Accepting Incompetence

In The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, professors Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write: “It’s inevitable that we will have hard days at work (or many of them in a row). [...] Sometimes these difficult emotions stem from the nature of the work itself, but just as often they stem from the nature of our relationships at work, whether it’s a challenging coworker, a demanding boss, or customers who never seem to be satisfied.”

This certainly resonates with my experience. If I had to estimate, I would say 98.6% of the challenges my coaching clients face at work are interpersonal. It’s rare that someone doesn’t know the “right” answer to the challenges in front of them. It’s more often My boss and I have a different perspective on the right answer. 

Or:

Getting everyone on the same page about the new right answer will require a lot of change.

In that sense, reducing interpersonal conflicts at work is one of the keys to increasing our joy and satisfaction. And here is one crucial insight from all of my reading: Accepting that everyone else is just as incompetent as we are is one step towards reducing those interpersonal conflicts. 

How do we embrace this idea? Rather than holding the assumption that someone is intentionally “against” us in a work conflict, we can walk a few steps down the ladder of interpretation and find more benign explanations for their differing perspectives. 

The party in question just might have different information then we do. They might use a different lens to process the same information. Or perhaps their boss is giving them different mandates and incentives than ours. Or maybe we’re both wrong since no one knows the future and we’re all just making things up as we go.

Of course, our opponents at work could just be idiots or jerks. The Jerk Ratio varies between industries and between companies, that’s probably only the case a small minority of the time.

(Jerk Ratio is a made-up term, but I think it should be an official statistic.)

Either way, de-personalizing conflicts is helpful because it almost never feels good to be in interpersonal conflict with others. That’s the part of work that brings us stress and keeps us up at night. 

As Waldinger and Schulz write, “One of the major pitfalls is thinking that a situation is all about us; it rarely is.”