Do Your Competencies Reveal the True You?
Have you ever wondered if your competencies reflect the best you and what you want to offer? Or are they skills you developed out of necessity, habit, reputation, education, training, expectations or needs of others? How attached are you to your competencies? If you could start over, would you rather showcase or develop other capabilities, interests or skills?
Think about this … if your competencies do not align with the demands of your job or organization, you may struggle to fit in or feel satisfied even when completing or excelling at tasks or performing in certain roles.
Have you become great at something that doesn’t really interest you? Do you feel stuck because you have earned a reputation for high performance linked to the very skill or talent you wish you could ditch or secretly give to someone else? What if your manager or company relies on you to possess and employ these very competencies — does this make you more stuck?
Seven Signs of Inauthenticity
1. Burnout
If your competencies are not aligned with your true interests, you may experience burnout regarding your job. Another clue is a growing feeling of resentment toward your manager or organization. These are clear warning signs that should not be taken lightly.
2. Redirection
Do you find yourself trying to pull your job into types of work that you enjoy more or in which you tend to excel? While this can be beneficial in some cases, if this tendency comes at the expense of performing your primary responsibilities, you may need a change.
3. Frustration
When you are performing tasks outside of your true competencies, you may begin to feel frustrated with directions or goals that your manager lays out for you. Feeling frustrated by well-meaning colleagues is another potential red flag.
4. Procrastination
Although you may begin a project willingly and with a positive attitude, you can’t fake it forever. If a job is out of alignment, you will soon lose interest, your enthusiasm will fade and you may begin to procrastinate instead of working on the task at hand.
5. Lack of Stamina
When your work does not hold your attention or fill you with a sense of purpose, stamina to keep performing may feel difficult to access. It can be difficult to keep going under these circumstances and you may feel sluggish.
6. Feeling Burdened
Your sense of duty and obligation toward your employer, manager and team may seem like a heavyweight on your back if you are not truly invested in your current responsibilities. While there is honor in being a team player, in the long run you will drag the team down if duty is your only driving force.
7. Plummeting Engagement
When you are unable to perform the competencies that feel most authentic to you, your engagement and satisfaction will drop even if you continue to meet or exceed your performance objectives.
What to do?
If you recognized yourself in the seven signs above, the first step toward authenticity can be the hardest. Be honest with yourself. Become aware of your situation and reflect on how you got to this point. Identify the competencies that don’t align with your interests and strategize about where you want to go and how you want to change.
Pay attention to facets of your role in which you excel but don’t enjoy. While each person must perform this type of work at some point, spending too much time on these tasks or staying too long in a role leveraging competencies that do not align with interests is not a viable long-term strategy.
Once you are aware of the situation, determine if your manager or company is using you or dependent on you for these competencies. Does your manager have an awareness of this misalignment conflict?
Talk to your manager and/or mentor to get feedback on the situation. Explore how you can match your interests and competencies to your work or at least achieve better balance to address the conflict.
After having these talks, perform an independent assessment of your personality, behavior and competencies. Using what you learn, build an action plan and take responsibility for changing your circumstances.
During this process, it’s vital to keep in mind that we all face this conflict at some point. Misaligned competencies can often go overlooked without honest assessment followed by action.
This exploration will enable you to be bold and creative. Remember to challenge yourself and have fun. This is the space that sparks true development and transformation, which will enable empowerment to ignite.