When Competence Is No Longer Enough

Is it luck? Being in the right place at the right time perhaps. Better education? Is it their work ethic? And if you feel a bit nasty, you could even add proximity to decision-makers. Politics, you conclude finally.

We all get up in the morning and go to the office, where we spend more than half our lives trying to win what has often been termed “The Rat Race”. And towards that effort, we give up a part of our lives and spend more time at the office than we do with our families. Corporate life occupies too much of our lives for what happens within it to be treated lightly. It is where ambition is tested, where standing is earned or withheld, and where many people come, often without quite realising it, to measure their worth. What happens to a person inside an organisation therefore reaches far beyond salary and title.

Had growth and failure within organisations been as clear as chalk and cheese, it would have been a simple thing. Professionals who are failing would realise this fact and move on to do other things. But what we often see is not failure in the obvious sense, but a gradual loss of momentum. A person may remain competent, yet find that this no longer leads to upward movement or a larger future. Nothing dramatic happens, unless you happen to get fired, which is another way to reset and restart. The problem is that a competent professional may still be respected and nothing seems out of place. But something in his career has gone still. He has simply stopped growing.

Over the years, I found myself returning to this pattern again and again. We have all been told that the best way to grow at work is to work really hard, ensure you are indispensable, treat your bosses right, make sure they are happy, and all good things will automatically come. But what we see more often is the failure of that arithmetic.

A person may be literally indispensable, in the real sense, and may be working harder than everyone else, and yet find himself replaced by someone who, for all practical purposes, is way less qualified, has proven his abilities less, has not shown that he is as good at resolving issues, and yet he is considered for growth and you are not. I found this happening too often, and with too much consistency, to be explained away as bad luck, politics or unfairness alone. There seemed to be a deeper logic at work, one that many professionals were living through without being able to name.

The Relevance Trap is an attempt to name that condition. The book follows a three-part path: The Drift, The Shift and The Reconstruction.

The first part of understanding the Relevance Trap is recognising what I call The Drift. The Drift is the slow erosion of influence while continuously being praised for your competency and for keeping the wheels turning. It is the latter that keeps you from recognising the Drift. The praise is usually genuine, for “a job well done”, and this is precisely what can blind you to what is happening. In fact, the Drift can be so deceptively invisible that you may already have given a large chunk of your working life before you recognise that growth is no longer going to come.

The book therefore is an attempt to name these patterns, patterns that I had observed over my own corporate life. Through my research and interviews with other senior professionals, I began to recognise that they were both rampant and present across all levels of competence. I felt these phenomena needed names, and I have named several of them.

One of them is The Reliability Premium, the belief that being competent and consistently reliable is a sufficient condition for growth. It is not. There is also a persistent belief that having a senior title means greater authority and influence. It doesn’t. I call this The Title Illusion, a phenomenon where title and authority begin to separate long before it becomes evident.

And yes, there are several others. The Diversion Trap, for instance, is where a professional, having shown excellence in execution and been praised for keeping things running, is often excluded from where the organisation is planning for the future.

The trap is that all of these don’t arise because of malice or manipulation. They are structural phenomena that arise from the very nature of the entity we call the organisation. Organisations are constantly responding to pressures from markets, customers, technology, competition, leadership changes and the need to prepare for what comes next. The people within them often move more slowly and react much later because they are still responding to the pressures within the organisation.

This is where the separation can begin. The organisation may already be changing what it values, while the professional is still becoming better at what it valued yesterday. The professional may continue doing everything that made him successful. He works harder, becomes more dependable and solves more problems. Strangely, every one of those things can continue to earn him praise. But praise and future relevance are not necessarily the same thing.

These phenomena are not without impact on the professional. They are confusing because the language surrounding them is often the language of praise, while the reality on the ground is stagnation. This conflict can be highly detrimental to the professional, both to the execution for which he has been praised all along and to his psychology. At some point, the question begins to arise: “Am I not capable?”

That is perhaps one of the most damaging questions a competent professional can begin asking himself, because capability may not have been the problem at all. The problem may be that the organisation has begun asking a different question. Not simply, “Can this person do his present job extremely well?” but increasingly, “Where does this person fit in what we are becoming?”

Those are two very different questions.

If the professional does not recognise that distinction, there can finally be a retreat into acceptance without really understanding why or what has gone wrong. He may tell himself that perhaps this is as far as he was meant to go. Perhaps younger people have arrived. Perhaps the organisation has become political. Perhaps somebody simply liked someone else better. Sometimes, of course, some of those things may even be true. But they are not explanations we should accept before asking a more uncomfortable question: Has the organisation moved while I remained extraordinarily good at standing where I was?

That question sits at the heart of Professional Relevance. It is also why I believe relevance cannot be something we begin thinking about only after our careers have stopped moving. By then, the Drift may already have been underway for years.

The better time to recognise it is while everything still appears to be going well, while you are still respected and while you are still delivering. Perhaps even while people are still telling you, “We don’t know what we would do without you.”

Because sometimes, hidden inside that compliment, is a question worth asking:

Do they need you where the organisation is today, or can they see you where it is going tomorrow?