When competence and confidence clash

Some people say that confidence breeds competence and that is probably where the expression “fake it till you make it” finds its origin.

I’ve always been skeptical of people overly confident and through the course of my life, I’ve seen them, time and time again, over-promising a lot, but under-delivering by an even larger margin.

That was until I heard, I few days ago, on NPR, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, shine a different light on these two important traits. The discussion began on how confidence was defined; namely, was confidence the same as being charismatic or extroverted?

Chamorro-Premusic said that confidence had an external and internal face, in that the external face looked a lot like extroversion, a trait linked to charisma in our Western societies. This said, there are many good people who can be internally confident without projecting it to others.

Overly confident folks are often coming across as arrogant and even obnoxious. All the narcissists are excellent examples of this.

Since confident individuals tend to be more extroverted, and socially-skilled our society tends to put them on pedestal, not only that, but we tend to equate confidence with competence, and automatically assume that because of it, they’re are also more skilled or talented.

The expert went on to say that competent people are generally confident, but confident people are not necessarily competent. They’re just skilled at hiding their incompetence and their insecurities– mostly because they’re self-deceiving themselves, so they can think that they are much better than they are in reality.

This is also an excellent reason why, during quick interviews or evaluations, it’s very difficult to measure how competent people are, especially when they use confidence to fake competence, especially when we’re not experts in that field and can’t perceive the difference.

So, these people who interview really, really well look really good if you have no evidence or information on their actual talent or competence, and this might lead you to assume that they’re great.

Don’t fall into that trap and always look for a way of finding where their real competence stands and don’t just get blinded by their bravado!