Competence is communicated in a myriad of ways. Competence is not just basic know-how. Competence is a character-based and value driven. Competence is the ability to complete tasks, but it is also the value of completeness. That means completeness as a goal and a value is important to competent people and to those who act competently in various activities. It has to be. If an individual does not value completeness, he is or she will not seek completeness various tasks. This applies to all areas of business and life, but no area is more susceptible to this truism than business, management, and the professions. When an individual is engaged in a profession, it is assumed that he is engaged in some aspect of professionalism. It is also generally assumed that professionalism entails a certain level of competence. However, this assumption is no longer valid. It is frightfully common today to find many people engaged in very serious professions: medicine, accounting, law, jurisprudence, teaching, sales, etc., who have very little service knowledge as well as very little topic knowledge. Very often people engaged in the various professions show a startling deficiency in the most basic knowledge in their given professions so that they are unable or unwilling to answer common customer questions that arise as a matter of course in their chosen professions. This is so common in fact one is left to wonder, how do these “professionals” obtain the credentials by which they practice their given professions? What is required to obtain those credentials? This is startling that is until some reflection is cast toward the types of school training people receive and the tenor and attitude in those “training” programs toward the development and preservation of competence.
Unfortunately, it has become quite common in America to neglect important matters and details, or to accept incessant distractions when concentration and focus are required. However, it is precisely the ability, willingness, and discipline to focus that competence–and professionalism–require. This is seen time and again from meetings that are scheduled without time, location, and topic provided; to medical practices where doctors introduce risks, medications, or diagnoses without any mention of follow up or resolution, which of course is the only thing a patient usually wants to know: what treatment plan will facilitate recovery? Not to include this fundamental baseline to the delivery of products, services, or knowledge is not professional because it is not competent. This may sound harsh, but only because schools tend to encourage the softness that comes from not facing matters, challenges, or problems in order to find workable solutions. However, this practice, procedure, and policy of problem solving could be called the essence of leadership, management, and professionalism. This is how competence is developed and passed along through mentoring, training, and teaching, not just directly, but also indirectly through the message that is conveyed in taking matters serious in action.
To be complete, an individual must value completeness. Valuing completeness motivates individuals to pursue completeness in their various tasks and activities. This practice of pursuing completeness of course becomes a habit, but more than that, it begins to build an ability and a culture to do things “correctly.” This is one of the reasons that mentoring, seniority, and experience are so valuable in business and life. However, it is extremely important to highlight that experience in itself is not an a true indication of competence. The same can be said for college degrees. There are many people who catalog lots of years in a chosen field, or who have many initials after their names, but who seem to have trouble with the most basic of tasks such as explaining to a customer or patient something about their area of expertise.
Unfortunately, far too little value is attributed to competence and competent people. This is not a demand deficiency, but a supply deficiency. In other words, patients and customers when given the choice much prefer competent people. Moreover, they know intuitively who is competent and who is not. The evidence of this is shown in how busy competent people tend to be with customers or patients. Competent doctors frequently have long waiting times to be seen. The same is true of competent lawyers, accountants, and teachers. Under normal conditions this alone would be incentive enough to encourage individuals and training program administrators to seek competence as a mission-critical goal in training, management, leadership, and professionalism. In fact, competence is the essence of professionalism.
Competence is such a crucial value that it is literally astonishing how little attention is paid to its development in school, business training, and leadership training. The competence of many professions and professionals is taken for granted. Perhaps that is why many do not seek to develop competence. People assume that they are competence. So, they rarely seek to verify it and educate themselves as customers. However, the ability to get away with something is no justification for doing it.
Competence is no longer a baseline in many social and business settings and cannot be assumed. There are many examples of this from the retail sales representatives who routinely ask customers if they need help finding anything, only to be stumped when the customer asks for an item that the store should carry. This used to be a source of embarrassment and that embarrassment alone would motivate sales staff and more importantly their managers to train staff precisely in product inventory long before making it a policy to ask customers if they need help finding anything. This lack of completeness has become such a standard operating procedure that it seems few managers and leaders even notice just how poorly it reflects on the business and the brand.
The lack of completeness, which is a lack of professionalism, has a much deeper ramification. It encourages loss. Customers that are justifiably off-put by the lack of product or service knowledge–and how professional deficiency inconveniences them–are not likely to want to buy more products or services from that business or individual. Few customers want to do business with companies that make their lives more difficult rather than less difficult or more enjoyable. Yet, that is precisely what customers assume that a business will do for them: make their experiences more convenient. It is the main reason a business becomes a business in the first place: to offer some convenience that a no other company can offer: a better product, a less expensive product, an easier to obtain product or service etc. For some reason this basic business principle is omitted from many business, management, and leadership training programs. However, that does not make the principle any less important. Like the rarity of a precious metal, business logic becomes all the more dear. Moreover, the trend provides a tangible business opportunity for competent managers and leaders to seek to capitalize on this deficiency in competence by training in seeking to establish all staff and at every level of the enterprise to be knowledgeable about their business rather than following the trend to be dismissive toward this business-critical value of competence.