HumanWORKS

Let’s talk about probably the most perverse reward system ever devised outside of experimental psychology labs: the modern workplace’s response to demonstrated competence.

It goes something like this:

You solve a problem effectively.

People notice.

They bring you more similar problems.

You solve those too. Congratulations! You’ve now been rewarded with a permanent problem-solving role that will follow you like a particularly clingy ghost through the remainder of your professional existence. I hope you enjoy whatever it is you were doing!

Welcome to the Curse of Competence – that strange phenomenon whereby doing something well once guarantees you’ll be doing it repeatedly until either your skills deteriorate from soul-crushing boredom or you fake your own death and restart your career under an assumed identity in a different industry.

The Competence Trap: Hotel California for Skills

The competence trap functions with the elegant simplicity of a particularly well-designed venus fly trap. The initial experience is quite pleasant – recognition! appreciation! the warm glow of being needed! – right until the moment you realise you’re now permanently stuck doing that one thing you happened to be good at during that meeting in 2019.

“But surely,” I hear you protest, “organisations would want to develop their talented people? Move them around to leverage their abilities? Create growth paths that capitalise on demonstrated excellence?”

Oh, my sweet summer child. That would require both forward thinking and the willingness to temporarily sacrifice immediate efficiency for long-term gain – two qualities approximately as common in corporate environments as unicorns who are also certified public accountants. (Why think of the future when you have next quarter breathing down your neck!)

The reality operates on a principle I’ll call Organisational Path Dependence: once you become known as “the Excel person” or “the one who can calm down Client X” or “the presentation wizard,” that identity becomes fixed in the corporate hivemind with a permanence that ancient Egyptian stonemasons would envy. (The pyramids may be magnificent but I’m sure Sarah has been doing that trick with the finance software for as long as it took the slaves – I mean aliens – to build them)

This phenomenon creates magnificent absurdities like:

– The senior developer still fixing basic code because they were good at it as a junior five years ago

– The marketing director still writing all the copy because once, in 2015, they composed a particularly effective email

– The finance executive who can’t escape quarterly planning because they created a spectacular spreadsheet during the Obama administration

Each trapped in their own personal Groundhog Day of competence, doomed to repeat their past excellence in perpetuity while watching less capable colleagues fail their way upward with spectacular regularity. (It’s amazing how there’s a waterline where you fall upwards once you get into the management realm, whilst the mere plebs of the world huddle around metaphorical fires worrying about the 675 metrics they have to hit just to keep doing the actual fucking work.)

The Reward for Carrying Water: A Bigger Bucket

The corporate response to demonstrated capability follows a pattern so predictable it should be taught in business schools under the probably-more-honest-than-most-bootcamps “How to Systematically Burn Out Your Best People 101.”

Step 1: Identify person who executes Task X effectively

Step 2: Give person more of Task X

Step 3: When they handle that well, add even more Task X

Step 4: Express confusion when person becomes increasingly desperate to never see Task X again and/or goes off sick citing mental burnout

This system operates with the precision of a Swiss watch designed by particularly sadistic engineers. Its elegance lies in how it masquerades as recognition while functioning as punishment. “You’re so good at this!” translates directly to “You’ll never escape doing this!” – a sort of Sisyphean life where rocks and infinite hills got replaced with the mind numbing shuffling of digital detritus in a tastefully styled office with seemingly unironic motivational quotes. It’s up to you which is worse (I’ve always liked rocks).

In that sense, the demonstrated empathy on show is rather like responding to someone who swims well by throwing them into progressively deeper bodies of water while adding increasingly heavy weights to their ankles.

“But you’re so good at not drowning Hannah! We’re just creating opportunities for you to further develop this clearly demonstrated capability!”

What makes this particularly diabolical is how it’s presented as a compliment. “We keep giving you these projects because you’re so good at them!” they say, nodding earnestly, as though permanently consigning you to the same repetitive task is a recognition of your value rather than an exploitation of your reliability. Meanwhile, those who don’t have any obvious skills spend at least 75% of their time practicing their acceptance speech for the invariable falling upward promotion trajectory that invariably awaits. (That’s because the generally accepted way to deal with awful leaders is by throwing them somewhere else in the hope that maybe that person might have a semblance of a backbone, and the ability to have an uncomfortable conversation rather than palming them off because their current manager has neither.)

The effective people by comparison? Well the reward for carrying water is, inevitably, a bigger bucket, and a PIP if they fail to carry the bucket that may or may not now contain all of Earth’s water system.

The Competence/Growth Inversion Principle

Behold the magnificent irony at the heart of professional development: the relationship between demonstrated competence and actual career growth typically exhibits a strong negative correlation.

I call this the Competence/Growth Inversion Principle, and it works like this:

– The more crucial your current contribution, the less the organisation can “afford” to move you. (In the corporate world, why would we want to move people out of roles that get stuff done as it might mean we’d have to think about one or more of succession planning, increased competition at the next level of hierarcy, or pulling ones thumb out of one’s backside.

– The more reliably you solve certain problems, the more tightly you become identified with those problems (so you’ve worked out how to use functions beyond =SUM? You’re the Excel “guru” now – no, there’s no payrise).

– The more irreplaceable you become in a specific function, the less likely you are to escape it (it’s like a black hole has appeared in space yet rather than being able to observe light falling into the abyss, it’s your career prospects disappearing over the event horizon).

Meanwhile, observe the person who is mediocre at multiple things rather than excellent at one thing. They often advance with puzzling speed, largely because:

1. They’re never quite good enough at any one thing to become indispensable in that role

2. Their consistent mediocrity creates no specific attachment to any particular function so they are always ready to go (mostly to shit, but in a way that allows them to tell management what they want to hear abstract of what reality is)

3. Their broad but shallow exposure creates the illusion of versatility

4. Nobody fights to keep them in their current role because nobody particularly values what they’re currently doing

This creates the magnificent spectacle of organisational advancement functioning almost as natural selection for a particular type of non-excellence – not outright incompetence (though that certainly happens), but rather the careful cultivation of being just good enough at many things to avoid the curse of being excellent at one thing. (In that sense, it’s a skill – but probably not the sort of skill we should be lauding if we’re being honest).

The competence trap thus creates a perverse incentive structure where rational career actors might deliberately avoid demonstrating too much excellence in any single domain lest they become permanently associated with it. Is that what a company should look like?

The Specialist’s Lament

For those caught in the competence trap, work often devolves into a peculiar form of specialised repetition that feels less like career development and more like being a particularly well-educated hamster on a wheel.

I recently spoke with a mid-career professional – let’s call her Grace – who made the career-limiting mistake of creating an exceptional PowerPoint presentation in 2018. This singular event, which lasted approximately 45 minutes, has somehow become her professional identity for the next seven years.

“I have two degrees and fifteen years of experience,” she told me with the thousand-yard stare of someone who has created one too many slide transitions, “but I’m now introduced in meetings as ‘our PowerPoint person’ like I’m some sort of sentient template. I’ve debated changing my surname to PPTX-Smythe.”.

Another victim of the competence trap – we’ll call him Marcus – described being “the data guy” despite having originally been hired as a strategic planner with significant decision-making responsibility.

“I made one particularly good PowerBI dashboard during my first month,” he explained, “and now I haven’t been invited to a strategy meeting in three years. Meanwhile, I’ve watched three consecutive bosses implement catastrophically bad strategic decisions that I could have helped prevent, but apparently, my only role now is to create colourful visualisations of the resulting disasters.”

The specialist’s lament echoes across industries and functions: “I am so much more than this one skill, and yet this one skill has somehow become my entire professional identity.”

The Three Deadly Career Virtues

Particularly prone to the competence trap are those who exhibit what I’ll call the Three Deadly Career Virtues: reliability, efficiency, and conflict avoidance.

These seemingly positive attributes combine to create the perfect victim profile:

1. Reliability ensures you’ll get the job done without requiring management attention, making you the path of least resistance for similar future tasks

2. Efficiency means you can handle increasing volumes of the same work, creating the illusion that this arrangement is sustainable (I mean why wouldn’t it be given companies operate under the idea of continuous, infinite growth as if that’s really a thing)

3. Conflict avoidance makes you less likely to push back when your role becomes increasingly narrowed to your area of demonstrated competence

Together, these virtues create what appears from the outside to be the ideal employee but is actually a person being slowly entombed in their own capabilities like a museum exhibit: “Here we have a perfectly preserved specimen of an Excel wizard in their natural habitat. Note how they continue to pivot tables despite their growing despair.”

In short, the exploitable get exploited. It’s a tale as old as time, but without the whimsy of listening to a song about Beauty and the Beast (bite me, I’m a Disney fan).

These qualities typically combine with a work ethic instilled since childhood that makes refusing tasks feel morally wrong, creating the perfect conditions for indefinite exploitation of specific skills at the expense of broader development. (The reward for childhood trauma that likely made you a people pleaser to mitigate anger? Some adult trauma, delivered digitally via the Microsoft office suite.)

The Double-Bind of Demonstrated Expertise

Those caught in the competence trap face a particularly cruel double-bind when they attempt to escape:

Scenario 1: Do you continue demonstrating excellence in your pigeonholed role, further cementing your association with it while watching growth opportunities go to others?

Scenario 2: Deliberately perform worse in hopes of being released from your specialisation, thereby risking your professional reputation and potentially confirming the organisation’s unspoken belief that you’re only good for this one thing anyway. (PIPs are available for those below the “safe” watermark of those who operate the metrics rather than those who have to comply with them).

Neither option offers a particularly appealing path forward. It’s rather like being asked whether you’d prefer to be slowly suffocated by a pillow or a duvet – the instrument differs but the outcome remains distressingly similar.

This double-bind often leads to the most reliable people in organisations quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles at 11pm while sighing heavily into their third glass of wine. (Or, in my case, manipulating my psychology by engaging hyperfocus simply by waiting till the last second before I have so much adrenaline and cortisol in my system, there’s approximately zero chance I’m going to be sleeping).

The only apparent escape routes involve:

1. Leaving the organisation entirely (the “corporate witness protection program” approach)

2. Finding a sponsor powerful enough to override the organisational imperative to keep you exactly where you’re “most valuable”

3. Developing such a spectacular new skill that it overshadows your existing competence trap (approximately as likely as teaching your cat to prepare your taxes, but if you can say AI in every other sentence, you may have a shot)

The “Go-To Person” Paradox

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the competence trap is how it’s disguised as a compliment. Being the “go-to person” for anything sounds like recognition rather than the professional equivalent of being sentenced to repeat the same year of school indefinitely.

“Sarah’s our go-to for client presentations” sounds like praise until you realise Sarah hasn’t done anything except client presentations since the iPhone 7 was cutting-edge technology.

“We always rely on Dave for the monthly reporting” seems like an acknowledgment of Dave’s value until you notice Dave gazing longingly out the window every 30th of the month like a prisoner marking days on a cell wall, grappling with an Excel spreadsheet so large and creaky that it might masquerade as a haunted house on the weekend.

Being the “go-to person” is less an honour and more a subtle form of organisational typecasting – one where you’re permanently cast as “Person Who Does That One Thing” in the ongoing corporate production of “Tasks Nobody Else Wants To Learn and How We Found Suckers To Do Them.”

The Organisational Amnesia Phenomenon

Compounding the competence trap is what I call Organisational Amnesia – the curious inability of workplaces to remember anything about you except the specific skill for which you’ve become known.

You may have:

– Published thought leadership in your industry

– Successfully led cross-functional projects

– Developed innovative approaches to longstanding problems

– Demonstrated exceptional leadership qualities

– Acquired three new languages and the ability to communicate telepathically with squirrels

Please be aware that, much like that stock market advice you got, past performance does not indicate any potential future likelihood of similar success.

Instead in planning meetings, you’ll still be referred to as “Morgan from accounting who does the thing with the spreadsheets.”

This selective institutional memory creates situations where highly capable individuals with diverse skills and interests become one-dimensional caricatures in the organisational narrative – reduced to a single function like characters in a particularly lazy sitcom that runs for seventeen years with no sign of stopping, serving as escapism for the masses who can say “hey my life is bad, but I’m not as bad as Seymour from Uncomfortable Conclusions”.

The Competence Escape Velocity Theory

For those determined to break free of the competence trap, I propose the Competence Escape Velocity Theory, which states that escaping your pigeonhole requires simultaneously:

1. Building a coalition of influential advocates who see your broader potential

2. Secretly training replacements who can take over your current responsibilities (extra points if AI does is – management love that stuff, i.e. less spending on people who might complain)

3. Creating visible wins in areas unrelated to your competence trap

4. Developing a reputation for something – anything – other than your current specialisation (perhaps not soiling oneself at the Christmas party – keep some standards)

5. Being willing to risk the identity security of being “the person who does X well”

This multi-pronged approach represents your best chance of achieving escape velocity from the gravitational pull of your own competence – a manoeuvre approximately as complex as launching a rocket while simultaneously convincing mission control that you’re actually still on the launchpad.

The difficulty explains why so many choose the simpler option: updating their CV and finding an organisation where they haven’t yet revealed their particular talents, creating a brief window of opportunity before the whole cycle begins again.

The Mediocrity Advantage

This analysis reveals a counterintuitive truth: there are significant professional advantages to strategic mediocrity – or at least to the careful management of where and when you demonstrate exceptional capability.

The truly savvy career operator maintains a carefully calibrated performance level:

– Good enough to be considered valuable

– Not so good as to become indispensable in any one function

– Visibly competent at politically advantageous skills

– Carefully average at career-limiting responsibilities

This calculated approach to skill demonstration represents a sophisticated response to organisational incentive structures that routinely punish excellence with more of the same work rather than growth opportunities. The sad reality is that this is ultimately bullshit of the highest order – and something that needs to be addressed at a broader level.

After all, it’s not that organisations consciously design systems to reward mediocrity and punish excellence – it’s simply the emergent property of prioritising short-term efficiency over long-term development, immediate needs over strategic talent deployment, and the path of least resistance over optimal resource allocation. Who’d have thought focusing solely on the next thing – be that a quarter, task, or fixing a catastrophe might have such a significant impact?

Beyond the Competence Ghetto

So is there an alternative to this dysfunctional system? Perhaps. But it requires organisations to fundamentally reconsider their approach to talent development and individuals to strategically manage their skill demonstrations.

For organisations, escaping this trap means:

1. Creating systematic rotation programs that prioritise development of people over short-term efficiency

2. Rewarding knowledge transfer rather than exclusive ownership of capabilities – which creates structural problems for both the business and the poor souls who get trapped

3. Explicitly valuing versatility alongside specialisation

4. Building redundancy for critical skills rather than relying on individual “heroes”

5. Measuring managers on their team members’ growth rather than merely their output

For individuals navigating existing systems, survival strategies include:

1. Deliberately cultivating multiple, visible areas of competence to avoid single-skill typecasting

2. Strategically training others in your “special skills” to reduce your uniqueness

3. Explicitly negotiating skill deployment and development pathways before demonstrating new capabilities

4. Creating alternative identity markers in the organisation beyond your functional skills

5. Recognising when the only escape route might be the exit door – sadly, sometimes it becomes the only option if your organisation isn’t willing or able to change.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

The competence trap reveals an uncomfortable truth: organisations frequently talk about developing talent while implementing systems that systematically prevent it. The gap between rhetoric and reality creates the professional equivalent of quicksand – the harder you work to prove your value, the more firmly you become stuck in a narrowing role.

It may not be a conscious decision that is manifested by an evil corporate mind, but its impact on the wellbeing of their staff, and the associated headaches created by the need for mental gymnastics creates problems that are both human and financial.

Perhaps the final irony is that recognising this dynamic represents its own form of competence – one that, if demonstrated too visibly, might land you permanently in the “organisational development” role where you can spend the remainder of your career explaining this phenomenon to others without actually being able to escape it yourself. (I fear I may have fallen into this hole by writing articles but, hey, at least I may have a future in some form of corporate stand up).

The true meta-skill, then, might be learning exactly when to display competence, when to conceal it, and when to decide that an environment incapable of appropriately developing talent deserves neither your excellence nor your loyalty – being good at things you don’t want to do probably isn’t the route forward if you want to do bigger and better things.

In that sense, the most valuable skill in navigating modern organisations might not be any particular technical capability but rather the wisdom to recognise when your competence is being weaponised against your own development – and the courage to seek environments where excellence is a pathway rather than a prison.

The original copy of this article was published on my personal LinkedIn on April 25th, 2025. You can find the original link here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curse-competence-why-excellence-makes-you-hostage-your-turvey-frsa-kympe/?trackingId=XmAsaUBPQQGJHP0dYoGpKw%3D%3D