Dive Brief:
- Only 30% of front-line supervisors said they were placed into their role based on supervisory skills, experience as a supervisor or because they began their career as a supervisor, according to recent data from Gallup.
- Sixty-five percent of front-line supervisors said they obtained their position “based on performance or years of experience in a front-line role.” Supervisors who obtained their roles this way are less engaged (31%) than peers who got their roles through supervisory skills, experience as a supervisor, or who began their career as a supervisor (42%).
- Front-line supervisors who have been through training that focused on becoming a better supervisor in the past year are 79% more likely to be engaged, per Gallup. The report also said they were 19% less likely “to feel burned out at work very often or always, and 11% less likely to be actively looking or watching for a new job.”
Dive Insight:
In explaining the data, Gallup cited The Peter Principle, a concept introduced by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull in 1969. The idea suggests that employees tend to “rise to a level of respective incompetence,” being promoted “until their performance declines,” the report said. Employers often leave those workers in place “instead of moving them into roles that better use their talents.”
The result, said Gallup, is that management and leadership roles get filled with people “whose past success does not align with the demands of managing a team.”
While front-line supervisors in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare and retail are promoted based on individual performance or experience as front-line workers, Gallup cited data from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found a 7.5% decline in subordinates’ sales performance “when organizations promoted high-performing sales representatives to managerial roles.”
Supervisor engagement also influences employees who report to them, per Gallup’s research, which found that managers’ “engagement, effectiveness, and natural talents account for at least 70% of the variance in team-level engagement,” even when taking into account other factors. Meanwhile, U.S. front-line employees already experience lower levels of engagement (26%) than the U.S. workforce broadly (32%).
Gallup found that less than half of front-line supervisors (45%) said they had participated in supervisor training or education in the past year, and another 32% said they had that kind of training, but not in the past year. A further 23% said they’d never taken part in that kind of training.
In order to mitigate the effects of the Peter Principle, Gallup suggested hiring and promoting workers based on supervisory talent instead of only basing the decisions on individual performance or experience in a role.
“A meta-analysis of 136 studies in which structured interviews and assessments were administered to 14,597 managers found that hiring based on managerial talent increased sales or revenue by 21% per manager and profit by 32% per manager,” Gallup said.