The optimist in me wants to believe that if L&D departments had a say in every promotion, luck would have very little to do with who gets promoted. If we were allowed to appropriately assess all candidates’ abilities in a job’s key success factors, only the best-suited would advance.
But alas, advancement is more likely to follow the Peter Principle:
In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
And here’s a quote from Nobel prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman:
Success = talent + luck
Great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck
A great many researchers have sought to measure the role of luck (versus talent and effort) in career success and it looks like a rough estimate of 50% would not be far off. About half of career advancement is due to luck. Wow. The good news in this horrifying fact is that there is enormous room for improvement.
The hot trends in L&D suggest that there is a growing acceptance of approaches that are grounded in learning theory such as the power of learning embedded in the flow of work. With a bit of creativity, the concept of the social learning sandbox (see our copywriting example in a previous post) can eliminate the role of luck in career advancement.
L&D may at last earn its place as a strategic function.