{"id":782,"date":"2013-04-08T12:58:33","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T00:58:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=782"},"modified":"2013-04-08T13:04:01","modified_gmt":"2013-04-08T01:04:01","slug":"competence-confidence-and-commitment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=782","title":{"rendered":"Competence, confidence, and commitment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"stones2\"<\/a>One of my former bosses used to reckon that the basis of a good team was competence, confidence, and commitment.<\/p>\n

By competence he meant that each individual team member must be competent to execute the skills and exercise the judgements required to make a full and useful contribution to the team\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n

By confidence he meant that each team member must be realistically confident of their own competence and the competence of the other team members.\u00a0 In short, they must believe that they can do what needs to be done.<\/p>\n

And by commitment he meant that each and every team member must believe in the team and that he or she must be committed to the team\u2019s success.<\/p>\n

\u2018But competence comes first,\u2019 he used to say.\u00a0 \u2018Without competence, confidence plus commitment is a recipe for disaster.\u2019<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bit like Clausewitz\u2019s observations on new recruits to the Prussian army.<\/p>\n

There are those who are clever and energetic.\u00a0 They are tomorrow\u2019s leaders.<\/p>\n

There are those who are clever and lazy.\u00a0 A pity; a waste of good talent; but no harm done.<\/p>\n

There are those who are stupid and lazy.\u00a0 And it is just as well that they are lazy.\u00a0 They don\u2019t do very much, so they don\u2019t get the chance to make too many mistakes.<\/p>\n

And there are those who are stupid and energetic.\u00a0 These people are the most dangerous people in the entire army.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this recently when I was asked to \u2018tidy up\u2019 a suite of briefing papers.\u00a0 They were, to put it mildly, gobbledygook of the first order.<\/p>\n

Their principal author was a man with an almost unbelievable amount of confidence and commitment.\u00a0 Unfortunately, his competence when it came to putting ideas down on paper was almost non-existent.<\/p>\n

In many organisations, \u2018writing it up\u2019 \u2013 whether \u2018it\u2019 is the results of a brain-storming session or a multi-million dollar pitch \u2013 tends to fall to he or she who volunteers, he or she who is confident in their ability to put pen to paper.\u00a0 But, unfortunately, there are many confident writers who are not competent writers.\u00a0 And competence must come first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my former bosses used to reckon that the basis of a good team was competence, confidence, and commitment. By competence he meant that each individual team member must be competent to execute the skills and exercise the judgements … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=782"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":787,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions\/787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}