Competence as a Dangerous Trap (And How It Can Be Effectively Circumvented)
Competence is the confident mastery of skills. It is important, but can also become an unfortunate path.
Competence is the confident mastery of skills. It is important, but can also become an unfortunate path.
My goal as a Scrum Master is to create a strengths-based team. To achieve this, it is necessary that everyone is aware of their talents to a certain minimum, so that these can be developed into strengths.
That’s why we’ve been talking about the competency trap a lot lately in conversations with team members.
Namely, when we get good at performing activities we don’t like doing at all, it becomes problematic. We become knowledgeable and skilled at doing something we don’t like.
Competence then becomes a trap because we are perceived by bystanders as capable and therefore more work comes to us that we don’t actually enjoy.
But if the work is not fun, then we are not realizing our full potential.
The only way to do great work is to love what you do.1
— Steve Jobs
So activities we are good at can be a weakness. If that is the case, then competence is a dangerous path.
Escaping the Competence Trap
To avoid the competence trap, it is necessary to know one’s own strengths.
Marcus Buckingham, who has spent decades studying talent, describes a simple but sound definition of strengths and weaknesses in his book Love & Work.2
[…] a “weakness” is any activity that weakens you, even if you’re amazing at it. […] a strength, properly defined, is any activity that strengthens you.
If you do an activity and afterwards you feel severely drained and weakened because you don’t enjoy it, that’s a weakness.
A strength, on the other hand, is anything that strengthens you. It is everything that you do instinctively and voluntarily. It’s the activities that make you feel like time is just flying by. When you’re done with one of those activities, you realize you’ve made giant leaps in learning.
So the question we may ask ourselves if we want to get to the bottom of the competency trap is this: How do I feel during and after I am done with an activity?
Marcus Buckingham suggests a simple activity he calls “Loved it / Loathed it” to check your strengths and weaknesses.3
Identify Strengths with “Loved It / Loathed It”
All you have to do is this:
Take a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle. The left column is titled “Loved It” and the right column is titled “Loathed It”.
After that, this sheet will accompany you through your daily life. Whenever you have done an activity at work or outside that you really loved or loathed, write it down in the appropriate column. It is best to do it while the impression is still fresh and not at the end of the day.
Do this exercise continuously for a week or two. Then you should have two well-filled columns. Make sure that each row contains a verb. What exactly did you do? What specifically was the activity?
Reflect on this list. Which of the activities would you like to do more often? Which ones less often?
Describe specific action items. What can you do to do the activities you like more often? Who can support you (your supervisor, your colleagues, your friends, …)?
Conclusion
Of course, work cannot be 100% fun, because unpleasant things can always occur. But a certain minimum of ten or significantly more percent per day should be possible.
To achieve this, it is necessary to know your talents and strengths and to regularly check whether you are still on track and in danger of falling into the competence trap.
The “Loved it / Loathed it” exercise can help with this review. It is especially recommended to do it in times of change or once a year as a small refresher.
Buckingham, M. (2022). Love + work: How to find what you love, love what you do, and do it for the rest of your life. Harvard Business Review Press.
Marcus Buckingham TV (Regisseur). (2018, Mai 29). How to Do What You Love (in the job that you have). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQwKrZcMPm4