You wouldn’t go to a five-star restaurant, order a meal, and then walk into the kitchen and start telling the chef how to prepare the dishes. So why when we employ competent professionals to do their job, do some people feel the need to check everything that they’re doing and give them directions?

I regularly see people challenging competent professionals and have been subjected to a lot of it myself recently by some of our client’s clients.

By challenging professionals, I mean refusing to accept work from competent people, questioning every choice that has been made, insisting that evidence be provided for every decision, challenging the very ability of the individual to do their job. This leads to rework that adds little or no value, but at the same time requires additional effort and introdcues delays to delivery.

There are many high-profile projects running late and over budget right now where I know that significant costs and program delays have come from unnecessary rework from client’s representatives who will not accept assurance from competent professionals.

If you are in a client organisation you may not do this personally, but I guarantee someone in your business does.

I’ll examine some of the causes that I have experience and provide some key discussion points below.

What is competence anyway?

I think for a lot of people they don’t fully understand what competence is, or why it is so important in providing Assurance.

There are two key factors to consider when we talk about competence, those being knowledge and experience.

• Knowledge tells us the why we need to do something.
• Experience tells us the how something is done.

We leave university or college having been taught the theory of something, but we have no life experience of implementing that something. The idiosyncrasies of a discipline, an industry, or the real world are not known to us, we are 'book smart' but have no real-life application, we are not ‘street smart’.

Likewise, someone who has never studied but learned on the job will know how to do something within the scope of their experience, but may not know why they are doing it. They may not have the skills to be able to take that experience and adapt it to different scenarios.

Each job has a different requirement but for a professional it is the combination of knowledge and experience that is used to demonstrate that a person is competent.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

You may be aware of the well-used phrase ‘a little knowledge can be dangerous’ - and there’s a reason why it exists.

Have you heard of the Dunning Kruger Effect which describes the link between confidence and competence? If not, here's a link to Wikipedia.

We may all done it as some point in our lives where we’ve learned a little about a topic, thought we were an expert, before coming to the realisation of how little we actually know.

This learning curve is completely natural, but the trick is to get over that early stage of 'This is easy' as soon as possible. Some people however seem to get to that initial peak and no further, it is referred to as 'Mount Stupid’ when people stay there too long (I’m not making this up).

With some people there can be a degree of arrogance and wanting to be seen as the best, or more likely wanting their clients to think they are the best.  They’ve got to the top of 'Mount Stupid' and aren’t even interested in looking down the other side.  These people often revert to personal attacks to establish dominance in the eyes of their clients and thrive on toxic environments. These individuals are difficult to deal with and they may never change. The onus, unfortunately, is on the client to see through the charade.

In most cases when I see people challenging experts it simply stems from a lack of confidence on the challenger’s part. An employee can often challenge an expert as a way of showing that they have some knowledge too, often to try and feel secure in their role. This is sometimes called imposter syndrome with employees feeling the need to prove why they have their job.

Asking questions to learn should always be encouraged, but constant challenging experts/expertise and causing additional work without changing the outcome just increases costs and introduces delays.

It’s OK to acknowledge that someone is more competent than you, in fact it should be positively encouraged. You employ an expert to do something when you don't have the ability to do it yourself - take this opportunity to learn and grow your knowledge from them.

If you’ve engaged the expert as you’re too busy to do something yourself, why waste both of your time questioning everything they do?

Sometimes, unfortunately, there’s a financial incentive for the person who is constantly challenging the experts. You may be paying a party who makes more money by challenging a competent professional and raising issues on your behalf. The only thing this is doing is harming your business and making someone else rich.

You may be inadvertently incentivising someone to delay your project and increase costs.

A little trust goes a long way!

Ask yourself, if you don’t trust an individual or an organisation, why are you employing them in the first place?

At some point, when engaging a party, there should have been checks undertaken on their competence, their ability, and ideally some reference checks. This may not have been completed by you, but someone in your firm should have done it. You need to be able to rely on these processes.

It is OK to seek assurances and do some due diligence. But working from a basis of trust is essential.

When you trust a competent person, you can step back, accept what they’re doing, get on with your own job and focus on achieving the outputs, not wasting both parties’ time scrutinising each step of the process.

Here’s an example:  You need to re-wire your house, if you get this wrong then there could be an accident and you, or one of your family, could get hurt or even killed. You can manage this risk by employing a licenced electrician to re-wire the house for you.

You don’t spend all day watching every electrical connection they make, questioning every decision, recording every move. You trust the licenced professional to do their job and provide you with the relevant certificate at the end.

Why then, when our safety or the safety of our family is at risk, are we happy to trust an electrician. But at the same time when we get to work, why won’t we trust a competent professional?

If you don’t trust professionals working for you, ask yourself why?  Take the opportunity to self-reflect on what is driving this and to try and identify what steps you can take to able to trust that competent professional and turn it into a win.

Ultimately, if you can’t trust them, and there may be a valid reason for this, then you need to replace them with someone you can trust as soon as you can.

Key takeaways

So here are my five takeaways, get these right and you won’t be far off the mark when it comes to trusting competent professionals:

1.     When engaging a person or business what checks were done to ensure they were competent?

2.     It is OK to know less than the professionals you have employed to work for you. Be humble and use the opportunity to learn.

3.     If you’re challenging a competent professional, ask yourself why? If you have a genuine reason then there’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t do it for personal gain.

4.     Find a way to establish trust in the competent professional you engage, or replace them with someone else.

5.     If you manage or engage someone who is constantly challenging competent professionals, ask what incentives they have for doing it and what impact it is having on your business?

Competence is simple. Trust them and trust yourself.

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