More troubling, self-evaluations are likely to be terribly flawed. "People are not adept at spotting the limits of their knowledge and expertise," wrote four researchers from Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in a report with the confidence-building title "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence." "Indeed," they wrote, "in many social and intellectual domains, people are unaware of their incompetence, innocent of their ignorance. Where they lack skill or knowledge, they greatly overestimate their expertise and talent, thinking they are doing just fine when, in fact, they are doing quite poorly."

After administering a sophomore-level psychology exam to 141 of their students, the four professors asked the students to estimate their absolute scores and their performance on the test relative to the rest of the students. The students in the bottom quarter of the class on the test thought they were well above average. Those who did worst on the test overestimated their performance by about 30%.

The dilemma -- the "double curse," the researchers called it -- is that some of the very abilities that make a person good at performing a job are the same abilities needed to realize whether he is failing or succeeding. If an employee isn't talented, knowledgeable, or skilled enough to do a good job, there's a good chance he's not talented, knowledgeable, or skilled enough to know he's blowing it, and he floats around naively thinking everything is fine.

This form of unconscious incompetence is not restricted to taking psych tests in college. Other research has found the same problem with people's assessment of their ability to think logically, write grammatically, or spot a funny joke. Hunters who don't know much about firearms think they know plenty. Medical residents who have poor patient-interviewing skills think they are doing fine, as do medical lab technicians assessing their knowledge of medical terminology and problem-solving skills. Even if the researchers offer a $100 incentive for a subject to give them the cold, hard truth, people give inflated self-assessments, apparently because they sincerely believe they are that good.

The Cornell and Illinois researchers also made an intriguing discovery on the other end of the scale. While those at the top of the class accurately estimated they did well on the test, they did not realize their accomplishment was unique. They suffered an "undue modesty." "Top performers tend to have a relatively good sense of how well they performed in absolute terms, such as their raw scores on a test," they wrote. "Where they err is in their estimates of other people -- consistently over-estimating how well other people are doing on the same test."

These results show how imperative it is that a manager, coach, or mentor be able to hold up the mirror to an employee. The ray of hope in the "double curse" is that once a research subject is educated on the difference between good and poor performance, he becomes more conscious of where he is failing.

"We gave roughly half of the participants a mini-lecture about how to solve this type of logic problem, giving them skills needed to distinguish accurate from inaccurate answers," wrote the social scientists. "When given their original test to look over, the participants who received the lecture, and particularly those who were poor performers, provided much more accurate self-ratings than they had originally."

Copyright Ó 2008 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted with permission.  Visit The Gallup Management Journal at http://gmj.gallup.com/

Article from The Gallup Management Journal