Are you competent? Are we?

These seem like fair questions to ask, on both a business and personal level. Let’s explore, with a focus on the “best” kind of competence.

 

There are 3 levels of competence:

1. Incompetent -you don’t know what you are doing. While we do encounter people or businesses like this, they tend to be rare (hopefully!) One example that leaps to mind is our baseball team.

2. Unconscious Competence – This is where most people and businesses fall, so at least it’s not that bad. It means that you kind of know what you are doing but you don’t know why you are doing it. You are probably not going to improve your performance from this level. Achieving the next level takes more time, effort, and introspection. One example is that we are continuing to handle way more paper than we should here at Metro, although we are trying to move past it.

3. Conscious Competence (“cue heavenly music”) – This means that you do know what you are doing and why.

 

Moving Into Conscious Competence:

This is much easier said than done. It means more than “just doing your job”.

The concept is to think about what you are doing and asking yourself if there is a better way. There is a lot to be said for an occasional “clean slate approach”, i.e., if we were starting over, would we be doing it this way?

The challenge is that this requires (a) effort, and (b) a higher plane of thinking, that some might call “perspective”. The analogy for me is to ask myself “how high is my helicopter here”? When I am in meetings, sometimes I loom around the room and wonder who has the best perspective. That person is usually the boss, but not always.

It is also possible to over-do this analysis, where you actually stop working and all you do is think/analyze. That would be bad! (and I plead sometimes guilty to this, which I suppose can bring me back to the first rung of ….)

What do you think about this? Do you do this? Does it help? Do you have other ideas to share/we’d love to hear!

 

Shout Out – to Jay Lewis, my Boss 40 + years ago at Mercer for illuminating this for me.