Now You See Them?

John and Noah

Welcome to Examining Competence! If this is your first visit, I recommend starting the series from the beginning to get more out of it. But that’s your call.

I only have a few more specific attributes to tell you about, so I’m going to start mixing in articles that illustrate how attributes work together. The point of this series is to describe a special, but often-overlooked kind of individual. When I say “often overlooked” I mean that we vastly underestimate how important this type of person is to the success of an organization. But it is also true that we literally overlook these people. Sometimes they might as well be truly invisible.

This isn’t an academic series. It’s based on a lifetime of observation. I like to know what makes things go well. Working in IT, my whole profession is about “keeping the trains on time.” If we do our work correctly, people don’t even know we’re doing it. Lots of IT people never learn to do that well, they learn how to put out fires. So what you get with those folks is fires. Expertly extinguished. What you want is no fires.  

That’s challenging in many ways. First, of course, it’s difficult. Doing anything well is difficult. But when your job is to be unnoticed, that means if you’re good, you’re unnoticed. How can people recognize the value of what they don’t know exists? How can you budget properly to support a function meant to be invisible? But it’s the job. Good IT people are unnoticed because doing the job correctly means you don’t notice them doing it.

But “invisible” to one degree or another is also what most (but not all!)of the Competent people I know are like. They do their work subtly. They make things go well, usually in the background. The credit often goes to someone above them. Sometimes that’s bad, but often these folks don’t want the hassle. They might even find credit to be an embarrassing nuisance.

Today I’m going to tell you about two more martial artist friends. Why not IT people? Well, two of the most (frustratingly) invisible Competent people I know, I met on the mat. (Technically one of them is also an IT person, but that’s not how I know him).

I met both of today’s subjects through my primary art. That style is, when done well, meant to be unnoticed. One of my biggest challenges, as a “punch them in the face” sort of person, has always been subtlety. Wow is it hard to learn. Sort of like eating a vegetable I don’t like. Every day, forever. But stubborn is one of my own most endearing traits, so I found people to watch. I found a very subtle instructor (you’ll hear about him later on another topic), and I found extremely subtle peers. The two most invisible of which are the ones this article is about.

Both professionally as an IT professional, and as a martial artist studying a ridiculously subtle art, if I wanted to learn to do something well, I needed to watch the people who are the hardest to watch. Which I’ve done. For decades. I’ve not mastered invisibility, but I’ve learned quite a bit from people who have. Let me tell you with certainty, competent people can be invisible. Frustratingly, elusively, troublesomely, pop-up-where-least-expectedly invisible. Competent people are masters of subtlety.

John and Noah are two of the most invisible people I’ve ever met. Both apply that subtlety not just as excellent martial artists, which they are, but also in real life. Let’s start with Noah. He takes the “quietly in the background” thing to an extreme as a Nurse Anesthetist. He puts people to sleep professionally. The other is John. An excellent computer programmer. Doing his best work off on his own.

Both of these folks’ hallmark is “quiet.” They’re not ones for a lot of extra chatter. But when they speak, people listen, because they save it up for a time they have something worth saying.

I think even people who know both John and Noah well might be surprised at how much they do to improve people’s lives. They are both exquisitely skilled at applying effort to big effect. If you need help with something and ask your friends, John and Noah will be one of them who shows up. But (important Competence trait), you may not need to ask. If something needs doing, don’t take your eyes off it with Noah or John around, or it’s likely to be done when you aren’t looking.

When my family moved from the house we were in for seventeen years, lots of folks came to help. Several helped a whole lot. Noah came extra times, unasked, to help me with the worst parts of packing and unpacking. Those horrible “oh, the new house has something wrong that you didn’t realize, and you have to figure out,” Noah was there and just figured it.

Noah looks like a medium-sized, innocuous sort of person. He’s absurdly strong for someone his size. In kickboxing class he had to take care not to accidentally knock over the heavy water bags, (that some of us could only knock over with considerable skill and effort.) So moving boxes in and out of the attic in that move, would have been a nightmare for me, but Noah just handled it, and didn’t appear to break a sweat doing it.

John is a fixer. Computer issues obviously, but also small tools, commercial AC units, electrical wiring…John is also one of the two best people I know at starting campfires. I’ve seen him do it seemingly out of the air, in the middle of a torrential rain, when many people around him with “survival skills” failed with their assortment of tools and tricks. John is someone you want to have with you when things aren’t awesome. Fortunately for you, John has a sixth sense for that, and will just show up. “John, why are you on that 20’ ladder?” “Oh, I just fixed the AC.”

I’ve told you before about the Trivia Contest. Noah and John have been on the team for many years.

Even though both are stand-outs at finding answers.

Even though as a Captain of the team I make a point of appreciating our players and noticing who does what.

Even though I’ve spent a lifetime seeking out Competent people and studying them, knowing I need to look at places my mind doesn’t latch on to to find the really good ones.

Even given all of that, Noah and John are so understated that I have to look at our chat logs to see just how much of a stand-out each one is. What I find is that they’ve played at the most difficult times of day, consistently found innumerable answers or, just as important, that they assisted others finding answers.

When we play this Trivia contest, finding the answer in a timely way is not enough. Someone has to call it in. That means talking with strangers, saying absurd things, it means being wrong a lot. It’s not easy. Only a few of us really enjoy it. Most of our teammates would rather not. You would think people who are legendarily quiet wouldn’t go near it. But they do. Is there a thing the team needs done? These are the people who step in to do it. Theyre the “20% doing 80% of the work.” And Wow do they do it well.

And that points to other Competence skills we’ve already discussed. Someone who is just smart can’t achieve what these folks can.

In a conversation, Noah is not the quiet shy one you don’t notice giving an answer, who has to repeat himself a few times, maybe gives up dejected that no one heard him. Noah is authoritative. He makes himself heard when he has something to say. I’ve never observed him at work, but I expect it wouldn’t go well to have a shrinking wallflower in surgery if something is going wrong. In Trivia, when I’m choosing which answers to call in, if Noah has suggested one, I’ve heard him over the dull (or sharp) roar of team activity. And that answer is going right to the top of the list. He’s skilled at expressing his degree of confidence, and does it in a way that gets noticed in a room of twenty people with the contest audio up at full volume.

But Noah achieves that without my thinking about it at all. With Noah (and a few other key players) I expend almost no overhead figuring out whose answer to call in, because they’ve adjusted their own approach to conveying the answer to the environment at that moment. 

If I was listing our top players in a hurry off the top of my head, Noah and John would be nowhere on that list even though I know they’re there and I objectively know what rockstars they are. They’ve made themselves so foundational to the team that they blend in. And invisibility takes effort to look through. But if I look at the records to figure it out objectively, they’re in our top tier. To be among the most skilled in this contest, you must have an array of skills. Noah and John have raised “invisible” to an art form to be this good and go unnoticed.

Noah is baffling in that way. He’s universally liked, respected, always wanted at any social gathering. He’s got a wicked sense of humor. Smarter than most, but with a slow mode of speech and excellent poker face that makes people underestimate him.  He’s bafflingly subtle. John is often purely silent. There, again, always welcomed. Liked. Respected. But just silent. And if you make a point of watching him almost anywhere, he’s helping. Whether he’s guest, staff, or host, he’s helping.

When I say that Competent people are often in the background, Noah and John are my best examples of it. Invisibility is a problem to observe, so it’s possible I know people better at it than these two, but if so, I’m not certain I know that I know them!

Many people are ineffective at communicating. Introverts who are shy or lacking in social skills, for example, may fail to be heard. People who speak too much may get tuned out. Implicit bias affects how much people absorb from an array of people.

A Competent person is effective regardless of their personal traits and drawbacks and demographics. For example, I know women and people of color who’ve found tricks to be heard or get their ideas out in meetings or other ways to be effective in spite of the obstacles and structure stacked against them. I’ve known shy people who practiced public speaking and learned every tool and trick of it because that’s what they needed to do to be effective. Competent people don’t let weaknesses or environment undermine their goals if there’s any way to help it.

Watching Noah closely, I’ve noticed him alter his voice to be a bit more resonant without being “loud.” He uses the effect of slightly slowing speech to get attention. And he gets just enough punch to the beginning of words to catch people’s ears when he speaks. Intentional or not, he’s effective. People hear what he says. In a busy room, he can insert an idea. If asked a bit later who had the idea, others may not even remember it was him (I’ve tested that).

That isn’t unusual of course, in busy conversation among many people, that’s not unusual at all. But some people work hard to be noticed and have ideas “attach” to them. Noah appears to be interested in the effectiveness of the group, in having good ideas considered, and not be particularly attached to the credit.

John often goes about it differently. While others are figuring out how to accomplish something, John just quietly does it himself. John is the quintessential “sole contributor” in an organization. He’s a renaissance person in the most thoroughgoing way. If that means learning a skill on the fly, so be it. That may make it easier to go unnoticed. But when you interact with him, you’re unlikely to manage it without catching his engaging smile, terrible punny humor, and obvious delight in whatever is going on.

If you’ve been reading this series from the beginning, consider some of the other Competence skills, and how this effective-invisibility intersects. Every person with these skills has them in different degree, and employs them differently. Studying them one at a time as we do in most of these articles, it’s a binary “do they have it or not.” This main thread of articles is the most foundational of elementary approaches. I’m trying to set off the skill so you can understand it.

But in this example I want for you to think about how being invisible would be a massive failure trait in most cases. You might wonder why I’m even listing it as a useful trait at all.

Only when you consider invisibility with other skills: noticing important things, caring deeply, being a good team member, having courage of conviction, or having gumption for example, do you see how it can work out at all.

In fact, there are times when invisibility can be a huge help. But I’m persuadable whether this is a skill the fits in the panoply of Competence, or if it’s just an extra attribute of many people who have Competence. I believe it’s useful.

I was listening recently to a podcast about expertise. The host made this point about experts. Many experts are nowhere near the top of an organization, and they can be incredibly hard to find. Experts focus on what matters to them. Well, I think Competent people do too. Being seen can have value, and so when it’s needed, our heroes will turn it on. But most of the time it’s not needed and can interfere with the important business of actually doing things. Like Experts, the Competent want most of all to get things done efficiently and well. Not be stuck in meetings or promoted into a position of uselessness. So I do think invisibility is a true skill. Needed, not just decorative.

Even for those Competent people who are very much noticed, leaders from the front rather than the rear, you’ll still see those times when they dim their light deliberately, nudge others to be seen, skillfully insert ideas without attachment if that’s the way to get the idea to float. This may not be an “all the time, every day” skill to be used, but in my opinion it’s an arrow in the Competence quiver.

I recommend looking down a directory list in some organization you belong to or work for. Are there any people on there who trigger an “ah hah” for you? Ones who do things well, who are needed, but who you just don’t think about unless your work intersects with theirs? Find the invisible people. Watch those folks for a while. You’ll learn a lot.