Competence and Performance

I have been always surprised how people with mediocre skill sets get on projects. It has not been once or twice when I worked on a project with consultants which could not deliver what was expected on a daily basis. They all passed screening interviews and have nice resumes. And yet, no matter how much the deliverable was discussed, it was not coming together….slowly becoming a snowball.

The surprising answer came to me when I was reading a dictionary of linguistics. Back in the 1950 there was a famous American linguist Noam Chomsky. He introduced a dichotomy of competence and performance as related to linguistics. In simple terms, competence is a person’s potential to execute an action, while performance is his or her actual ability to execute an action.

In a similar fashion, a Consultant’s resume is his or her competence. It shows what a Consultant is capable of doing or hope of being capable of doing. I can put in my resume that I can lay bricks. I saw many times how other people are doing it. I can read a couple of books and talk to other guys about the tricks of the trade. I guess I will be able to pass the interview for a brick laying job.

Performance is a bit different story. Have I ever worked with bricks? No. Anybody who sees me working can immediately spot it. And based on the distractions closeby, such as a nearby internet cafe, I will never be able to perform on that job.

An interview process is a mear attempt to guess about a Consultant’s performance based on the declared competence. And here references, come in handy as it is the only chance to probe into Consultant’s past performance. Did other clients and managers find that the Consultant was able to execute?

A piece of advise - Build your network and keep your proven Consultants close.