Hired for What You Pretend to Know

Remember your first week in a new role? That gap between what you said you could do in the interview and what you actually knew once you sat down at the desk?

Maybe you smiled through a meeting full of acronyms you'd never heard. Maybe you nodded at a process that made no sense, then Googled it frantically afterwards. Maybe you just kept quiet and hoped nobody would ask you a direct question.

That wasn't a character flaw. That was survival.

The fiction that gets you in

Here's something worth noticing about how we hire people. The entire process is a performance of competence. You present the best, most capable, most polished version of yourself. The organisation pretends this version is the real one. Both sides know the gap exists. Neither side names it.

This isn't dishonesty. It's the deal. And it works fine—right up until you actually start the job and need to learn things. Because learning requires not knowing. And not knowing is precisely what you just spent three rounds of interviews proving you'd never do.

The trap snaps shut.

Where "imposter syndrome" gets it wrong

You've probably heard the term. Maybe you've diagnosed yourself with it. There's a small industry of TED talks and self-help books dedicated to helping you overcome the feeling that you don't quite belong, that someone's about to find out you're not as capable as they think.

Here's what bothers me about that framing: it locates the problem in you.

You have a syndrome. You need to fix your thinking. You should feel the fear and push through it anyway.

But what if the feeling isn't a pathology? What if it's a perfectly rational response to a situation that's been set up to punish honesty?

You were hired on a fiction of competence. Maintaining that fiction is a condition of continued belonging. Admitting what you don't know risks the very thing that February's psychological contract depends on, your leader's continued investment in protecting you.

Feeling like an imposter isn't a syndrome. It's a signal that the system is working exactly as designed.

What this does to relationships

This is where it gets expensive.

When everyone's performing at a high level, every conversation becomes potentially evaluative. Asking for help isn't collaboration; it's a risk calculation. Will this make me look incapable? Will they remember this at review time? Is this person safe to be honest with?

So people don't ask. They fake it. They spend hours struggling with something a colleague could have explained in ten minutes, because ten minutes of honesty feels more dangerous than three hours of pretending.

Teams end up in an elaborate mutual performance where everyone's projecting capability, and nobody's actually learning. The meetings are polished. The updates are confident. And underneath, people are quietly drowning.

The cruel irony is that genuine competence, the kind that actually makes organisations work, requires exactly the thing the system forbids: honest admission of what you don't yet know.

The structural bind

This isn't about brave individuals choosing authenticity. It's about a system that punishes the very behaviour it claims to value.

Organisations say they want learning cultures, growth mindsets, people who ask questions. But the hiring process selects for performance. The promotion process rewards confidence. The review process evaluates against expectations of competence that were fictional from the start.

You can't build a learning culture on a foundation that penalises not-knowing.

A question worth sitting with

Think about the last time you pretended to know something at work that you didn't.

Not a big deception. Just a small moment where you nodded instead of asking, or stayed quiet instead of saying "I don't understand."

What was at stake? Not really your competence, but your belonging. Your place in the deal.

That's the competence trap. Not that we lack courage. But the system has made honesty structurally expensive—and we've all, quite rationally, done the maths.

Resource Corner:  Curated content to deepen your understanding:

The Thinker Jennifer Garvey Berger — Simple Habits for Complex Times Garvey Berger nails the central paradox of this month's theme: "We find that most of the organizations we spend time in talk about learning but reward perfection and certainty, which pulls in exactly the opposite direction." If you want to understand why your organisation's learning culture feels performative, start here. She doesn't just diagnose the problem — she offers a genuinely different way of thinking about leadership when the answers aren't clear.

The Talk Amy Edmondson — "How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team" (TED) Edmondson is best known for psychological safety, but this shorter talk focuses on something more specific: how people learn together under pressure when the stakes are high. Watch it through the lens of this month's article and notice what has to be true for someone to say "I don't know" out loud — and what most workplaces do to make that nearly impossible.

The Read Chris Argyris — "Teaching Smart People How to Learn" (Harvard Business Review) A classic for good reason. Argyris noticed something counterintuitive: the people most likely to struggle with learning aren't the ones who lack ability — they're the ones whose identity is most invested in being competent. Sound familiar? Written decades ago, but it reads like it was written about your last team meeting.

The Research "The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real" — various sources, 2023-2024 Worth a look if you enjoy having your assumptions challenged. Recent statistical analyses suggest the famous effect (incompetent people overestimate themselves, competent people underestimate) may be largely a mathematical artefact. Which raises an interesting question: if the competence trap is real but Dunning-Kruger isn't, maybe the problem was never about individual self-assessment at all. Maybe it was always structural.