A friend sent me an article called “The Peter Pyramid,” and I read it twice before I let myself get excited. You likely know the Peter Principle: in a hierarchy, people get promoted based on their performance in their current role, not their potential performance in the next one. The skills that got them noticed for promotion often have nothing to do with the skills the new role actually requires. We’ve all seen it again and again. What we don’t always see is why the failure looks the way it does (competent people suddenly making decisions that seem shortsighted, reactive, almost panicked), leaving you thinking, “What happened to that guy? He used to be so good.”

Organizational theorist Elliott Jaques had an answer for this decades ago, and it’s simpler than most leadership theory: the real difference between organizational levels is time horizon. A frontline employee acts and within hours or days, sees the result of that action. A senior leader makes a call today that won’t reveal whether it was right for a year, sometimes longer. When someone is promoted into a role that demands a longer horizon than they’ve built the capacity for, they typically don’t stretch to meet it; they shrink the job down to a horizon they can manage: today’s fire, this week’s numbers, the meeting after this one. That’s when things start to go sideways.

IRL

I watch this play out with clients all the time. A newly promoted VP still running her calendar like a director, chasing this quarter’s targets while the strategic conversation her new role requires keeps getting bumped. An executive director who inherited a five-year plan and somehow ended up managing the organization one week at a time. Neither of them is incompetent; they’re operating on the wrong clock for the seat they’re in. And because short-horizon leadership doesn’t fail loudly or immediately, it’s rarely diagnosed correctly. By the time the damage is visible, it’s already old news, and nobody connects it back to the decisions that caused it.

Surviving the Next Fire

This is where Brené Brown’s work sits comfortably alongside Jaques for me, even though she doesn’t use his language. In her Dare to Lead research, Brown names time scarcity as one of the most common ways leaders abandon their courage. Not enough time to do the debrief, to have the hard conversation, to be intentional about anything, because everything is on fire. Daring leaders push back on that story. They spend time deliberately now, knowing it saves them a much larger cost later. The redone project, the resignation nobody saw coming, the team that stopped bothering to flag problems early.

She also distinguishes between leaders who are playing to win and leaders who are playing to not lose. Fear-based, armoured leadership narrows its focus to surviving the next threat. Daring leadership holds a longer view on purpose, which is what gives a team room to experiment and take real risks instead of only protecting territory. Put next to the Peter Pyramid, this reads less like two separate frameworks and more like two people describing the same coin from different sides. Jaques explains the mechanism and Brown names the choice a leader has inside it.

A piece of Brown’s model I lean on a lot in coaching is what she calls pocket presence (a term borrowed from football quarterbacks), or the awareness of timing, cost, and consequence that doesn’t live in one person’s head but is distributed across a team. This shifts leadership development away from building a single heroic executive presence and toward building a team that collectively holds the long view. Most of my work with senior leaders eventually turns into this conversation: not “how do you personally think further ahead,” but “how do you build a team that thinks further ahead without you.”

Your Turn

Here’s a question you can ask yourself: 

What time horizon does your role require, and is it the one you’re operating on most days? 

Almost nobody has been asked this directly. It tends to sit with people for a while, which usually means it’s worth asking.

Time isn’t just something leaders manage, it’s the terrain they’re being evaluated on, whether or not they’ve noticed.

I’d be curious where this shows up in your own leadership. Drop me a note if it strikes a chord.