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We’ve all dealt with co-workers who are bad at their jobs, but very good at making their incompetence your problem—from the boss who over-promises, (only to expect you to do all of the work) to the co-worker who can’t quite do their job, (but is all too happy to pass their work off to you). This habit of feigning incompetence at a task, so as to make it someone else’s responsibility, is called “weaponized incompetence,” and can show up at work in a number of different ways.
Sometimes the co-worker may be genuinely incompetent; other times, they are capable of doing the work—they just don’t care to. Either way, their refusal or inability to do the work properly ends up becoming your problem as you are blamed for their failures or forced to take on work they will then take credit for. One major sign of weaponized incompetence in a boss is when they seem clueless about what it actually takes to finish a project.
They might assume a particular a task takes 2 hours to complete, rather than the more realistic 12 hours. Or they don’t having a good sense of what their employee’s workload actually looks like. For some bosses, this cluelessness may be genuine. For others, this incompetence is strategic, as they’ve learned they can make a whole bunch of big promises…..Story continues….
By: Rachel Fairbank
Source: How to Deal With ‘Weaponized Incompetence’ at Work
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Critics
Competency is also used as a more general description of requirements for human beings in organizations and communities. Competencies and competency models may be applicable to all employees in an organization or they may be position specific. Competencies are also what people need to be successful in their jobs.
Job competencies are not the same as job task. Competencies include all the related knowledge, skills, abilities, and attributes that form a person’s job. This set of context-specific qualities is correlated with superior job performance and can be used as a standard against which to measure job performance as well as to develop, recruit, and hire employees.
Competencies provide organizations with a way to define in behavioral terms what it is that people need to do to produce the results that the organization desires, in a way that is in keep with its culture. By having competencies defined in the organization, it allows employees to know what they need to be productive. When properly defined, competencies, allows organizations to evaluate the extent to which behaviors employees are demonstrating and where they may be lacking.
For competencies where employees are lacking, they can learn. This will allow organizations to know potentially what resources they may need to help the employee develop and learn those competencies. Competencies can distinguish and differentiate an organization from competitors. While two organizations may be alike in financial results, the way in which the results were achieve could be different based on the competencies that fit their particular strategy and organizational culture.
Lastly, competencies can provide a structured model that can be used to integrate management practices throughout the organization. Competencies that align their recruiting, performance management, training and development and reward practices to reinforce key behaviors that the organization values.
Competencies required for a post are identified through job analysis or task analysis, using techniques such as the critical incident technique, work diaries, and work sampling. A future focus is recommended for strategic reasons.[8] If someone is able to do required tasks at the target level of proficiency, they are considered “competent” in that area. For instance, management competency might include system thinking and emotional intelligence, as well as skills in influence and negotiation.
Identifying employee competencies can contribute to improved organizational performance. They are most effective if they meet several critical standards, including linkage to, and leverage within an organization’s human resource system. The process of competency development is a lifelong series of doing and reflecting. As competencies apply to careers as well as jobs, lifelong competency development is linked with personal development as a management concept.
And it requires a special environment, where the rules are necessary in order to introduce novices, but people at a more advanced level of competency will systematically break the rules if the situations requires it. This environment is synonymously described using terms such as learning organization, knowledge creation, self-organizing and empowerment. Within a specific organization or professional community, professional competency is frequently valued. They are usually the same competencies that must be demonstrated in a job interview.
But today there is another way of looking at it: that there are general areas of occupational competency required to retain a post, or earn a promotion. For all organizations and communities there is a set of primary tasks that competent people have to contribute to all the time. For a university student, for example, the primary tasks could be handling theory, methods or the information of an assignment.
In emergencies, competent people may react to a situation following behaviors they have previously found successful. To be competent a person would need to be able to interpret the situation in the context and have a repertoire of possible actions to take. Being sufficiently trained in each possible action included in their repertoire can make a great difference. Regardless of training, competency grows through experience and the extent of an individual’s capacity to learn and adapt.
Research has found that it is not easy to assess competencies and competence development. Dreyfus and Dreyfus introduced nomenclature for the levels of competence in competency development. The five levels proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus are part of what is now referred to as the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition:
- Novice: Rule-based behavior, strongly limited and inflexible
- Experienced Beginner: Incorporates aspects of the situation
- Practitioner: Acting consciously from long-term goals and plans
- Knowledgeable practitioner: Sees the situation as a whole and acts from personal conviction
- Expert: Has an intuitive understanding of the situation and zooms in on the central aspects
Dreyfus and Dreyfus also introduced four general areas of competency:
- Meaning competency: The person assessed must be able to identify with the purpose of the organization or community and act from the preferred future in accordance with the values of the organization or community.
- Relation competency: The ability to create and nurture connections to the stakeholders of the primary tasks must be shown.
- Learning competency: The person assessed must be able to create and look for situations that make it possible to experiment with the set of solutions that make it possible to complete the primary tasks and reflect on the experience.
- Change competency: The person assessed must be able to act in new ways when it will promote the purpose of the organization or community and make the preferred future come to life.
In psychology, the four stages of competence, or the “conscious competence” learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill. People may have several skills, some unrelated to each other, and each skill will typically be at one of the stages at a given time. Many skills require practice to remain at a high level of competence.
Behavioral competencies: Individual performance competencies are more specific than organizational competencies and capabilities. As such, it is important that they be defined in a measurable behavioral context in order to validate applicability and the degree of expertise (e.g. development of talent)
Core competencies: Capabilities and/or technical expertise unique to an organization, i.e. core competencies differentiate an organization from its competition (e.g. the technologies, methodologies, strategies or processes of the organization that create competitive advantage in the marketplace). An organizational core competency is an organization’s strategic strength. Core competencies differentiate an organization from its competition and create a company’s competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Functional competencies: Functional competencies are job-specific competencies that drive proven high-performance, quality results for a given position. They are often technical or operational in nature (e.g., “backing up a database” is a functional competency).
Management competencies: Management competencies identify the specific attributes and capabilities that illustrate an individual’s management potential. Unlike leadership characteristics, management characteristics can be learned and developed with the proper training and resources. Competencies in this category should demonstrate pertinent behaviors for management to be effective.
Organizational competencies: The mission, vision, values, culture and core competencies of the organization that sets the tone and/or context in which the work of the organization is carried out (e.g. customer-driven, risk taking and cutting edge). How we treat the patient is part of the patient’s treatment.
Technical competencies: Depending on the position, both technical and performance capabilities should be weighed carefully as employment decisions are made. For example, organizations that tend to hire or promote solely on the basis of technical skills, i.e. to the exclusion of other competencies, may experience an increase in performance-related issues (e.g. systems software designs versus relationship management skills)
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