Navigating the Competency Continuum
Navigating the Competency Continuum
5 minutes
When you start a new role, nobody expects you to know everything on Day 1. There’s really no such thing as ‘hitting the ground running.’ This is your moment to shine as a leader, but it’s also important to understand the psychological journey you’re about to embark on.
The Competency Continuum is a framework that describes the progression of skills, knowledge, and abilities as you grow into your new role. It outlines the stages of competency and helps in understanding the journey of development, which can be broken down into the following stages:
This stage represents the very early days of your new role when you literally don’t know what you don’t know. For some people this stage might even feel a bit ‘cruisy.’ You don’t know what you don’t know, and you listen to others politely, sensing there’s more to come. Without the bigger picture from the next few weeks, you’re unsure what else might be revealed.
At this point, it becomes quickly apparent just how much you don’t know. Or to put it another way, just how much you’re expected to know… and just how quickly you’re expected to pick it all up.
You realise the breadth of the learning gap and it’s not uncommon for anyone in a new role to panic at this point. It’s during this phase where you may start to feel uncertain, lose confidence, or even start to doubt your own ability to meet what’s expected of you.
This is when you suddenly become aware of just how much you know.
In terms of the dynamics of your team, you’ve got a good idea of ‘who’s who in the zoo.’ The requirements are all starting to make sense; you’ve found your groove when it comes to your one-to-one catchups and team meetings; you may even feel like you’ve had some early wins in your new position. Above all, if you make a mistake, or if you’re unsure of something, you know who to ask, where to look, or you can quickly discover a way to find the solution yourself. Being consciously competent feels good.
Eventually, everything becomes second nature. You seamlessly balance your own tasks and team leadership, prepare well for meetings and may even lead important projects. This stage, often reached in 6 to 12 months, signifies a significant reduction in feeling overwhelmed. Don’t pressure yourself—this level of competence takes time to achieve.
Reaching a state of subconscious competence is something to aspire to. You instinctively know what to do, like riding a bike, recalling past experiences to handle current challenges. —you don’t even have to think about it anymore!
There is no prescribed timing as to when you should progress from one stage to the next. But it’s important that every now and then you pause and recognise where you are at. You may even want to highlight what stage you feel you are at when you have that ‘aha’ moment and realise that you are in fact progressing along the axis.
And finally, remember that where you fall along the continuum is not ‘absolute’. Rather, it is task-based. You may be ‘unconsciously competent’ on a particular element of your job, but ‘consciously incompetent’ on another. For example, when you move from an individual contributor, where you are ‘unconsciously competent’ on most tasks, to a first-time leadership role where you are ‘consciously incompetent’ on many tasks, you will feel the weight of it.
What stage you are at doesn’t really matter, as long as you feel as though you can genuinely celebrate your progression as you move along the timeline to the right.
