Become a Top Performer: Beating the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Do you know what you don’t know? Do you even care? Well, if you don’t care about improving your personal performance then you are doomed to be stuck in mediocrity and that’s not O.K. because it means you’re part of the problem.
David Dunning and Justin Kruger described a cognitive bias in which people who performed at the lowest level of a task overestimated their own ability at the task. In other words: self professed experts at something are often underperforming the skill in which they profess to be an “expert.” Why is this? Simply, they don’t know what they don’t know. They suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as greater then it actually is. Illusory superiority is a product of the person’s inability to recognize their own ineptitude. Without self-awareness, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.[1]
The opposite of this is also true. High performing individuals underestimate their own ability and don’t understand why others struggle with skills that they themselves find easy to perform. In other words: If a task is easy for them to perform it should be just as easy for someone else to successfully perform. Obviously, this is not always the case since people learn differently and reach competency at different times.
Self assessment is the key to beating the Dunning-Kruger effect. Being able to have that HONEST internal self talk with yourself about performance is essential to develop as a professional and perform to your fullest potential. This is obviously very important if you work in a high reliability organization like healthcare, the airline industry or any other job that requires you to perform at your peak. This also easily relatable to everyday life. If you don’t want to the best person, parent, husband, wife you can be then you probably don’t like or know how to self assess.
Self assessment is also know as reflection. If you take 5 minutes after a task to evaluate a few things, you are on the road to performance improvement and development of your self as a top performing individual. Some people keep a reflective journal, others record their self assessments via digital voice recorder or their smart phone. Athletes use video to assess performance. The video doesn’t lie no matter how much they rationalize. The next time you perform a task such as starting an IV, placing and endotracheal tube, splinting a refract or just driving to work try this simple reflective debrief:
- What went well?
- What didn’t go so well?
- What needs improvement
- 4. What can I do in the future to prevent things that happend when I answered #2?
The person who is constantly willing to self assess in all aspects of their life is the person who will continue to develop as a person and achieve peak performance Whether they are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company responsible for a multi-million dollar budget or a teacher responsible for 25 3rd graders, self reflection and self assessment pays dividends. You just have to be honest with yourself even when you don’t like hearing what you’re telling yourself.