Competent is one of the “Three C’s of a Cultural Champions” discussed in Leadership IMHO #37. Being competent means, you’re constantly keeping your “tools sharp” regardless of your level of proficiency in your field of play. Competent individuals keep striving for excellence and mastery. They don’t rest on their laurels. They’re never satisfied with their current state, making it a habit to seek new knowledge and enhance existing skills.
In my opinion, there are three main mindsets on what it takes to be competent. These three mindsets cover a spectrum of behaviors and practices that maintains an individual’s high level of competency. These three mindsets are:
Ability to Move Forward
Constant Learner
Ability to Create Opportunities
1. Ability to Move Forward
This first mindset talks about the individual’s drive or horsepower. Competent individuals deliver results and solutions constantly. They’re driven to achieve a certain goal or objective regardless of how hard the situation is. These individuals keep moving forward, inch by inch, with the much rigor and enthusiasm. They’ll keep pushing, they’ll keep pulling. They don’t waste time and energy to complain or be distracted by unproductive things.
Cal Newport, author of the book “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in Distracted World,” calls these distractions, “shallow work.” Distractions don’t necessarily mean they’re unproductive things. They can be work, but they’re not the type of work that would elevate you and your organization.
“You should only do the amount of shallow work needed to keep you from getting fired, so that you have the time necessary to do the deep work that will get you promoted.” – Cal Newport
Deep work requires intense focus and determination. Competent individuals have what it takes to start, process, and complete deep work. Furthermore, competent individuals know how to distinguish deep work from shallow work. They use their experience, organizational insights, and other resources to identify the distinctions between the two.
2. Constant Learner
Competent individuals don’t settle. They are constantly trying to improve themselves, finding new skills to learn and seeking opportunities to improve on the skills they already have.
Many years ago, I remember a comment from a senior-level direct report I used to have--Cyrus. (Not his real name, of course!) As part of my career development strategies for my direct reports, I would start assigning resources—training courses (internally and externally), books, videos (e.g. TED videos), points-of-contact within the organization—to my direct reports based on our ongoing career development conversations. For Cyrus, I earmarked a particualr full-day leadership workshop for him to take. This specifically stood out to me because I’ve taken the workshop a few times in the past, and I found it extremely helpful. The workshop was on communications—communicating with different generations, multi-cultural audiences, and vertical/horizontal communications. (I wish I remembered the exact name of the workshop; it sounded much cooler and more professional than how I described it.)
On the day the workshop was supposed to happen, I noticed Cyrus was still at his desk. I hesitated to ask him about it thinking that the class may start later than the normal 8am-start time. 10 am rolls over, and I still see Cyrus at his desk. When I asked him about the workshop, he said, “Oh, I withdrew my registration.” Before I could even respond to that, he followed, “I don’t think I need it. Even the instructor said (a friend of his) thought that I don’t need it. There’s nothing else new for me to learn about this.”
As I walked away from that conversation, I was speechless. I remember being confused and annoyed at the same time. This was years before I even identified the “three C’s” of what I would identify are traits of a cultural champion. Even as a young leader, it has always been a value for me to keep learning—that everyone always has room to improve and should always seek mastery. As JJ Redick, former NBA star, used to say, “You’ve never arrived. You’re always becoming.”
3. Ability to Create Opportunities
In my opinion, competent individuals can come up with great things from scratch. They don’t rely on others to feed them a platter of opportunities or work from a process template. They look at a situation from different angles and altitudes, assess the situation, integrate their knowledge and experiences, and use resources (traditional and non-tradition) to come up with a solution or create a whole different environment altogether.
Competent individuals don’t just wait for projects to be handed to them. They seek things to do. Not just any “thing,” but things that create value to the organization. This is the whole point of having stretch assignments. Outside of the standard duties of an individual, they’re encouraged by management to work on things that interest them. It could be something specific to their section or to a totally different area of the organization.
These types of scenarios, hardwire the workforce to create opportunities themselves. Since the topics of these stretch assignments were not prescribed by their management team, individuals in the team are forced to think outside of their normal roles and operations; creating things as they go. Many big companies now started from side projects, like, Twitter, Groupon, and even Craig’s List. The founders of these companies show their competency through innovation and opportunity generation.
Crowdsourcing FTW
Do you agree that competency is a crucial element of cultural champions? Do you think the three mindsets above appropriately captures what it takes to be competent? Do you have other traits or mindsets you think competent individuals possess? Please do share in the comments below.