Leslie,
I may be missing your point here, and if so, please correct me. I believe
you are suggesting that different people have different mental models of
life or of specific tasks which inevitably lead to different levels of
"competence" at certain well-defined tasks.
I think this is true. I have, for example, observed people who are so
pessimistic about what they believe will inevitably happen that they lose
all will to try to make change. I have observed other people who appear
to be passive. I do not know the cause. I observe others who are
competent, but are inarticulate. They perform better than they get credit
for because their linguistic ability is limited. This is true of people
who are operating in their first language, but even more true of people
who are operating in their second language. I observe others who believe
that they cannot make change because someone else has the power. Sometimes
this is true, sometimes it is not.
At the risk of appearing hard-hearted, there is a way in which I am
uninterested in the mental model of the person. I am, after all, paying
for results. I expect results, and I actually get results from most of my
staff. So if someone cannot provide results, even though they are in
essentially the same position as others doing the same work, then that
person is not performing.
Part of my task as leader is to discover and correct the impediment to
their ability to perform. It is my responsibility to _make_ them perform.
However, if I cannot do it, then it is my task to find them other work
that they can succeed at. While it is my responsibility to make them
perform, it is also their responsibility to learn how to perform. You may
be right about their mental models. While this may be an important thing
to consider in trying to help them improve, ultimately it is irrelevant to
the issue. They must perform.
--Rol Fessenden
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