3.
FEAR OF INCOMPETENCE

“I feel the pressure to look competent whilst inside I’m drowning,” says a senior manager in government. “For me, respect is the ultimate. I am worried that if I look incompetent, I will lose people’s respect. I will lose my credibility. Without credibility I can’t influence the outcome. The fear of looking incompetent holds me back from fully participating.”

Feelings of incompetence commonly arise at the edge. Facing our gap in knowledge can lead to questioning who we are, our competence, confidence, professionalism, knowledge and power. Nicola Gatti, CEO of startup AWS24, has spent almost all his career in the telecommunications industry. He describes a situation when he recently moved to the financial sector as a mergers and acquisitions director and found out that he had a serious gap in his professional knowledge.

“On the cusp of my first international tender, my direct boss asked me: what WACC are you using in the Business Plan? OK, I barely knew how to read a Business Plan, but ‘WACC’? I had to ask one of my collaborators: 16% he said, and I reported this figure to my boss, I still remember it. It was such an embarrassing feeling for me! Like when you’re thrown into the water and don’t know how to swim: having to manage a complex tender with incomplete knowledge.

“Over time, I came to learn all the ropes, and even the tricks, of corporate finance, but most of all, I learnt how to manage a situation in the face of uncertainty, and still be successful: we won that tender, and several others afterwards.”

During that intense period, Nicola learned that no human being can be an expert in all fields. The best strategy has to be built by necessity in the presence of imperfect knowledge. This lesson has accompanied him throughout his professional career.

There are many assumptions we have about what might happen if we admit we don’t know and some of them are well founded and some are not. The dangers of appearing not to do a job well, not to have sufficient expertise, of not knowing enough are real. We can lose our benefits, influence, authority, even our job. The consequences of not fulfilling our responsibilities, our objectives, are always in the background. A senior manager in the health sector explains: “I am worried that I won’t be respected if I don’t know. I want to get it right. I am known for getting it right, and getting to the answer quickly. Do you know what will happen if I slow things down? I run the risk of letting down the reputation I have built for efficient delivery. People are counting on me. There is a lot at stake.”

Diana: In my early days as a lawyer I struggled with feelings of incompetence: “Every time someone asks ‘how is the project going?’ in a well-meaning way, I feel sick. Just that simple question, asked naively, brings up all my insecurities and doubts in one go. And every time I am tempted to pretend it’s all going fine. Fine. Great. But it occurs to me that this is the point where we’ve all been before. The point where we can pretend we are OK, in control, achieving what we’ve set out to achieve, or we can be open and honest with how it really is (hard) and how we’re feeling (not good). Actually, bad, very bad. The point where I could just reveal that the only thing that I know is that I actually don’t know!” This became a repetitive experience. I noticed that the higher the stakes, the harder it was to admit I didn’t know. What stopped me from acknowledging that I was struggling? It was the fear of looking and sounding incompetent. I was convinced that revealing my true feelings would in some way diminish me and undermine my status. The stuckness I was feeling in my work was now being perpetuated in my interactions and relationships. The more closed I became about my insecurities, the more I felt like a fraud. I’d given all the power away to an external ‘judge’ who was assessing my worthiness based on how I was going in my work.

One reason we fear the unknown is that we are brought face to face with ourselves and our own fragility, our mortality. We are not infallible after all. When we are well within our comfort zone, dealing with situations and problems that are familiar and questions that have an answer, we feel full of mastery and agency. Our roles, both formal and informal, protect us from the unknown, but they can also get in the way of us fully engaging with the unknown.

Roles are like a protective cloak that we can hide behind to avoid the vulnerability of Not Knowing. They are protective because we can rely on them to pretend we know, as everyone is looking to us for an answer. It’s easy, at least on the surface, to succumb to the pressure and provide an answer. With a cloak we are not exposed. We can rely on the structures and processes around us, the lists and plans we create to give the impression of order, control and certainty and in time this becomes a habit. Wearing the defensive cloak of knowledge becomes so second nature that we forget we are wearing a mantle of defence. We’ve become the cloak and we’ve lost ourselves in it. The cloak becomes a straitjacket. Like the emperor with no clothes, everyone pretends not to notice. Nobody dares state the obvious: that the emperor is naked. There are no answers. We are vulnerable in our incompetence.

People report feeling conflict between their inner experience of Not Knowing and the outer situation, with its demands of maintaining the impression of competence.

This experience is shared by Reka Czegledi-Brown, an organizational consultant for almost 20 years. A few years ago she was engaged by a local government authority to facilitate integration with a public health department. Even though she was reluctant to set herself up as the expert, the client insisted that she provide detailed information on her professional background. She was told that “as this situation is so sensitive, we can’t afford to have someone who has no idea.” From the outset her client’s expectations were for her to solve their problems. She felt a strong pressure to know and “save the day.” This placed the responsibility squarely on her shoulders and relieved her clients of the anxiety of Not Knowing. Even though she brought considerable experience to the job, she initially found herself paralyzed by a high level of uncertainty and doubt. But this was not something the client was prepared to hear.

It took Reka a few months to re-orient her client’s expectations. She did this by making the work the primary focus for the client. “It wasn’t about me,” she says. “It was about truly deeply listening to them and being with them during this difficult transition. They were so unbelievably lost and ‘unseen’, not fully acknowledged, and it was such a painful position to be in that my willingness to engage and be there with them was a big step. I made myself vulnerable rather than reverting to expertise and hiding behind it.”

To feel incompetent, useless or inadequate is very uncomfortable. Admitting Not Knowing can be a disempowering experience because it means experiencing a loss of power and control, which in turn can lead to acute feelings of embarrassment and shame.

Common reactions in the workplace:

“I’d rather not have all this attention”

“I made a mistake and I feel that I want to die”

“I can’t try this, I’m no good at it”

“If I was a good manager I wouldn’t have let that happen”

“I should know what to do. Something’s wrong with me”

“I can’t let anyone know about this mistake, my credibility is at stake”

“How could I be so stupid?”

One of the common signs that we have arrived at the edge is the feeling of being embarrassed by our limitations. We do not want to look bad or lose public esteem. This experience that “all eyes are on us” can take the form of mild shyness, where the most obvious sign may be that we feel self-conscious. At the other end of the spectrum we may experience a harsh inner criticism and feelings of shame, which can be deeply painful and isolating.

Shame is the feeling that “I am wrong,” in which our very identity is threatened, not simply our actions. Brené Brown, a researcher into vulnerability and shame, defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”⁵⁰ One of the ways we can recognize shame is by the sense of isolation it triggers. It can prevent us from moving forward as we want, to get away from the people and the situation that are making us feel this way. Shame prohibits us from wanting to express our views about the situation at all.

The inner critic emerges at the edge; resembling the voice of reason and logic, this critic throws doubt at our ability to do something and it holds us back.

Diana: When I began a role managing the refugee centre of a large social organization, I faced up to a formidable inner critic: “The inner critic casts its dark shadow. I heard its voice in my head loud and clear: ‘You can’t do this! You are so foolish to have even thought that you could succeed. You are too big for your boots and now everyone can see you for who you are. The job is too high-level for you and you don’t have enough experience. Everyone else is so much more experienced and talented. They’ve had years of training and they know so much more than you do.’

“Doubt has settled in. It’s warm and reassuring in a disturbing way. I’ve been here before, where I start worrying and become soft and floppy like a rag doll. I don’t feel like doing anything. I can’t find the energy. My thoughts are floating in a mushy sea of half-frozen ice. I am confused about where I am or what I am supposed to be doing. I don’t know where to begin. It’s overwhelming.”

Professor Carol Dweck, a world-leading researcher of motivation at Stanford University, sought to understand why it is that some people succeed while others don’t and she was very interested in finding out whether there was a correlation between intelligence, talent and success.

In her book Mindset Dweck published some startling findings from her research: that mindset makes more of a difference to success than ability does.⁵¹ This is the self-narrative that we tell ourselves – about our intelligence, our ability to learn, our personality and our talents. It shapes whether we stick to what we know, or whether we enter into the unknown and develop new skills.

Dweck distinguishes between two basic mindsets. A fixed mind-set is where we believe that our intelligence, talents and traits are fixed at birth. They are the inheritance of our genes, our cultural conditioning, or the way in which we have been parented. This is a fixed idea, that even though we may be able to make incremental improvement, it is unlikely we will ever be able to change that much. In contrast, a growth mindset is one in which we believe that although we have a starting point with our natural talents, traits and intelligence, we can develop further, cultivate our traits and improve our talents through sheer practice, discipline and persistence to achieve our goals.

Steven: An example of a fixed mindset is my attitude to maths. As a child I never excelled at maths. For others it came naturally but I had to really struggle in class. I told myself: “I’m just the type of person who is good at writing and the humanities. I am not a maths or science person. Some people are just more numerate than others.” This mindset was only challenged when I was 16 and decided to do the subject for A-level. Getting a low grade however, seemed only to convince me of my belief. The negative consequence is that I later avoided job applications or even study that required high numeracy skills, even though they may have led to jobs that I wanted.

An example of a growth mindset is the first time I played table tennis with my brother Selwyn, I was terrible. We used our school books as a make-shift net and our kitchen table. Yet by playing regularly with my brother and also our dad, who was much better than both of us, I kept improving my technique. By the time I was 18, I was good enough to represent my university in competitive matches.

Whether we have a fixed or growth mindset has significant implications for the choices we make, our behaviour and therefore for our results. For example, Dweck argues that those who have a fixed mindset need to constantly prove themselves and confirm to themselves and others their capability. They do everything to avoid the unknown, which they believe may result in failure. According to Dweck, every situation is evaluated for a binary outcome: “Will I succeed or fail?” “Will I be a winner or a loser?” With this mindset we avoid tasks we are not sure we will be good at. We may want to be flawless the first time we try something and if we have deficiencies, we will naturally want to hide them. Failure for a fixed mindset type of person can lead to shame. They may also seek to surround themselves with people who can make them look good, rather than those against whom they may not measure up. A fixed mindset is a critical stumbling block at the edge. It stops us from being open to trying new things and to experimenting.