How to Avoid the Competency Trap
I’ve always thought that the saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” was one that was as old as time itself. Turns out, I was completely wrong, and that it one that is far more recent.
The phrase is widely attributed to Bert Lance, who worked as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget in Jimmy Carter's 1977 administration. In May 1977, Bert was quoted in the US Chamber of Commerce newsletter, Nation’s Business,
“Bert Lance believes he can save Uncle Sam billions if he can get the government to adopt a simple motto: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” He explains: “That’s the trouble with government: Fixing things that aren’t broken and not fixing things that are broken.””
When Bert said this, I don’t think he ever thought it would become one of the most widely quoted phrases, especially not as a core part of management literature, or part of so many people’s approach to their personal productivity.
As a species, we humans seem to have this urge to constantly improve things. However, if we’re not intentional with how we spend our time and in the way that we seek to improve things, and most importantly, ourselves, we can so easily fall into what’s called the competency trap.
The competency trap is a belief, and a false one at that, that what you have done in the past will continually lead to future success as you seemingly already have a proven method for how something should work or behave. Typically, this is used in reference to companies as a whole, but I believe that it can also apply to individuals as well.
What’s wrong with this approach to personal productivity is that instead of maintaining and open mind to continue learning better systems, practices, and skills, so many people stop questioning the principles that made them successful in the first place. Instead, they follow the rule of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and as a result, get stuck in the same habits and routines.
When you become so good at whatever it is that you do, you can become blinded by your past successes. Doing something well can often get you stuck in a loop, and instead of growing, you begin to stagnate and start relying solely on the techniques that you believe to work well without actually spending the time to evaluate their effectiveness now or in the future.
The competency trap stands in the way of your incremental progress.
“What got you here will not get you there”
The key word in that last sentence is incremental. There’s another old saying, “practice makes perfect.” I disagree. I believe that practice makes improvement. When you say that practice makes perfect, in effect what you’re saying is that “I am so good at this that I no longer require any additional knowledge or skills. I cannot improve further beyond this,” and that’s just false.
Author and leadership coach, Marshal Goldsmith wrote in his 2007 book, What Got You Here Will Not Get You There, that behavioral problems, not technical skills, are what separate the great from the near great. Think of it this way: when you repeatedly get praise for doing something right, you’re more likely to continue doing that same thing in order to receive more praise, and if you don’t receive praise or receive criticism instead, you’re more likely to try a new approach to see if that works better.
As Goldsmith writes, getting praise can be dangerous because it becomes so easy to delude yourself when all you hear are positive things, and this delusional sense of over self-confidence can lead you to be resistant to change. Effectively, Goldsmith is expanding upon B.F. Skinner’s theory on operant conditioning.
So, how can we avoid falling into the competency trap?
First, to borrow a term from the tech industry, you need to:
Disrupt Yourself
What I mean by this is that in order to avoid this trap, you need to continually challenge and push yourself. Story time. When I was in high-school, I had a math teacher who kept a list of the top 5 students in his class. A really good friend of mine and I would constantly challenge each other to see who would end up in the top spot, and as a result, we learned new skills and approaches to our work. While this was definitely an exterior motivator that came in the form of our teacher, we ended up becoming better students overtime. And that’s what competition does; it removes the mind’s tendency to become complacent and sit on our laurels, because if we’re not carful, someone else is going to quickly bump you down a spot or two.
In light of the current global pandemic, one of the things that I’ve begun to do is take advantage of online and remote learning opportunities. Sites like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Google Digital Garage, MasterClass, and Facebook Blueprint offer a ton of courses in a variety of areas. Not only have I taken courses to brush up on my current skills, but also taking courses in areas of interest that lie outside of my professional career, and through this, I’ve become the most critical person of my own past successes, and I’ve begun to address gaps in my skillset and look for areas of improvement. It’s a mindset of continuous improvement, and while it won’t happen overnight, as Goldsmith writes, “the first step to change is wanting to change.”
And second, you need to:
Look Backwards for Insights on Future Growth
Taking the time to analyze your life and career goals, and how productive your strategies and actions have been is essential to finding out what’s worked for you and what hasn’t.
Are you more productive in the morning, evening or afternoon? What type of schedule works best for you? How much time do you spend actually working, and how much time is spend taking yet another break? Is the work you’re doing fulfilling? These are all important questions, and a reflection on them can not only help you determine trends in your personal productivity, but also surface the realities and misconceptions standing in the way of your own incremental success.
Many companies do this, whether it’s weekly, monthly, or annually, to determine what’s working and what isn’t so they don’t fall for the sunk-cost bias, which is the reluctance to give up on previous investments, even when they are no longer paying off, as they have invested so much time and energy into making them work in the past. The same applies to your own personal productivity - don’t get trapped by your own success and investing in continuing to learn how to do the same thing, but only better.
Instead, spend some of that energy learning new skills and processes, with the goal in mind to continuously evolve.
