When I was much younger, I thought the world was run by competent mature adults and I was very intimidated. As I grew older, I realized that the world was run by people just like me and I became very scared. Why? Because I never felt I was competent enough to be an Adult in a Responsible Position. Then I became even more scared because I realized that I was no less capable than most other adults I knew. Finally, I started to relax when I saw that most of what needed to get done got done anyway. Maybe this Myth of Competence needs to be explored.
Let’s start at the beginning. When we were little children, we thought our parents knew what they were doing. They sure acted like they did! Many of us even thought our parents were perfect. Those of you reading this who are parents are probably laughing at that thought. You most likely had continual crises of confidence, wondering if you were totally messing your kids up because you rarely felt like you knew what you were doing. At a certain point, most of us swung that pendulum way to the other side and decided our parents knew nothing and were totally incompetent. This usually started in the preteen years and went until you were about 30 or had your first child. Then, suddenly, your parents became human. They weren’t perfect but they did a pretty darn good job.
When I was in college, a new professor joined the Chemistry Department in my sophomore year. She was right out of grad school. We were all amazingly impressed by her! Knew her stuff; great teacher. We’d hit the jackpot. As she and I got to know each other, she confessed this to me: “You know, Sherri, I am staying just one lecture ahead of you guys.” She had never taught Physical Chemistry before. She was up late into the night developing her lectures and materials, staying one lecture ahead. We assumed she was so knowledgeable that she could teach us in her sleep!
It’s generally comforting to think that the people around you are competent. With competency comes confidence. We see this in the medical field in particular. We expect our doctors to be competent to the point of perfection. We expect them to be able to diagnose any ailments on the first try, to know what to look for with virtually no clues from us, and to be able to fix whatever is wrong. Amazingly, that actually happens a good percentage of the time. Sure, there are totally incompetent quacks and we have a vibrant personal injury law industry that proves that point. However, most doctors are fairly competent and we rely on that. Unfortunately, we want to rely on that to the point of abdicating our responsibilities as the patient. We forget that doctors are human and that competence does not mean perfection. Or omniscience!
In the workplace, misplaced expectations of competence get us into trouble all the time. It is natural to believe that the people around you in any decent organization know what they are doing and will get done what they are supposed to get done. (I hear more laughter….) The reality is that no one is as good as you think they are. No one knows as much about a topic as you think they know. No one is as organized as you think they are. No one is as perfectly dependable as you think they are. I am not saying this to diss on people who have let me down or vent some bitterness toward the workplace. I’m just giving you a reality check to, first, not get down on yourself about your own imperfections (we’ll get to that in a bit) and, second, to remind you that those around you are human. You need to not trust too implicitly and you need to give people a little grace and support when they mess up. I remember a time when I was working with a person in our financial organization to develop data to support a business plan. When he ran the financial projections based on our assumptions about the business, his work showed revenue growth that just seemed out of whack to me. I immediately assumed that I was wrong about my understanding of certain financial terms. He, after all, was the finance guy! He knew this stuff better than I did, right? Clearly my understanding of a compound annual growth rate was wrong. When we went over the financials in a business meeting, no one raised a concern. We went through with the investment, which was not small. I made a mental note to do a little reading. Long story short, I was right. That guy lost his job (not just because of that plan). And I lost confidence in the rest of the business team. I never spoke up, though. Who else was thinking, “That just doesn’t look right”?
I talk about this myth of competence in leadership coaching because it’s important to speak up and gently ask those questions. As I became more experienced, I learned that most of the time others were thinking the same thing and appreciated someone asking a question that they were afraid to ask. Afraid because they didn’t want to embarrass the person or didn’t want to look incompetent themselves. There is an art to it, of course. You need to be kind and authentic and maybe even self-deprecating. But there is nothing wrong with asking someone to define or clarify a term. There is nothing wrong with following up on the details of a task. There is nothing wrong with offering to help. Sometimes people get in over their head or don’t know what they don’t know. Most people feel compelled to project this air of confidence and competence even when they don’t feel it. If you can approach people as humans, you have a better chance of heading off a disaster or just ensuring that things get done that need to get done.
Another important aspect of the Myth of Competence is to remember that you, as well, are often not as good as you think you are. I have written before that the most important characteristic of a good leader is humility and I need to emphasize that, here. We can all get over confident. We can all get full of ourselves, especially when we’ve had success. Stop it. Just stop it. Remember that you are strongest when you know your limits and when you surround yourself with people who have strengths where you don’t. And as important as this is in the workplace, it’s even more important in your personal relationships. When you already think you know it all, you never learn anything. And there is so much out there to learn!
While not blindly trusting in the competence of others is important, this “all people are human and deserve a little grace” applies especially to yourself. It is natural to become overly critical of your own shortcomings when you see everyone around you as unfailingly competent. At three different leadership webinars that I’ve recently been involved in, this question of Impostor Syndrome has come up. Impostor Syndrome is feeling that you are totally unqualified to do the job you are doing, professionally or personally, and that at any moment you will be found out as a fraud. I have felt a bit (sometimes more than a bit) of Impostor Syndrome at every stage of my professional career and at a good many key moments in my personal life! It’s natural. It helps you stay humble. It can motivate you to be better. To paraphrase Brene Brown (again), we are here to GET it right, not to BE right. I am constantly amazed at the number of very famous and accomplished people across all kinds of professions who readily admit to Impostor Syndrome. I feel in good company. The risk, though, is that feeling unqualified and like a fraud can become paralyzing. How do you stop that? Well, that’s where the concept of “threshold” or “good enough” comes in. And we’ll talk about that next time.