Episode 830 - Culture of Competence

0:00You already know how AI is changing how everyday work gets done, how much ground you can cover, and how fast a team can scale. To stay ahead, you need the tools to give you a competitive advantage, built for this new era. Welcome to a Gentech Revenue. Adio is the CRM for this world. It meets you where you work. Compounds every customer signal into context, then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale. With agents and animations for every job in Revenue, Adio orchestrates your work around the clock, built to handle the scale of your workloads, extensible with API, and MCP, and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents. Loved by high growth startups like Granola, Modal, and Edget, Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agent to CRM, the intelligent system that never sleeps. Fix up leads at 2 a.m. Catchers renewals before they slip. Hands you the answer before you ask. Try Adio free at adio.com slash iHeart. That's adio.com slash iHeart.

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2:06Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 7 Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode 830. Today, I want to talk about something every organization claims to have every leader assumes they have, and every customer expects them to have, and that's competence. More specifically, a culture of competence because having a few competent people inside your organization is not the same thing as having a culture where competence is expected, and there is a massive difference. You can have a brilliant employee surrounded by people who are winging it. You can have a great manager working inside a broken system. You can have one person who knows every policy, every procedure, every customer expectation, every piece of equipment, and every operational detail. That person might be incredibly competent. Your organization might still be a mess. A culture of competence exists when being good at your job is normal.

3:15Think about that sentence. Being good at your job should be normal. That sounds ridiculously obvious, and yet leaders everywhere. Our dealing with organizations where basic competence has somehow become exceptional. Someone shows up prepared, and we praise them. Someone reads the policy, and we are impressed. Someone knows how to solve a routine problem without calling for other people, and suddenly we think we found our next executive. Someone completes their work correctly the first time, and everybody notices why? Because somewhere along the way, we lowered the bar. And eventually the minimum standard started looking impressive, and that is dangerous. A culture of competence starts with a very simple expectation. If this is your job, you should know how to do it. If you don't know how to do it, we will teach you. Then we expect you to learn it in that last sentence matters. Training is an opportunity. Learning is a responsibility.

4:23Leaders sometimes take so much responsibility for employee development that they accidentally remove responsibility from the employee. We create the class, we create the manual, we create the checklist, we provide the equipment, we give them experience people to work beside, and then six months later somebody says, nobody ever showed me how to do that. Wait a minute. At some point, competence becomes personal responsibility. You cannot build a culture of competence around people who have no interest in becoming competent. And leaders have to be willing to say that. I come from emergency services, and competence has a very different meaning when someone's life could depend on your performance. You don't want somebody standing over you during the worst moment of your life saying, I think this is how we do it. You want someone who knows aviation works the same way. There are procedures, checklists, limitations, standards. Nobody wants to hear their pilots say I'm pretty sure we're good. Pretty sure isn't the standard.

5:32Now take that same mindset into your organization. Your business may not involve an ambulance or an airplane, yet your customers are still depending on your people to know what they're doing. Your employees are depending on their leaders to know what they're doing and your leaders are depending on each other. Competence creates confidence. When I know the person beside me understands their role, I can focus on mine. When I don't trust their ability, I start watching their work while trying to do my own. And now we have duplication. We have hesitation. We have unnecessary phone calls. We have people checking behind other people. And eventually your best employees become exhausted because they're doing their jobs while quietly protecting the organization from everyone who can't do theirs. That is how incompetence spreads its cost across an entire team.

6:32And here's where leadership enters the picture. Leaders establish the acceptable level of competence, not with a poster, not with some corporate buzzwords hanging in the break room. They establish it through what they expect every day. Imagine two employees make the same mistake. Employee number one says, I screwed that up. Show me what I missed because I don't want to make that mistake again. Employee number two says, well, nobody told me those are two completely different situations. One person is moving towards competence. The other person is moving away from responsibility. Your response as a leader cannot be identical. Culture of competence rewards learning. It values preparation at respects expertise. It makes people want to know their craft. And one of the fastest ways to destroy that culture is allowing incompetence to exist indefinitely without correction. Everybody sees it. Your competent employees definitely see it. They know who can't do the job. They know who constantly needs rescued. They know who avoids difficult assignments.

7:47They know who asks the same question 15 times. They know who disappears when the workload gets heavy. They also know whether leadership does anything about it. This is where culture gets interesting because culture isn't what you say you expect. Culture is what people discover that they can get away with. If someone can remain unprepared for years, you have created a culture where preparation is optional. If someone can repeatedly make the same preventable mistakes you've created a culture where learning is optional. If you're strongest employees constantly compensate for your weakest employees, you haven't solved the problem you've hidden it. Eventually those strong employees start asking a dangerous question, why am I working this hard? That's when your competence problem becomes a retention problem. So how do you build a culture of competence? Start by defining what good actually looks like. Don't tell somebody I need you to do better. Better means nothing. Tell them what successful performance looks like. What should they know? What should they be able to do without assistance?

9:06What decisions should they be capable of making? Where should they go when they don't know something and then give people opportunities to practice? Training can not only happen when something goes wrong. If the first time your people seriously think about a procedure is during an actual problem, your training system failed them. Practice before pressure. Talk through scenarios, review mistakes. Ask questions. Let people teach each other and occasionally ask somebody, walk me through how you would handle this. You will learn very quickly where your organization is strong and where people are guessing. You need to participate in leaders need to participate. Nothing kills a culture of competence faster than an incompetent leader hiding behind their title. Your title does not excuse you from knowing your business. The higher you move in an organization, the more important it becomes to understand how the organization actually works.

10:09You don't need to perform every technical function every day. You do need enough operational awareness to recognize when something doesn't make sense. Your employee should never be able to manipulate your lack of knowledge and your people should never think the boss has absolutely no idea how this place works. That's a credibility problem. There's another part of confidence we don't talk about enough and that's maintenance. Competence expires technology changes policies change customers change equipment changes industries change a person who was excellent five years ago can become dangerously outdated if they stopped learning five years ago experience matters. Current experience matters more that means competence is never something you achieve and put on a shelf it requires maintenance and leaders should create an environment where saying I don't know teach me is respected I would rather have somebody admit they don't know something and learn it then watch them bluff their way through it.

11:21Competence isn't pretending you know everything competence includes knowing the limits of what you know that is maturity that's professionalism and that protects organizations from preventable mistakes. So here's something you can do this week pick one important function inside your organization don't announce an inspection don't send a memo watch see how your people actually perform it and then ask yourself is this being done this way because it's the correct way or is this being done this way because this is how everybody learn to survive the process. You may discover your people need training you may discover the process needs repaired you may discover one employee has quietly developed a better method everyone else should learn that is what competent leaders do they stay curious about performance they don't assume competence because nothing catastrophic has happened yet no disasters lately is a terrible performance metric your goal is bigger you want people to be more careful.

12:28People who know their jobs you want leaders who understand the operation you want training that creates capability you want standards that actually mean something you want employees who take pride in knowing their craft because when competence becomes part of the culture something powerful happens people stop waiting to be rescued they solve problems they make better decisions they trust each other and the organization become stronger because capability isn't concentrated in one or two people anymore it lives throughout the team that is the culture you want a place where excellence isn't surprising preparation isn't unusual and knowing how to do your job isn't considered exceptional it is simply the standard. So I want you to take a look at your organization this week and ask yourself one question have we created a culture where people are expected to become great at what they do if the answer is no don't lower the expectations raise the competence teach it practice it expect it protected because competent teams don't happen by accident leaders build them intentionally.

13:52This has been the seven minute leadership podcast and I thank you for listening for more Paul fall of Alito podcasts visit Paul fall of Alito dot com. You already know how AI is changing how every day work gets done how much ground you can cover and how fast a team can scale stay ahead you need the tools to give you a competitive advantage built for this new era welcome to a gentig revenue adio is the CRM for this world it meets you where you work compounds every customer signal into context. Then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale with agents and animations for every job in revenue adio orchestrates your work around the clock built to handle the scale of your workloads extensible with API and MCP and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents loved by high growth startups like granola modal and etched adio runs the work behind every win that's adio the agent to CRM the intelligent system that never sleeps picks up leads at 2 a.m. Catchers renewals before they slip hands you the answer before you ask try adio free at adio dot com slash i heart that's adio dot com slash i heart.

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