Bulldozer00's Blog

I’m very skeptical of management consultants, but the dudes at VitalSmarts are really good. They are responsible for the wonderful “crucial” pair of books:

• Crucial Conversations
• Crucial Confrontations

I’ve read both of these along with Influencer. They’re all very “down to earth” and highly accessible tomes that detail what works and what doesn’t work in terms of leading organizations of people. Their simple and “executable” advice is backed by academic research and, most importantly, their direct experiences from interacting with lots and lots (thousands) of real people in working organizations around the globe.

The following snippet from their latest e-newsletter caught my eye:

“People are excellent at masking ability problems.”

Man, ain’t that the truth! Along with you, I ‘ve put the “mask ” on many times, both willingly and unwillingly. The question is: “what would cause people to do this?”.

I think the main reason why people try to feign expertise is because they are stuck working in archaic corpo CCHs (Command & Control Hierarchies). All CCH orgs unquestioningly assume that everyone within the pyramid walls is supremely competent, regardless of whether they are or not. In a CCH, anyone who dares to persistently point out “ability” problems is excommunicated, regardless of how much evidence is presented to prove the case so that a beneficial change can be made.  Heaven forbid the case where a lower level masked associate points to the huge masks being worn by one or more of the obviously infallible managers entrenched in an upper echelon. Retribution is swift and unambiguous.