Competency Trap and How to Avoid It
Our past successes can become our future liabilities. How can we avoid a competency trap? How can we develop new skills when we are so busy?
Are you a Climber or a Switcher?
When I think of people considering a corporate career change, I can roughly identify 3 broad categories:
Climbers aspire for roles with greater leadership, albeit without a radical change of environment: they’d rather stay with their current employer or move to a close competitor.
Switchers consider lateral moves. While they prefer to stay in the same or similar role, they are willing to change the environment, to varying degrees: a business unit, a company, industry or geography, or a combination thereof.
Climbing switchers are the most ambitious (or maybe the least informed and the most naive?) types, aiming for a simultaneous change in leadership level combined with environmental changes of varying degrees.
3 categories of skills
Whatever the pathway we contemplate, the skills necessary for the current and new role can also be divided into 3 categories:
Non-transferable skills: What we currently do, but will not need in the new role.
Transferable skills: What we currently do and what will serve us in the new role.
New skills: What we will need to succeed in the new role, but currently don’t have.
All three areas are graphically represented in the below figure. The more transferable skills we have (the larger is area #2 in the figure below), the higher are chances of a successful transition.
To make area #2 larger, there are 2 main strategies:
Acquire additional transferable skills in your free time, outside of your current corporate role: via a side project, moonlighting, involvement in a non-profit activities etc. The perimeter of the blue circle will grow bigger, making area #2 bigger.
Being strategic about your current corporate role: here, it’s a matter of give and take. Making area #2 bigger means making area #1 smaller - you will have to decide not only what to do, but also what to spend less time doing or what to stop doing completely.
Competency Trap
The largest obstacle to the second approach is the competency trap. Herminia Ibarra in her book “Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader” describes the competency trap as follows:
Success creates competency traps. We fall into a competency trap when these three things occur:
(1) you enjoy what you do well, so you do more if it and get better at it.
(2) when you allocate more time to what you do best, you devote less time to learning new things that are also important.
(3) over time, it gets more costly to invest in learning to do new things.
… We enjoy what we do well, so we do more of it and get still better at it. The more we do something, the more expert we become at it and the more we enjoy doing it. Such a feedback loop motivates us to get even more experience. The mastery we feel is like a drug, deepening both our enjoyment and our sense of self-efficacy. It also biases us to believe that the things we do well are the most valuable and important, justifying the time we devote to them.
Marshall Goldsmith in his book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” speaks about the success delusion.
… all of us in the workplace delude ourselves about our achievements, our status and our contributions. We overestimate our contribution to a project, take credit, partial or complete, for successes that truly belong to others, have an elevated opinion of our professional skills and our standing among our peers, conveniently ignore the costly failures and time-consuming dead-ends we have created, exaggerate our projects’ impact on net profits because we discount the real and hidden costs built into them (the costs are someone else’s problems; the success is ours).
All of these delusions are a direct result of success, not failure. That’s because we get positive reinforcement from our past successes, and, in a mental leap that’s easy to justify, we think that our past success is predictive of great things in our future… but our delusions become a serious liability when we need to change.
… among the myriad wise things I have heard Peter Drucker say, the wisest was, ‘We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. we don’t spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop.’
How to avoid competency trap and success delusion
So if we want to grow our ‘muscles’ for the new role, we need first and foremost create some slack in our existing schedules. To quote Herminia Ibarra again,
The first, a difficult but tractable problem, is making yourself spend more time on the things you know are really important, but not urgent. This is hard to do, but there are tried-and-true techniques for doing so. The second, harder problem is changing your views about what is important. The only way to tackle this second problem is to get involved in activities that will make you think differently about what you should be doing and why.
Other recommendations to make your current job a platform for learning and doing new things:
Understanding a bigger picture. If your current and past roles have been limited to one function or business unit, it is extremely important to gain a broader understanding of the business, its big themes, challenges and opportunities, main stakeholders and interconnections between them. Ideas to achieve this: internal networking, shadowing / assisting to CEO, as well as
Getting involved in a project outside of your usual responsibilities. Go for it even if it means some extra work: the exposure outside of your functional or business unit silo is going to pay off.
Participate in extracurricular activities, like industry events. Speak or blog on the topics about which you would like to learn. Chances are, these extracurricular activities will not only give you extra visibility with the people who can be crucial for your next move, but also make you reconsider the things you could delegate or stop doing in your current role.
Think about and communicate your personal WHY. While you are experimenting with all these new projects and activities, think about a coherent story they can make. It might not be fully clear at the start, but you will get clarity as you move on.
All the above recommendations are first and foremost a call for action. Action comes first, self-reflection second. We cannot think out our way into your new role, we can only act and experiment our way into it.