these dynamics might even be worse in politics because hiring and promotion timelines are extremely accelerated, failing often to allow for proper vetting of candidates. It’s not unusual for people to apply for new jobs every year, or two years, and expect a promotion each time.

The dynamics ultimately put people who are not necessarily the best fit for a job in positions of power over people who might be more competent or qualified. The result can be a negative power dynamic that ultimately sees BIPOC coming out on the losing end, more often than not.

Caveats and Qualifiers

A couple of things are worth noting before I dig in further:

1. Not every White person has failed up to their position. I have worked with many White people who are really good at their jobs. Similarly, in my experience this applies mostly to White men. But because of our lack of strong hiring and management systems, no group is fully exempt from failing up. Including White women. The same lack of hiring management and systems can also set up people who are otherwise qualified for failure. But that’s another topic.
2. Not everyone who has “failed up” actually failed at some point. Sometimes, they’re just mediocre, but they get the benefit of a doubt that their colleagues didn’t, especially when it comes to managing other people.
3. Managing people more qualified than you isn’t inherently bad. It can even create opportunities for strong managers to shine and excel. But it also has the potential to exacerbate bad managers’ behaviors.

Failing Managers Up Hurts Organizations and People

I have a Latina friend (we’ll call her Maria) who was hired into a senior leadership role in a political consultancy. Six months into Maria’s tenure, her (White female) CEO gave her a glowing review. Right after, she (and her Black colleague) were removed out of the senior leadership team by a White man, though they retained their senior leadership titles. She lost all of her direct management responsibilities and became bored and disengaged at work. She asked her new manager and the organization’s chief of staff what additional leadership roles or responsibilities she could take on. They ignored her.

The CEO hired the new manager without advertising the role internally or externally. Maria never had a chance to make her case for why she should be in the position, nor was she (or her Black colleague) offered the opportunity to prove herself to earn the position. As a result, Maria felt that her contributions and hard work were not valued.

What’s more, Maria’s new manager was classically insecure. Instead of valuing Maria’s inputs, he sidelined her. Maria left the company within 5 months and before she secured new employment.

This type of story is common in politics.

Coded Language Used to Excuse Bad Management Practices

In a functional workplace culture, “managing up” gives subordinates the opportunity to develop professionally or to participate in conversations that they may otherwise not be a part of.

In a dysfunctional or toxic workplace culture, managing up is code for overburdening more junior staff with the task of doing their managers’ jobs for them or making their managers better at their jobs — often without proper recognition, attribution, or credit.

In politics, I’ve witnessed White people in power have open disdain for junior staff who were calling them to task for not providing them proper support as managers. They would say things like, “everyone has too many feelings…” in an exasperated tone that was dismissive of their more junior colleagues’ (often legitimate) concerns.

In another campaign I worked on a long time ago, I confided in a colleague who was at my level about the issues I was having with our shared manager. His response was that I needed to be “more strategic” and learn how to “manage up” better.

I believe managing up is a true and valuable skill. But it can also be used to excuse bad management and bad managers.

Calling Out Bad Management Behavior

Conflicts between managers and staffers can have many dimensions. In established companies and organizations (mostly outside of politics), human resources and conflict resolution systems — -or more experienced managers — -help people work through those conflicts.

In most political campaigns or small consulting firms,however, there is very little in the way of support systems to manage through problems or conflicts when they arise. There is often no outlet or resource for a more junior staffer to lodge a complaint against their manager.

Consider a campaign’s staffing structure. It most often looks something like this:

Typical (simplified) campaign staffing structure

Staff theoretically can complain to their campaign manager or to their candidate, if they are being mismanaged or mistreated. But that is very risky and the Campaign Manager is not an objective party. They presumably hired their department heads because they trusted them to do their job, well. But since most campaigns don’t formalize any way for staff to provide upward or anonymous feedback about their managers, the department heads maintain the advantage in being able to communicate their side of the story, blame their staff for their poor management, or generally shield themselves from repercussions. This is gaslighting. And it happens all the time.

The only time things come to light are when staff have some kind of unified effort to raise their concerns OR if it’s clear by virtue of their performance that their manager is not doing their job particularly well. For department heads who have a bad campaign manager, the option is even worse. They can go to the candidate, but there is no real other option for them to remedy the situation.

I’ll pause here to acknowledge that there have been efforts in recent years to unionize campaign workers. I applaud these efforts and I think unionization is part of the solution, but it’s not a panacea. It’s also much more difficult for staff on smaller campaigns to unionize, for a variety of reasons. And a union won’t always solve persistent and pervasive toxic workplace cultures.

In the end, it will almost always be the person in power who fares better, when conflicts arise. And because we promote White people over BIPOC, it is more often the case that the BIPOC lose in these situations.

People who struggle with their managers or their workplace cultures are often then left with three bad choices:

1. Deal with it and stay
2. Complain and get fired or
3. Voluntarily leave (often without complaint) — people don’t want to leave on a bad note with their employers, for fear of not being able to secure future employment. In my example above, Maria lied about the reason she left and said it was simply because she was pursuing another opportunity.

There is SO RARELY an option “d” — one that acknowledges the issue, makes a fair assessment through objective, third-party professionals, and then develops a workable solution that supports both the staffer to ensure they are heard AND accomplishing the mission of the organization.

Power Empowers the Powerful

As people rise within our political industry, they have more access to others in positions of power — campaign committee staff leadership, donors, candidates, consultants, and most importantly — hiring managers.

When we create a system that allows people to fail up over and over again, we build a system that protects the people who perpetuate bad behavior. And we normalize things like getting fired as “common.”

We know that not everyone who gets fired is bad at their jobs. In an industry driven by relationships, sometimes personalities just don’t mesh.

But there is a double standard when it comes to getting fired. Because so many hiring managers are White, White people tend to give people who look like them the benefit of the doubt. And It’s very easy to spin these situations to mask one’s own culpability.

While it’s only anecdotal and based on my observations and experience, I do not believe BIPOC, especially Black people, are as often given this same benefit of the doubt. They are not always given the opportunity to explain what happened from their perspective. And if they call out their experience from the perspective of racism or unequal treatment, they run the risk of being labeled “problematic”.

Friends have also shared stories (and I’ve observed) situations where Black people, especially, but people of color more broadly will be fired for infractions that are often overlooked when committed by White people. THIS IS A PROBLEM.

We Need to Train People How to Manage People, Then We Need to Value Those Skills

I’ve said it before, but a huge piece of this comes down to training people how to manage people and then valuing those skills.

Especially in campaigns, hiring managers do not usually value good people management skills. One colleague I know was interviewing for campaign manager positions with political committees. Out of four different interview processes, only once was she asked about her management philosophy.

Ultimately, we have to decide that good people management is worth the investment, because that’s what it takes. It takes time, investment, energy and prioritization. Because we’re so focused on short-term wins, this decision must happen outside of an election cycle.

Very often, when issues are raised to senior management on campaigns or within political organizations, especially as election day draws near, we hear an excuse that goes something like this:

We’re facing the most consequential election of our lifetimes. We just need to get through the next 4 months and everyone needs to put their feelings aside.

The problem is we say this every single election cycle and it never gets better. We must stop using the importance of our work as an excuse to treat people poorly cycle after cycle. Also, I want to be clear. Bad managers don’t just hurt “feelings.” They hurt a workers’ ability to do their jobs or do their jobs well.

By virtue of their poor management practices, they are hurting their own cause and leaving good talent, ideas, and productivity on the table.

How Do we Prevent Upwards Failure?

Here are some suggestions on how we can prevent upwards failure. Ultimately, addressing it will take hard conversations and cultural and systemic shifts in how we operate.

• Acknowledge it. Talk About It. Recognize Our Own Part in It. We need to recognize it as a problem, before we can start to address solutions.
• Those in power need to care. Going back to earlier post, if the elected officials, donors, and candidates around which our political system has been built are not going to prioritize fixing it, then it won’t get fixed.
• Reference checks from staff, not just supervisors. Organizations that have robust hiring processes will often check — not only supervisory references — but also references from those who were managed. We should do this when we’re putting people in management positions — every time and with as much rigor as we do when we call peoples’ previous supervisors (with or without their knowledge).
• Upwards feedback. We need to find a way to create an upwards feedback loop (aka 360 reviews, common in the corporate world) that gets back to the highest levels of an organization — whether that’s an Executive Director, a Board of Directors, or elected officials. Managers should be evaluated on how they manage people — not just on whether or not they produce what they’ve been asked to produce.
• Training, training, training. I can’t emphasize this enough. Training managers how to manage humans- not just projects — is incredibly important. In doing so, we should emphasize how you can leverage the skills and experience of subordinate staff and help those staff thrive, even if they are not the ultimate decision-maker.
• Formalized coaching and mentorship programs. Operatives at all levels can benefit from coaching and mentorship by people who have sat where they are currently sitting and we do not make enough space for those mentorship and coaching opportunities. Some organizations may provide executive coaching for their most senior leaders, but management coaching for more junior managers is a rarity.
• True accountability systems. I will be the first to admit that I have no idea what this should look like, but I just have to imagine there is a way to prevent people who are bad actors from continuing to succeed and excel in our industry. And this has to be balanced with giving people the opportunity to experience professional growth and not have stupid mistakes made when they were an entry-level organizer (or even a first-time manager) follow them around for 20 years.
• Be introspective and ask for help. If you are out of your depth as a manager, ask for help and support. And if you are in a position (consultants, political advisors) to offer help and support to managers who are out of their depth, do so with kindness, empathy and compassion.
• If you are in a position of power, call out bad management and do your best to nip it in the bud. The unfortunate thing about not having real grievance systems is that the ONLY people who will be able to effect change and stop bad management practices in their tracks are other people who are in positions of power. Allyship means not allowing the bad behavior to continue in the name of winning a campaign. Winning and supporting staff who need the resources to be better at their jobs or are NOT mutually exclusive propositions and suggesting that they are is lazy and short-sighted.

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