A Portrait of the Peter Principle in Action

A Delta unknowingly describes situational Alpha failure

A commenter with situational Alpha experience explains what he believes was his success in holding down the fort.

I find that while playing the role of the situational Alpha at work, a few things helped me out. First, I work in an organization where almost everyone is a skilled tradesman and the organization is 90% Delta. Deltas are the easiest to manage by far by simply saying, “good job” and honestly appreciating what they do. Just take an interest in them and they have something to feel good about at the family dinner table. Second, I always had a genuine Bravo at my side willing to clean up the messes I pointed out to them. Once you show them the mess to clean up, they never let the mess happen again. The third thing I have/had going for me is I understand how do drive performance though analytics, which none of my peers and former bosses really understood. It was how I knew where to direct the Deltas and Bravos. In short, I would see the problem/deficiencies through analytics and I knew where to direct the Bravos and Deltas attention, automatically improving performance. The feeling of accomplishment always made me feel good about my situational role.

Now a lot of the success I had at work playing the Alpha had a lot to do with the personal relationships and interactions with the men around me. Poking fun at the Deltas with the Bravo, but then ultimately admitting they do a good job, calling out the Gammas to the silent applause of their peers, and just joking around in general to form bonds with other men.

Now, the first question you might have is this: how do you know the commenter is a Delta? After all, the only direct information we have is that he describes himself as a situational Alpha, thereby implying that he is not an Alpha.

The astute SSH analyst will have already noted that the commenter’s focus is on himself, his job, and his competence at his job. This is completely in line with a Delta perspective. In this case, the Delta managed to accept that his job required taking responsibility for what other people were doing, but it’s obvious that he lacked the empathy required of an Alpha.

The things I hate about being the situational Alpha are the following. Going to awards ceremonies for workers, having to help people get their kids internships in the organization, participating in mentorship programs, going to meet and greets, going to retirement parties and the rest of the pomp and circumstance.

In other words, he hated everything that had to do with what actually mattered to the people under him in the hierarchy. Zero empathy. What he particularly enjoyed, as a true self-centered Delta, was “the feeling of accomplishment” which “always made me feel good”. Quelle surprise…

In most corporations, no one pays any attention to the changes about to hit the industry because it is not their job to do so.

Now, the second question is, of course, why I characterize this as a textbook Delta failure. After all, everything he describes appears to indicate success, perhaps even inordinate success. Which he must have had; the air of self-congratulation is too strong and self-satisfied to assume it is not genuine. But remember, Deltas are, first and foremost, competent. Which means that even their failures will tend to look superficially successful.

So in that light, look at what is missing from the Delta’s description of his success. It is all process-oriented. There is no mention of strategic vision, of opportunity costs, of making the inevitable hard decisions between the important and the urgent. All of his successes were focused on the short- and intermediate-terms, and while those things are urgent and necessary, they will not help the business prepare for the future. This is why even a very successful Delta COO will reliably fail if promoted to CEO.

This application of the Peter Principle is totally normal, by the way, and it is why we so often see established businesses that are extremely well-positioned to take advantage of new developments failing to do so and conceding the new markets and the next generations of existing markets to startups. It’s very closely akin to the distinction between designers and producers in the game development industry; the latter’s focus on optimizing process and function inevitably impedes the implementation of changes that, while vital for long-term success, are not immediately necessary and can be put off indefinitely without any internal protests.

In case you’re interested, Sigma failure in situational Alpha roles tends to be the partial opposite of Delta failure. Sigmas tend to excel at strategic vision, but fail at both management and operations, which is why they are often a) evicted from the companies they founded and b) brought into established operations to deal with short-term, emergency situations.