There are all sorts of expressions to describe peak human performance. You might aim for perfection, excellence, mastery, exceptionalism, or even virtuosity. But by whose standards and measures should you be judged? Does it matter more what others think or what you believe about yourself? Is your potential realized by the actions of others or by what you believe, prepare for, and act upon?<\/p>\n
In many aspects of life, the evaluation of your performance by others is critical. Whether you succeed at school is dependent on test results and your teacher\u2019s opinion about your performance. While tests should be objective, there is a great deal of evidence that many tests are highly subjective based on such things as cultural or socio-economic bias that invariably shows up in even well-intended exams. When the education process relies on deductive reasoning, and there is one correct answer that will benefit you, whoever decides what that answer is will determine your success, reasonably or not.<\/p>\n
If you hope to be excellent, perfect in someone else\u2019s estimation, deemed as masterful, or lauded as a virtuoso, you might conform to whatever is considered conventional. And you might succeed at being nothing more than mediocre.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But human curiosity leads more to inductive reasoning, where questions are more valuable than presumed answers. Rather than conforming to a particular standard, the learner is unbridled and free to discover their truths, which may or may not have anything to do with what the educator is tasked with to teach. Evaluating your performance then becomes much more difficult. If the objective is to teach students how to learn, encouraging an inductive approach would likely benefit both the student and the teacher. But suppose the aim is to satisfy the standards set forth in a formal curriculum, where deducing the correct answer serves some external desire for what people know and how they think. In that case, those who think differently are marginalized or even chastised.<\/p>\n
If you hope to be excellent, perfect in someone else\u2019s estimation, deemed as masterful, or lauded as a virtuoso, you might conform to whatever is considered conventional. And you might succeed at being nothing more than mediocre.<\/p>\n
The alternative is to pursue competence.<\/span><\/h2>\n
Competence is not a measure of your competencies, the knowledge, skill, talent, and experience (or credentials) you bring to what you do. It is a measure of what you accomplish with those competencies. In other words, there is no competence in the absence of meaningful or significant accomplishments. Having the capacity to do something is not the same as doing it. And attempting things for which you have no capacity to perform is unlikely, at best, to generate consistently positive results. If anything, incompetent people consistently underperform.<\/p>\n
Competence is its own reward.<\/span><\/h3>\n
The benefits you receive from accomplishing things that truly matter are integral to the process of being competent. There is an element of pride that rewards us whenever we feel we have accomplished something meaningful to us. And when those accomplishments serve a greater good or a cause beyond your personal needs or interests, the reward multiplies in magnitude.<\/p>\n
Competence is its own reward. The benefits you receive from accomplishing things that truly matter are integral to the process of being competent.<\/span><\/p>\n
Being rewarded for achieving what others desire rarely meets the level of self-satisfaction realized from accomplishing whatever aims you glean from your sense of purpose. Many things considered among the world\u2019s most significant achievements were the product of people who could care less about what others thought. Having a noble purpose is far different than aiming for selfish gain. The nobility of your actions is a function of serving that greater good. Self-preservation might be a noble and necessary pursuit, but heroes are those who sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others.<\/p>\n
Competence is a binary concept. You are or are not competent. <\/span><\/h3>\n
Those who are, utilize the competencies required to accomplish an objective and accept all the consequences of their actions. There is no guarantee that having the full capacity to succeed at something will make you successful. But it is nearly certain that not having the requisite competencies will make you more likely to fail. The distinguishing qualities of people who exhibit competence are wisdom, purpose, and grit.<\/p>\n
Wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge to accomplish something meaningful.<\/span><\/h3>\n
It is common for people who seem knowledgeable to be entirely incompetent. They appear knowledgeable because of their credentials or experience, but their actions fail to produce significant or meaningful results. Wisdom is acquired by understanding more than what you might need to know. As the saying goes, good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions\u2014the ability to discern good and bad experiences. Wisdom is the ability to discern good or bad experiences and learn something useful in the process.<\/p>\n
Purpose<\/strong> is an intrinsic drive that connects your actions to your beliefs about who you are and what you must accomplish. When purpose is activated, you behave on behave of a great and worthy cause. Inspired purpose informs people to be conscientious and care about things that matter as much or more to others than they do to themselves. Inspired conscientiousness is what forms grit.<\/p>\n
Grit<\/strong> is the action, but the source of that inspiration is purpose. Grit is simply the deliberate choice to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Whether it is learning something you do not know, unlearning something you thought you knew \u2013 or working harder or longer than you might otherwise, grit is the expression of human potential that transcends the conventional thinking that yields a world defined by mediocrity and dysfunction.<\/p>\n
To be competent is to be fully competent. <\/span><\/h3>\n
To be less-than fully competent is to be incompetent. There are degrees of incompetence. Some people lack the capacity to do certain tasks. It might be a matter of physical size, strength, or a lack of will or desire. Those people are ineffective in whatever roles they play. And even where the capacity and desire both exist and the inspiration to be conscientious produces all the necessary grit, you remain incompetent but perhaps highly effective.<\/p>\n
Highly effective but incompetent people are a great source of drive in organizations. When they strive to improve their performance and aim to be competent, the rate of learning and growth can be staggering. And this drive becomes contagious among like-minded and like-abled performers to help one-another rise \u2013 but through shared interest and often a certain level of useful competition. Organizations such as these may escape mediocrity and tend to be the kind of learning organizations that Peter Senge describes in his book, \u201cThe Fifth Discipline,\u201d and aspire to be true high-performance organizations.<\/p>\n
However, the scourge of such organizations is those I would consider to be non-competent. These people have the required competencies to achieve what you expect of them and may even demonstrate the grit one might expect from high-performers. But they lack the compass that guides them toward the greater good. Instead, they are self-serving, narcissistic, and arrogant. These people are toxic to their organizations, sabotaging the organization\u2019s performance in pursuit of their own personal gains. These saboteurs can exist at any level of the organization, from the leadership at the top \u2013 to the boots on the ground. But we often see that organizations tolerate this behavior it is because it thrives at the top.<\/p>\n
Pursuing competence is a function of leadership.<\/span><\/h3>\n
On the individual level, it is how you choose to lead your life. You need a solid moral compass and a worthy indelible purpose to stay true to noble aims in life. And in organizations, it is a function of leadership to make clear what is necessary and possible. Great leaders kindle the inspiration that converts those capable of being competent into those who choose to be so. Competent leaders cultivate competence in others by developing the leadership within those they influence. And the world is changed forever for the better by those who can and do accomplish what matters most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are all sorts of expressions to describe peak human performance. You might aim for perfection, excellence, mastery, exceptionalism, or even virtuosity. But by whose standards and measures should you be judged? Does it matter more what others think or what you believe about yourself? Is your potential realized by the actions of others or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cohort-reading-resources","category-leadership-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39724,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39722\/revisions\/39724"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}