Everyone is Incompetent

Nobody’s perfect. And some employees may not be fully ready for the responsibilities you’d like to allocate to them. When leaders embrace that idea and “take the training wheels off,” it can create conditions of safety and empowerment to stimulate improved engagement, faster learning, and enhanced organizational performance. And as an added benefit, it can provide relief for overburdened leaders. Ralph and Bill discuss the tools you can use to take the training wheels off.

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*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast. Our podcast is focused on individual team and organizational development and performance. We focus on topics such as leadership, human development, and raising the consciousness and awareness of leaders. We aim to provide creative concepts, new ideas, and pragmatic tips and practices for leaders in all walks of life.

I’m Bill Berthel,

Ralph Simone: and I’m Ralph.

Bill Berthel: So Ralph, we’ve got a lot of energy and a great topic today. We’re gonna talk about how everyone is incompetent.

Ralph Simone: Well, we certainly are, and if we’re gonna have some fun with it. And it almost seems counter to what we believe around potential in Everyone’s a genius. They are and they are also incompetent.

And I think if we went into everything with that belief, maybe we would be more inclined to take the training wheels off. And what we mean by that is I don’t think anybody’s ever ready for the next assignment, the next project, right? We’re always in transitioning and there is a learning curve. And so if we could just say, look it, they’re not competent, they’re not gonna do it perfectly, and let’s just embrace that. I think we would be a lot quicker in engaging, utilizing, and developing employees in our organization. So how about that?

Bill Berthel: I love the Training Wheels analogy. Well, first I, I, I can relate to this completely. I don’t think I was ever fully ready for any position, any role, any job, any promotion. But yeah, there was willingness, right? There was excitement and willingness so that, that leaning in. And I love the analogy of training wheels and it makes me think so with, with our son, we never had training wheels to begin with on his bicycle. We utilized the kick bicycle model that’s pretty popular in Europe.

So it’s simply a, a little two wheeled with a frame that he could steer, but there’s no pedals to get in the way. The whole idea was to meet him where he was at his developmental level, to give him the confidence to be on two wheels to kick along. You know what? It never held him back. It never slowed us down as a family on our bike rides.

He was as fast as we were pedaling along cuz he was so excited to be there. And there was the natural transition then to a full two-wheeled bicycle with pedals. Never had a training wheel in his life. The kid.

Ralph Simone: So what I love about that example is that we create conditions of safety for people so they’re willing to take risks while learning.

Absolutely. So we don’t overthink, we don’t have the self to,