Ben Compton, in the LO cited above, sets forth his views regarding the
importance to him of competency and asserts his unwillingness to work with
incompetent people, going so far as to say he will confront his management
with a choice between him and them (the incompetents).
"Competent" and "incompetent" are labels, attributions, judgments we make
about others. The basis of these judgments might range from up close,
sustained observation to repeated instances of hearsay. In any event,
those are labels deriving from judgments we make.
Now I've always thought that such labels were actually pretty useless.
People aren't competent or incompetent in general, they are instead
competent or incompetent AT something.
At first blush, Ben's posting reads as though he's making some pretty
broad-brush general judgments about people. Personally, I take a slightly
more fine-grained approach (e.g., Person A might be competent at X but
incompetent at Y).
So, I'd like to ask Ben to expound a little more on his general notion of
competent and incompetent people. More specifically, might he be willing
to work with Person A on Task X, but not Person B and, conversely, work
with Person B on Task Y, but not Person A?
Regards,
Fred Nickols
The Distance Consulting Company
nickols@worldnet.att.net
http://home.att.net/~nickols/distance.htm
--Fred Nickols <nickols@worldnet.att.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>