Leaders often find themselves facing this dilemma in assessing members of their team. And each time they feel they have finally arrived at the correct answer they realize that they’ve made a mistake yet again. And this keeps repeating. They swing in their preference from the trustworthy to the competent and back again… like a yoyo… never really finding the right answer. It can be frustrating!

Personality is a cocktail of several traits. When a leader connects with deeper emotional traits of her team member such as honesty, fairness etc. she considers him trustworthy. And when she connects with relatively outer or operative traits such as confidence, grasping ability etc. she considers him competent

To successfully accomplish a task the ideal lieutenant would obviously be the one who is both trustworthy and competent but leaders find it difficult to discover this combination. In reality the problem is not that this combination does not exist, it is just the leaders inability to connect, nay even identify the traits at different layers of her team member’s personality. As a result there is a tendency to search for these two types in isolation and consider them as mutually exclusive. This could in fact be beginning of a larger problem. The team may get divided into two distinct sub-classes giving rise to unhealthy team dynamics

In my view it is futile to even try and perhaps even wrong to brand someone as either trustworthy or competent. It is best to internalize that in every member of your team there is a combination of traits that are best suited for every task, which make him either competent or trustworthy for that task. Attempt should be to hone the art of managing this task and trait matrix. This is perhaps one way to address the dilemma…Helicon Consulting