Incompetence with Confidence Equals Disaster!

Have you ever known someone who wasn’t as good at something as they thought they were? I have been there.

When I was in my 20’s, I played a lot of basketball – often playing up to 3 times per week. I played in basketball tournaments, on city league teams, and many pick-up games with friends. I was even the starting guard at my junior high school team. Not quite Michael Jordan level, but still pretty good.

Or so I thought.

I remember once playing in a two-on-two pick-up game where the team I was playing on kept losing. We played all the combinations of players and yet no matter the combination, the team I was on always lost. It didn’t occur to me until this repeated itself in many games over several years that I wasn’t as good of a player as I thought I was.

With no one to offer an honest unbiased evaluation, I carried a false sense of my basketball acumen with me for a long time. I remember playing in a three-on-three tournament in my late 20’s and one of my teammates kept yelling at me from the sidelines “We need the best three in now!” I was apoplectic! I thought that the best three were in the game. The truth was, I had a highly inflated opinion of my court skills which likely affected the outcome of many games.

There’s a name for this and it’s called the Dunning Kruger Effect. It’s defined as a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers. In simple terms, it’s when people have falsely inflated opinions of their abilities.

There are four stages of the Dunning Kruger Effect:

1. Unconscious incompetence, when you don’t know what you don’t know.
2. Conscious incompetence, when you’re aware of what you don’t know but haven’t yet learned it.
3. Conscious competence, when you’re gaining knowledge.
4. Unconscious competence, when you’ve mastered something.

There’s no doubt that having confidence is important – certainly when you consider the alternative. However, if you don’t know what you don’t know the ramifications of the Dunning Kruger Effect can result in disaster.

If you are relatively new in your career or in your position with an organization, you likely have a lot to learn. Ask a lot of questions. Find someone who you know will tell you the truth and ask them to assess your work. Start an informal group to help each other develop skills and tools needed to be successful. If you are in a leadership position, make sure learning opportunities are available to your entire team. Don’t assume that someone has?the necessary job skills because they have been in an industry or even with your organization for a long time. Make sure that team members are regularly and accurately evaluated for their performance. Build a culture that encourages honest (and kind) communication when others need performance feedback.

While I don’t remember the outcome of that three-on-three tournament, I haven’t forgotten how much I could have improved my understanding of my abilities with an accurate assessment and proper coaching.

Of course, the stakes are much higher in organizations where the Dunning Kruger Effect is rampant.

Don’t stand on the sidelines and let incompetence affect your organization’s success.