I dont want a top job

The links between self-belief, incompetence and success
By Lucy Kellaway

A few weeks ago I stood with several hundred parents in the freezing playground of a north London state school waiting to collect my 11-year-old-son, who had been sitting an entrance exam. How did it go, I asked when I finally found him in the crowd. He shrugged nonchalantly and
said there were two questions he didn't know the answer to - which put his likely score at 98 per cent. Just behind him came a girl with a pale face and trembling lip, who flung herself on to her mother's substantial bosom and burst into tears.

Which child did better in the exam? As the results are not out yet, I can't tell you, though I wouldn't put money on my confident boy having done any better than the distressed girl.

How we rate ourselves is a funny business, and it seems to have precious little connection with our actual performance. However, according to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, there is a more than even chance that my son has done worse than the girl. Two psychologists from the Stern School of Business, New York, have found a strong link between exaggerated self-belief and incompetence. The people most likely to overestimate their ability are those with little ability to start with. On this reading, the scale of my son's self-belief is more
likely to make him a young David Brent than a young Albert Einstein.

I'm not at all sure about this as a general principle. The tendency to overestimate one's talents seems to me a temperamental thing that has no relation to ability and is found in people of all sorts at all levels. The brightest person I know is wedded to the idea that his brain is actually the size of a planet. The only pattern is that boys seem far more prone to exaggerated self-belief than girls.

In offices, people at all levels routinely overrate their own ability. According to an article in the journal, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, most of us believe ourselves to be far better than we are. It quotes a study showing that 32 per cent of engineers in one large company and 42 per cent in another put their performance in the top 5 per cent.

According to the journal there is a high price for all this misplaced self-belief. If we all think we are brilliant and deserve to get promoted, most of us will end up feeling bitter and disillusioned. It argues that inflated self-opinion at the top is particularly dangerous as it leads to terrible decisions that can be very expensive.

To remedy the problem companies put a lot effort into the giving of feedback and 360-degree appraisal - both of which are designed to help us know our limitations. Yet at the same time they bombard us with the platitudes of the self-help movement - designed to make us believe that we are all deeply marvellous, uniquely exceptional human beings.

Both efforts are futile. Puffed-up self-belief is something you either have or don't have. If you have it, it is hard to prick it. If you don't, it's hard to learn it.

Now here is the difference between exams and success in companies. In exams, the belief that one has done brilliantly is neither necessary nor a sufficient condition for actually doing so. In organisations, such a belief is vital for climbing the greasy pole.

A female friend who works in a big company rang me last week with a sad little story that made me think of the scene in the playground again. She had gone into a meeting with her boss and a male colleague. During the meeting her colleague, who had prepared nothing, bluffed with ease. She had done her homework, delivered her bit with care, but came out feeling awful.

With feigned sympathy, her colleague inquired afterwards: "Are you alright? You looked a bit nervous."

He started from the assumption that his performance score was about 100 per cent. She went in assuming hers was about 50 per cent and then worked hard from there to try to improve it. No prizes for guessing which of the two is on the fast track.

In big companies a realistic assessment of oneself - which entails a good deal of self-doubt - is not allowed. You cannot say: I don't know if this will work. Or: I'm not sure if my judgement is right on this one. People who are not sure if they are up to the job are seen as a liability, an embarrassment.

In companies it is often hard to know how good people really are. And in the absence of any objective benchmark, people take you at your own estimation of yourself. If you don't believe you are invincible, then why should anyone follow you?

Those who make it to the top have self-belief in spades. For a while my job on the FT was to interview these people to try to find out what made them tick. I found them a mixed bunch, some articulate, some barely able to string a sentence together, but they shared two things: they all believed in themselves up to the hilt and beyond, and they had no idea how they were coming across.

Is this really such a bad thing? I don't think so. Being sublimely confident is vital to survival in senior management. Almost all top jobs are impossible to do well and almost all end in public failure and humiliation - no matter how bright the person is. Which means that a clever, realistic person who knows precisely how others see them and who is well aware of
their own faults (the sort of person who might make a nice friend) would never want the top job. And if by some fluke, they ever reached the corner office they would dither and wring their hands before being carried out in a straitjacket.