In the above video, I explain a phenomenon I’ve been seeing in my consulting practice for many years. With the current climate of misogyny, racism, fascism, and an overall disrespect for workers and humanity in general, it’s getting worse.
I call it The Pat Principal, after the well known management concept called The Peter Principal. In the Peter Principal, workers get promoted to the level of their incompetence. This means that a talented worker will get promotions until they are so far away from their skillset that they become an incompetent, stagnant manager. Ours being a white supremacist culture, the chance to be promoted to the level of one’s incompetence is usually only ever offered to white, straight, able bodied men.
In the Pat Principal, we see a skilled and talented managers who only ever get promoted if they retrain away from the skills that make them successful into a skillset that makes their incompetent male supervisors more comfortable.
Pat is usually a woman, a person of color, or someone from one or more other marginalized groups who comes into an organization will all or most of the management skills she needs. However, her obvious talent makes her managers uncomfortable, either because the managers have internalized sexism, racism, etc,. because the managers are incompetent, or some combination of both.
These men in management, who are not used to being uncomfortable for any amount of time, will coach Pat to be less direct, less precise, to speak less to her fellow workers, and will redirect her from cross-training or skill building. They will say or imply that Pat is “too aggressive,” they will tone police her and stop her from meeting her KPIs so that she can be a better “culture fit.” For an organization that has a culture of racism, sexism, and general lack of achievement.
If Pat does what her male manager asks her to do, she will become worse at her job, but better at making him feel good about himself. Because her male supervisor is putting his personal comfort above the good of the organization, he’ll promote this newly nerfed version of Pat to higher and higher leadership positions as long as she makes him and the men above him feel better about themselves.
Now Pat is in upper management, she can’t be direct, doesn’t ask anyone for anything, has no demands, no boundaries, and struggles to meet her KPIs. She’s usually working late into the night and on weekends to force solutions on a team who doesn’t trust her, and resents her for her lack of transparency or availability.
Pat has a hard time trusting her own instincts, she no longer knows how to speak truth to power, even her own, and she feels backed into a corner. Her direct reports and down-chart staff want her to be direct, clear, concise, and transparent. They want her to stand up for their department, they want cross-training and skill building. All the things she was punished for wanting and doing in the past. It’s not that she doesn’t know how to do these things: it’s worse. She knows she should never do them and she actively resists her staff building systems that deliver success because she has been retrained for executive comfort over and above organizational success.
In order to get Pat back to her true, competent self, we don’t need skills training in the things she already knew how to do before she was beaten half to death by the glass ceiling. We must refocus her priorities away from men’s feelings and into organizational success.
The only way to restore the Pats in our workplace is to move the Peters out of their way and refocus on our actual product. Men who spend an organization’s precious resources on making the women and people of color around them less effective will never concede the power they know on some level they don’t deserve.
Too many vital organizations, from the presidency on down have become little more than the personal playthings of powerful men who don’t know what they’re doing and wouldn’t be able to learn if they tried. We must take back our power and refocus on actual real world results if we’re going to move forward. Whether we’re feeding homeless youth or manufacturing packing peanuts, we all have jobs to do. We have people to feed and peanuts to pack and despite all the bad coaching we’ve gotten, no part of those processes involve making mediocre men more comfortable with their own lack of skills.