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Episode 006: The Dunning-Krueger Effect and What It Means to Your Business
“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
- Bertrand Russe
On this largely philosophical episode of The Rebellious Recruiter with Daava Mills, I am talking about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.
In 20 years of working in the trenches of recruiting, I have been exposed to everyone on the leadership teams at the different companies I have worked for, and, in that time, I have made some interesting observations about competence vs. confidence. If you don’t know what I am talking about now, you’ll get it by the end of the episode.
Daava's Rebellious Recruiting Notes:
- While lemon juice may be used to make invisible ink, it will not make your face invisible when trying to rob a bank.
- Fly By Leadership, along with other "Best Practices", are used as excuses to not be an effective leader and blame others or systems.
- At the beginning of a learning process, people climb to the peak of "Mt. Stupid" then crash down into the "Valley of Despair" before their competence and confidence level off and build toward a sustainable level. See the Competence vs. Confidence chart in the episode links below.
- With the average worker staying at a job for two years or less, we feel pressure to hire employees who can hit the ground running to maximize the ROI for that hire. As a result, employee training suffers.
- Too often, we relegate team building to an HR event that happens on a schedule, instead of taking time to sit with our employees.
- When onboarding new employees, leaders can use the 5 approaches of Pedagogy (the study of how children learn): Constructivist, Collaborative, Integrative, Reflective & Inquiry Based.
- To recognize the Dunning-Krueger Effect, ask the question "Do you know how much a wrong decision will cost this company?"
- Leaders need to accept that the Dunning-Krueger Effect is a natural part of learning and must build in time to train employees until their competence matches their confidence.
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
- Charles Darwin
Episode Links:
