Have you ever felt like your leader thinks he (gender-intentional) is much better at his job than he actually is? This condition is often referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

It is not just annoying. It can be disastrous to your business and your own performance as your input, based on actual combat is ignored and replaced with “wisdom” emanating from your leader’s unchecked ego.

Knowing how competent we are and how our skills stack up to other people is more than a self-esteem boost. This knowledge gives us the ability to determine when we can proceed on our own experience and instincts and when we instead need to seek advice.

Not Very Good At It

But, psychological research tells us that not only are we lousy at evaluating our own capabilities, we more frequently over-estimate our skills.

One example can be found in a survey that asked software engineers at two separate companies to rate their own performance, 82% placed themselves in the top 5%. In the field of sales, how many sales reps would place themselves in the top 5% were it not for the lousy leads they get from marketing or the lack of product fit with market demand or the push back on pricing?

When psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger first described the effect in 1999, they posited that people lacking knowledge and skill were stuck with a double curse.

First, they make lots of mistakes and many poor decisions. And second but more importantly, those very same gaps additionally prevent them from recognizing and correcting their mistakes or reversing their bad decisions.

Sound Familiar?

Real Life

The crux of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that poor performers lack the very expertise needed to recognize how badly they’re performing. If, for example, a sales person doesn’t know how to sell effectively, how can s/he know that s/he is a bad sales rep?

The obvious answer isn’t always true. That is why we cannot ever get away from the 80/20 rule. 80% of your sales team is somewhere between mediocre to awful, yet they continue to make enough sales to somehow justify their role, while 20% keep the entire team afloat.

When most people fail at something obvious, like a test where 60% of the answers need to be correct and the guy who only gets 55% can’t avoid admitting failure, very few operational things in life are like that.

For example, does that same guy when he scores 61% believe he didn’t fail? Does the rep who barely makes quota each quarter believe he is succeeding? In my experience, barely making quota places one squarely into the 80% squad.

Knowing What You Don’t Know Is Rare.

Most people with a moderate amount of experience or expertise have less confidence in their abilities because they thankfully know just enough to know that there’s a lot they don’t know.

But your sales leader probably isn’t one of those people. More likely, s/he is one of the people that are caught in the bubble of inaccurate self-perception. When people are unskilled, they can’t see their own faults. But, when they’re exceptionally competent, they don’t perceive how unusual their abilities are, because they assume that everyone else is competent too.

I once had a development partner like that who was always legitimately stunned when folks didn’t get what he was saying because they had not the background of obviousness he assumed they had. They were, after all, senior cybersecurity practitioners.

Everyone Regresses Toward a Mean

In the context of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the argument is that incompetent people simply regress toward the mean when you ask them to evaluate their own performance.

Since perceived performance is influenced not only by actual performance, but also by many other factors (e.g., one’s personality, meta-cognitive ability, measurement error, etc.), it follows that, on average, people with extreme levels of actual performance won’t be quite as extreme in terms of their perception of their performance.

Sales coaches like Grant Cardone tell us that most sales reps have never read a book on selling nor do most have any forward-thinking sales training.

But because those reps are led by the same people, the Dunning-Kruger effect frequently becomes institutionalized, and because they all think they are doing it correctly, they don’t look for feedback nor do they bother to continue seeking additional knowledge about their craft.

Why learn more if you are already doing it right?

After all, it is not the sales team or the leadership that’s screwed up. It’s the product, the pricing, the market, the support, the leads, the marketing, the messaging, the service, the tech stack, the budget, the CEO, the founders …. That, is what prevents us from making those sales.

Learning?

The funny thing about learning however, is that the more we do it the less likely we are to have these invisible holes in our competence.

Maybe instead of continuing to perform near the top of the 80%, and thinking that we’re doing just great, we simply change the way we do our thing a little.

Maybe instead of focusing so hard on the transactional events (the 100-meter dash), we slide on over to the 1500-meter event and start working on creating value, building trust and engendering a relationship. Maybe we’ll find that we are truly great at the longer event and that suddenly we find we are no longer victim to all that other stuff.

Maybe the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn’t apply to us after all.