NOVEMBER 20 ― Fish rot from the head is commonly used to tell people of leadership values.
Plaguing from the recent failure of the Tanjung Piai election PH candidate, many are sending messages that most failures that can end someone’s career comes with dishonesty, bad behaviour and incompetence.
There are a number of reasons why a staff or worker is view as incompetent, even if the employee is trying hard.
Incompetence can be avoided but it will take a disciplined and strong person to handle it.
A smart person viewed as incompetent by superiors is fast to understand the causes and will openly and readily improve on his/her skills and behaviours before further action is taken against them.
Incompetence generally denotes the inability to do a job to a satisfactory standard, and may means different things to different people.
If an employee completes a task on time, without errors and the way he was asked to do the work, the employee is considered competent.
If an employee managed to do things beyond what was asked, the employee is more than competent.
Some indicators of incompetence include work being submitted late, with errors or requiring considerable help from others and sometime it increase cost and budgets.
Laziness is said to be one of the cause of incompetence. A lazy employee’s work can lead to errors, tardiness and other problems.
Submitting your work just for the sake of submitting and not double checking your work is an example of incompetence.
Typos in written communication, these can lead to making your institution look unprofessional or can cause other departments to make mistakes.
There are so many “instructors” in the workplace who loves to give “instructions” without them knowing and understanding what the instructions want.
Normally, a competent employee will ask co-workers or colleagues if they received the message, understand it and if they can meet the request.
Waiting until deadline to learn that a task cannot be delivered is another form of incompetence you should check in with key stakeholders during the course of a project to evaluate its status.
Poor communication skills are common which shows one is not able to properly and clearly communicate one thoughts or one superiors’ instructions to others, leading to problems at work, you are not competent to work with others, no matter how good your intentions.
Working institutions need to attract and retain customers and employees to stay in business.
Poor people skills are seen as one of the reason for incompetence.
If you are tactless, domineering, proud and arrogant, unclear, upset or don’t inspire confidence in the people with whom you work, you won’t be competent to work with others or management positions.
Penalising a key employee because you only point out his faults and never praise him is an example of administrable and managerial incompetence.
Telling others that they doing something wrong and making others feel stupid is another example of incompetence.
Through no fault of your own, you may be given a task for which you have no training or experience. Lack or overloads of training seems to be an issue too.
Though some organisers do provide trainings, yet there are people who think they know more than what was provided.
* Azizi Ahmad is a senior educator at the Institut Pendidikan Guru Kampus Bahasa Antarabangsa.
** This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
