---
title: Don't promote your best salesperson to country manager
description: "The Peter principle: promotion rewards the old role's equipment while the new role runs on patterns and conditions. A Japan country manager is not a top seller."
image: https://nobusato.jp/hubfs/blog-covers/dont-promote-your-best-seller-to-country-manager-en.png
---

[Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en?hsLang=en)

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# Don't promote your best salesperson to country manager

[Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en)

![Don't promote yourbest salesperson tocountry manager](https://nobusato.jp/hs-fs/hubfs/blog-covers/dont-promote-your-best-seller-to-country-manager-en.png?width=1200&height=630&name=dont-promote-your-best-seller-to-country-manager-en.png)

Eighteen months after incorporation, the sales director has closed 60% of all contracts alone. HQ makes him country manager. It seems obvious. He has the best results, he knows the customers best, and the local staff respect him. Six months later revenue drops, because he no longer visits customers. Two people leave, because he has never developed anyone. HQ reports come late, because he hates writing them. HQ starts to wonder whether it misjudged the man.

It did not misjudge the man. It misjudged the role.

## What a satire got right

In 1969 Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull wrote that in a hierarchy everyone rises to their level of incompetence and stays there. The logic is simple. Do well in your current job and you are promoted. The new job needs different skills. Do poorly there and the promotions stop. In time every post is held by someone who cannot do it. The authors meant it as satire. It became management common sense anyway, because it hit a real hole in how promotion works.

In 2004 the economist Edward Lazear gave it a cooler explanation. Promotion is based on past performance, and past performance contains luck and features of the old role that may not carry over. You don't need to assume anyone got lazy or was never good. Predicting how someone will do in role B from their results in role A is just inaccurate by nature.

Top seller (old role) runs onCountry manager (new role) runs onEquipmentProduct knowledge, relationships, negotiationStill useful, weight under 30%PatternsDo it myself, relationships, handle firstLet others do it, rules, report firstContextClear wins and losses, clear opponentLong-term balance, four parties unhappyCoreObservable in the old roleBarely observable in the old roleFour layers: core / patterns / equipment / context. Promotion looks at equipment; the middle two decide.

**Fig.1**Promotion is based on equipment shown in the old role. The new role runs on patterns and context, which the old role gave almost no chance to observe.

## Four layers

I read people in four layers: core, patterns, equipment, context. When a top seller is promoted, HQ is looking at equipment. Product knowledge, customer relationships, negotiation skill. Those still help in the country manager role, but their weight drops below 30%.

The country manager role mostly uses up the other two: patterns and context. Patterns are how a person habitually operates: jump in and solve it yourself, or get others to solve it; move things through relationships, or through rules; handle bad news first, or report it first. A top seller's pattern is almost always "do it myself". In sales that is a strength. In a country manager it is the direct cause of attrition. Context is the setting in which someone performs: a clear goal and a clear opponent, or an ambiguous multi-party negotiation. Sales runs on clear wins and losses. Country management runs on a long-term balance in which HQ, staff, customers and compliance are all slightly dissatisfied.

So promotion looks at the layer the old role put on display. Survival in the new role depends on two other layers, and the old role gave almost no chance to see them. That, to me, is how the Peter principle actually works. Whether the person is good has nothing to do with it.

## What makes the Japan role different

In Japan this role is further from sales than elsewhere. Most of a country manager's time goes to labour and compliance (labour inspectors, social insurance, work rules), translation between HQ and the office ([not only linguistic](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/bilingual-staff-are-not-translators?hsLang=en)), hiring and retention ([what one departure costs](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/true-cost-of-hiring-in-japan?hsLang=en)), and representing the company rather than the product in front of customers. None of this appears in a sales KPI.

There is one more cost. Japan's best salespeople often sell on relationships. Their customers are, in a real sense, their customers. Promoting one pulls the entity's most valuable customer relationships off the front line while making someone manage who does not want to. You lose twice.

## What to do instead

Score the role before you score the person. Applying [Score the role before the person](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/score-the-role-before-the-person?hsLang=en) here means breaking the country manager job into ten tasks, noting which layer each mainly draws on, and checking whether the candidate has evidence at that layer. A top seller scores full marks on the equipment items and is usually blank on patterns and context. Not zero. No data. Blanks cannot be filled by guessing.

Give the top seller a way up that doesn't involve managing anyone. The dual-track specialist ladders Japanese companies have been building in recent years exist for exactly this: grade and pay rise, no team. A top seller with country-manager-level pay and title who keeps closing 60% of contracts is far cheaper than promoting him and watching him fall. See [pay design](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/four-relational-models-and-pay-design?hsLang=en) and [the first hire](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/first-hire-in-japan-should-not-be-sales?hsLang=en).

If you must promote, lend the role first. Three months as acting head, or a small team to run, so you can see whether anything shows up at the patterns and context layers. If it does, promote. If it doesn't, nobody loses face. The most expensive part of the Peter principle is not the wrong promotion. It is that you cannot undo it.

Peter's book has a line that is rarely quoted. Giving an incompetent manager an assistant does not help. The Japan entity version is that putting a deputy under a head who cannot develop people mainly adds one more person who does not know whose instructions to follow.

References

- [Peter, L. J. & Hull, R. (1969). The Peter Principle. William Morrow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)
- [Lazear, E. P. (2004). The Peter Principle: A Theory of Decline. Journal of Political Economy 112(S1)](https://doi.org/10.1086/379943)

---

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