Avoiding the Certainty = Competence Bias in the Workplace

When it comes to leadership, usually the stereotypical image that comes to our mind is of a charismatic leader who has all the answers, giving us a strong sense of security. The lay belief then is that a good leader is the one who is displays a strong confidence, and developing leadership confidence is everywhere on the leadership development space, from public speaking to decision making.

The main problem with confounding certainty with competence is that way too often this leads leaders to become overconfident and biased in their decision making process. In a complex and uncertain world as the one we live today, being overconfident is a receipt for disaster. For example, a leader that I have worked with became very concerned of always being right, and he end up spending many time looking for arguments that confirmed his point of view. In that sense, his team end up having a defensive position, not challenging his assumptions and avoiding difficult conversations. After participating in a training session on how bias influence decision making, he realized the issue and had a courageous conversation with his team to change this approach. This led to enriching the decision making processes, including different views and perspectives, what ultimately resulted on better decisions for himself and his team.

In a complex and uncertain world as the one we live today, being overconfident is a receipt for disaster.

However, the certainty=competence belief is very well established and it is very rare to see leaders who assume an “I am not sure” approach. We celebrate the charismatic leaders who form an opinion in a fraction of seconds and then only look for elements that confirm this first point of view. We promote in our organizations people who seem competent to become leaders, and since one of those elements is this capacity to display certainty, we end up by fostering the fake certainty syndrome.

This is not to say that leaders should not have clear views on the direction they want to take for their team or their organization, but it means that they have to create an environment that favors a decision making process that gives room to multiple ideas, divergent thinking, and creative solutions. When the decision making process is rich and diverse, this leads to better decision making process, that is healthier and less biased. This will help the leaders themselves to become more confident on the decisions and beliefs that they collectively build.

When we are supporting leadership development programs we need to be careful about this certainty=competence belief, and help leaders to understand their own psychological bias and learn how to manage them. There are many techniques that can be used during training or coaching sessions to make our leaders to become aware of these biases and help them setting up teams that avoid group thinking and confirmation bias in their decision making process. This will ultimately lead boardrooms and organizations to become better on having difficult conversations and accepting diversity, to enrich decision making process and leading to better and more agile decisions.

I would love to hear your thoughts about the importance of learning how to avoid bais in the workplace. Please, leave your comments below and share this article with your network.

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Adilson Borges is the Chief Learning Officer at Carrefour and the Immediate Past President of the Academy of Marketing Science. Adilson is also the IRC Professor of Marketing at Neoma BS. Before that, he held various positions and worked as a consultant for different organizations in Brazil, Europe and USA. He's is passionate about marketing, learning, decision making and behavioral science. Adilson enjoys sharing his personal thoughts here on LinkedIn. All statements and opinions presented in his articles or posts only reflect his personal opinion.

Follow Adilson on Twitter: @aborges_mkt