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Confidence is more important than competence. Competence can be bought. Confidence, never.

Competence precedes confidence.

Confidence precedes competence.

When you know absolutely nothing about a skill, you are unconsciously incompetent -- that is, you don't know what you don't know. As you learn more, you become consciously incompetent: you know what you don't know. With training and practice you can become consciously competent, while total mastery makes you unconsciously competent, meaning that you use the skill so effortlessly that you're not even aware you're doing it.

Here's the kicker: in order to teach a skill, you have to go backward, from being unconsciously competent to being consciously competent. Until you can teach it, moreover, you don't really know what you know.

If you look at a lot of the fraud cases, before fraud there was terminal incompetence. When we teach the governance and ethics course [at HBS], the point I make is that you can have great values, but if you don't have the competence [to implement them], forget it. You need both character and competence. If you don't have the competence, you're going to get yourself in real deep trouble.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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While competency frameworks, used considerately, can have an important role to play, they are no more than a map that can be used to explore and navigate the concepts of leadership and management. Like all maps, however, they only represent a fragment of the complexity of the terrain and over-dependency will fail to engage with the real problems of leading in complex and changing environments.

Surveys show that workers aren't resentful of CEOs' exorbitant pay-in fact, Americans in general are surprisingly blasé about inequality-but that's partly because they aspire to that pinnacle. People hunger to be managers because they know that's the only path to the good life in corporate America . . . which is one reason why we have so many inept managers. This is yet another argument in favor of reducing the pay gap between management and non-management. If organizations can offer many of the rewards without necessarily the supervisory tasks-reducing the hunger to make an upward leap-and do a better job working with employees to match responsibilities with ability and ambition, they can go a long way toward eliminating not just incompetence but the cause of incompetence.