When Competence Becomes a Prison

You're good at something. Properly good.

Not in the CV sense. In the sense that when a particular kind of problem lands, heads turn towards you before anyone has said your name. The integration nobody else can untangle. The client only you can calm down. The numbers that have to be right by Thursday. You're the person for that. You have been for years.

And somewhere along the way — you couldn't say exactly when — you noticed it's the only thing anyone brings you.

The signature dish

Every good restaurant has one. The dish the regulars come back for, the one the reviews mention, the one the kitchen could cook in its sleep. It's how the place is known. It pays the rent.

It's also a trap. Because the regulars don't just like the dish — they expect it. Take it off the menu and they feel something's been taken from them. Put something new on and it goes out a little uncertain, a little under-seasoned, in front of people who have only ever eaten your best work. The safest thing any kitchen can do is keep cooking the dish.

That's roughly where a lot of capable people end up. Not stuck, exactly. Busy, valued, asked for. Cooking the signature dish night after night, for a dining room that would be faintly put out if they tried anything else.

It isn't fear

The usual diagnosis is that they've stopped growing. Lost their appetite. Got comfortable. What they need is a nudge out of the comfort zone — a stretch assignment, a development plan, a pointed word at the annual review.

That isn't what's happening.

What's happening is that they've read the price correctly. Herminia Ibarra calls it the competency trap: we do more of what we're good at, so we get better at it, so we're asked to do more of it — and the things that might stretch us never get the hours, because the hours are already spoken for. Nobody decides this. The organisation just keeps ordering the dish. Billable time rewards it. Staffing plans assume it. The next project goes to whoever did the last one well.

Nearly every working relationship you have is built around that dish. People come to you with a question you can answer. They know you as the one who knows. In April's terms, most of it is transaction rather than investment: a question goes in, an answer comes out. Hardly anyone has ever seen you not know something.

So stepping away from the expertise doesn't only mean being bad at something new. It means walking out from behind the pass into a dining room full of people who have no idea who you are when you're not cooking.

That's the prison. Not the skill. The relationships that were only ever built on the skill.

The price of the special

Which is why the new thing costs so much. Not because it's hard — you've learned hard things before. Because you'd have to be visibly mediocre at it, for a while, in front of people whose respect you earned by never being mediocre.

So you say the client expects you to have the answer. You say it's quicker if you just do it yourself. You nod in the meeting rather than ask "could you say a bit more about that?", because surely you ought to understand already. Each of those is perfectly reasonable. Each of them is the kitchen choosing the signature dish over the special, one more night.

From the other side of the pass

Think of the person on your team who's brilliant at the thing. The one you go to every time, because you know it'll be done properly. You've probably told them how much you value them. You may even have fought for them in a calibration meeting.

You're also, very quietly, a regular. Every time you bring them the same problem because they're so good at it, you're ordering the dish. Every project you staff them on because it's the safe choice is another night on the same menu. You're not holding them back on purpose. You're just eating well.

Last month was about who gets picked. This is what can happen to the people who are — picked again and again for the same thing, until being picked is what keeps them in place.

The bit that's actually ours

There's no fix for the menu. Organisations will keep buying what's reliable; that isn't a character flaw, it's more or less what they're for. If you're waiting for someone above you to take the dish off and give you room to experiment, you'll wait a long time.

But some of it is yours. Ibarra's other point is that you can't think your way into a new way of working — you act your way into it, and the thinking catches up later. Which means letting someone watch you be a beginner. And that only feels survivable with people who know you as something more than what you're good at. You can't build that kind of relationship from behind the pass. You have to come out and sit down with them now and then.

If you're the regular, your part is simpler and harder. Order something else. Bring them the problem they're not yet good at — and make it safe to get it a bit wrong in front of you.

Worth sitting with

So, with nobody watching:

What's the thing people bring you without even thinking — and when did anyone last bring you anything else?

Who in your working life has ever seen you not know something? And how did that feel?

And who have you made indispensable — and would they thank you for it?

Resource Corner  Curated content to deepen your understanding:

• Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader — Herminia Ibarra (book, 2015). The home of the competency trap referenced in this month's article, and of the idea that you act your way into a new role rather than think your way there. Practical without being a manual, and uncomfortably precise about why the people who are best at their current job often find the next one hardest.

• "Teaching Smart People How to Learn" — Chris Argyris (Harvard Business Review, 1991). Argyris noticed that highly capable professionals are often the worst at learning, precisely because they have so rarely failed. When they do, they get defensive rather than curious. Thirty-five years old and it reads like a description of last week's project review.

• "How to get better at the things you care about" — Eduardo Briceño (TED talk, 2016). Eleven minutes on the difference between the performance zone and the learning zone, and why most of us spend almost all our working lives in the first. A useful lens for noticing which zone you're in when you nod along in a meeting.

• The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (novel, 1989). Not a business book, and that's exactly why it belongs here. A butler so complete in his excellence that it has become the whole of who he is — and only very late does he see what it cost him. Quiet, devastating, and far too recognisable.