Most people know the Peter Principle by its punchline: people rise to the level of their incompetence. But the real danger isn’t that someone is promoted too far. It’s that they arrive in that role without rehearsal. In early-stage teams, leadership is often treated as something people grow into—as if growth is passive. Clarisse Ng, an educator-operator who’s worked with founders across Southeast Asia and the Gulf, flips that assumption. Growth, she argues, is designed. And in high-stakes roles, it must be rehearsed.
The Peter Principle takes root in startup environments precisely because of the speed and ambiguity that make early teams thrive. When a marketing lead performs well, she is made Head of Marketing. When a product manager is trusted, he becomes VP Product. These promotions often occur without rehearsal—without the practice of decision-making at the new altitude, without clear observation of delegation dynamics, without structured exposure to cross-functional pressure. Instead, promotions are justified by momentum. But momentum is not readiness.
Most founders don’t mean to replicate the Peter Principle. It sneaks in through good intentions. Clarisse sees this regularly in advisory work: someone excels as an individual contributor, so the team assumes they’ll "figure out" leadership. The title is offered as recognition, not role redesign. Responsibilities shift subtly, then dramatically. Performance softens, not from lack of will but from a mismatch in skill rehearsal. Under pressure, new leaders return to what they know: execution. They hover, overcompensate, micromanage, or retreat into burnout. Not because they’re bad leaders, but because the system never asked them to rehearse the role first.
This issue compounds. The new leader is unclear about where their authority begins and ends. Their direct reports are confused about whether to look up for direction or down for initiative. Meanwhile, the founder expects leverage that never materializes. What seems like a personnel problem is actually a design failure.
The consequences are structural. Delivery velocity slows as decisions bottleneck. Ownership becomes ambiguous as new leaders overstep or under-represent their teams. Culture drifts—not in mood, but in modeling. Without clarity at the leadership level, mid-stage teams adopt defensive behaviors: hoarding decisions, overdocumenting, or deferring to the founder. Eventually, team trust and speed erode.
Rehearsal matters. Clarisse argues that leadership should be treated as a skill loop, not a reward track. Elevation should follow exposure, not precede it. She offers a model: simulate, observe, codify. First, simulate leadership by assigning shadow responsibilities without title inflation. A team member might lead a retrospective, own an all-hands agenda, or design onboarding for a new function. These are safe rehearsal spaces. They test coordination under ambiguity. Second, observe. This is where many teams fail. Instead of offering vague encouragement (“You’re doing great”), provide structured feedback. Did the person drive clarity? Did they escalate effectively? Did they hold ownership or distribute it? Third, codify. If simulation and observation go well, move into codification. This means documenting role expectations together, surfacing fears, naming boundaries, and rehearsing feedback loops. By the time the title is formalized, the behavior is familiar.
This rehearsal loop isn’t about slowing down promotion. It’s about preparing it to succeed. It helps avoid the common trap: a person being asked to lead without shared definition of what leadership means in your context.
Clarisse often asks one diagnostic question when coaching founders on team calibration: what percentage of this person’s behavior reflects their current role, and what percentage reflects their previous one? If a Head of Marketing still spends 80% of her time refining copy, she hasn’t transitioned—regardless of her title. That’s not failure. It’s rehearsal debt.
Early-stage teams are especially vulnerable to this debt because of how they conflate function with role. A person may own "marketing" or "product," but those functions contain multiple layers: execution, strategy, management, vision. When the company grows from five to fifteen people, the job splits—but the person often doesn’t. They stay central, and the system orbits them. This creates hidden fragility. The organization looks flat, but is actually lopsided. One person holds both the history and the execution, making succession or scale difficult.
The antidote is clarity through design. Clarisse teaches founders to distinguish between core competencies and leadership rehearsals. Just because someone knows how to write excellent SQL doesn’t mean they know how to hold a standup, give peer feedback, or recruit cross-functionally. Those are distinct rehearsals. And without them, you don’t get durable leaders—you get accidental ones.
So what does rehearsal look like in practice? It begins with micro-altitude tests. Instead of promoting someone straight to Director of Ops, give them responsibility for a multi-team retro and observe how they prepare. Instead of naming someone Head of Product, let them coordinate a roadmap forum across teams with different priorities. Watch how they hold ambiguity. Do they synthesize inputs or collapse into certainty? Do they protect team voice or over-index on founder preferences? These are the rehearsals that reveal capacity.
Feedback loops are essential here. One of the most dangerous myths in early-stage leadership is that people either have "it" or they don’t. Clarisse rejects this binary. Leadership can be taught. But it must be practiced with feedback that is specific, timely, and grounded in the company’s operating style. A startup that values autonomy will require different rehearsal traits than one that relies on process orchestration.
Founders must be active participants in this rehearsal design. Too often, they assume their presence is enough to model leadership. But that’s misleading. Leadership isn’t osmosis. It’s explicit, patterned, and rehearsed. Founders need to make the expectations of altitude visible. What does it mean to manage a team in this company? What decisions can be made solo, and which ones require alignment? What does good look like in performance reviews, or roadmap adjustments, or conflict mediation?
When these expectations are invisible, people fill the gaps with legacy behaviors. They default to execution, urgency, or silence. Clarisse calls this system drift. Without rehearsal, elevation becomes ornamental. Titles float above the actual behavior. And when stress hits, the system collapses to its last stable shape: founder-central.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Clarisse advises founders to embed rehearsal loops into the cadence of their team development. Promotion should follow visible rehearsal, not surprise elevation. Every new layer of leadership should come with a trail of micro-simulations: standup ownership, conflict navigation, cross-team orchestration. Observations should be gathered, not assumed. And codification should follow: a document, a conversation, a shared map of what this role requires and what support it needs.
The result is not just better leaders. It’s a stronger system. One where delegation sticks, decisions compound, and cultural modeling spreads without bottlenecking through the founder. Leadership becomes distributed not just in title, but in practice. Teams move with more confidence because the scaffolding is rehearsed, not invented under duress.
In her final coaching prompt, Clarisse often asks: if this person disappeared for two weeks, would the team speed up, slow down, or stay the same? The answer reveals whether the role has been rehearsed into the system or is still dependent on personality. The Peter Principle doesn’t have to win. But prevention requires rehearsal.
Great leaders don’t emerge by accident. They emerge through rehearsal loops that match the altitude of the role they’re asked to hold. Simulate. Observe. Codify. That’s the design sequence that helps your organization grow leaders faster than it inherits titles.
Because leadership readiness isn’t about tenure. It’s about what’s been rehearsed—and what you’re willing to make visible, together.
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