When Competence Becomes Part of Your Identity: Shame, Perfectionism and the Fear of Getting It Wrong

My one-year-old Labrador, Juno, spent the best part of 48 hours at the vet's last week. She was being treated for potential poisoning and monitored for kidney damage after eating half a punnet of grapes.

If you don't have a dog, you may not know that grapes can be extremely toxic to them. If you do have a dog, you're probably already wincing. I am, even as I type this.

It happened in the utterly ordinary way that things tend to happen when you have children, animals, work and a household all going at once. We were at the very end of the summer holidays. I was upstairs working, my two youngest were downstairs on the Nintendo, and a box of grapes was left unattended. Nobody deliberately fed them to the dog. But the grapes were there, the Labrador was there, and you can probably work out the rest.

When we got to the vet's, alongside the worry about whether she'd be okay, I noticed something else in myself. Shame. Huge, excruciating, please-can-the-floor-open-up-and-swallow-me levels of shame.

There's something particularly humbling about sitting in a consulting room explaining how your dog came to eat half a box of something poisonous. The vet was entirely professional and didn't say “what on earth were you thinking” — but my brain was perfectly capable of supplying that part of the conversation. How did you let this happen? Why didn't you realise sooner? What kind of responsible dog owner doesn't know exactly where the grapes are at all times?

And I found myself wanting to explain everything. The children, the holidays, where I was, why I hadn't seen it. Essentially: please understand that I am normally a competent person.

Shame is different from guilt

Guilt can be useful. I can think, I really wish that hadn't happened, and we'll be much more careful about where grapes are left in future. That gives me information and something practical to do.

Shame is different, because it takes an event and turns it into evidence. “Something went wrong” becomes “I should have prevented it”, which becomes “a better mother, dog owner or leader would have prevented it”, which becomes “perhaps I'm not as competent as I think I am.”

Why capable people are especially vulnerable to it

I wonder whether those of us who are used to being competent are particularly exposed here.

When you've spent years being the person who handles things, solves problems, takes responsibility and keeps everything moving, competence stops being something you simply have. It becomes part of your identity. You're the capable one, the dependable one, the person who sorts things out. Other people rely on that version of you, and eventually you rely on it too.

So when life presents fairly compelling evidence that you are not, in fact, in control of absolutely everything, it lands much harder than the situation itself warrants.

I see versions of this in coaching all the time. You don't get the promotion you expected. You're made redundant from a business where you spent fifteen years building a reputation. A project goes wrong. Someone gives you feedback that bears very little resemblance to how you see yourself. A relationship with a colleague deteriorates and you can't seem to fix it. A grievance is raised. Or, through the sheer accumulation of responsibility over time, you find yourself struggling with something you think someone at your level really ought to be able to handle.

The circumstances differ, but the internal response sounds remarkably similar. How did I end up here? What are people going to think? Shouldn't I have known better? What does this say about me? And underneath it, something more uncomfortable: maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was.

What perfectionism actually looks like in senior leaders

We usually talk about perfectionism as wanting everything immaculate. Sometimes it is. But in high-performing people it tends to be more nuanced than that: an extremely high standard for what we believe we should be able to handle. Usually a standard we wouldn't dream of holding anyone else to.

We should know what to do. We should be able to cope. We shouldn't need help. We should be able to manage the difficult stakeholder, the impossible workload, the unhappy team member, the politics, the children, the ageing parents and whatever else life has thrown at us this particular Tuesday. And when we can't, we don't question the standard. We question ourselves.

Most of the senior leaders I work with aren't trying to perform well because they want to look impressive. They genuinely care about the people around them. They want to be fair, and trusted, and they take their responsibilities seriously. That's a good thing — right up until something goes wrong and doing a good job has become tangled up with being a good person.

Then the self-criticism goes much deeper than the event. A mistake doesn't feel like a mistake. A grievance isn't just a process to navigate. Being overlooked doesn't just mean somebody else got the job. Redundancy doesn't feel like an organisational decision. It all starts to feel personal — and shame creeps into the gap between what happened and what we've decided it means about us.

Responsible, not omnipotent

The uncomfortable truth is that life is never going to be perfectly controlled.

You can be responsible without being omnipotent. You can take your work seriously without believing you should be able to control every outcome. You can be a brilliant leader and occasionally handle something badly. You can be thoughtful, conscientious and experienced and still misjudge something. You can make a decision with the information available and find out later it wasn't the right one. You can be a loving parent whose children leave grapes where the dog can reach them.

None of that means we shouldn't take responsibility — quite the opposite. But there's a difference between taking responsibility for something and using it as evidence against yourself. The first helps us learn. The second makes us want to hide.

And hiding is rarely useful at work. Shame makes us defensive. It makes us over-explain, avoid difficult conversations, work harder to prove ourselves, become reluctant to ask for help, or read perfectly reasonable feedback as a threat. Sometimes what looks like a confidence problem, perfectionism or even imposter syndrome has shame sitting underneath it.

Three questions for when something has gone wrong

I don't think the answer is becoming someone who never feels shame — I'm certainly not there. But we can get better at noticing how quickly our brains turn an experience into a judgment about ourselves.

• What actually happened? The facts, without the interpretation.
• What is mine to take responsibility for? There may well be something. A conversation I should have had. Something I could have checked. A decision I'd make differently next time.
• What have I decided this says about me? That's usually where the shame is hiding.

“I should have handled that conversation differently” is very different from “I'm obviously not a good leader.” “I wish I'd realised sooner that the dog had eaten the grapes” is very different from “I'm a terrible dog owner.” One creates learning. The other creates a trial in your own head, where you're simultaneously defendant, prosecutor and judge.

If you'd find it useful to see where you're strong and where you might be making things harder than they need to be, the free Leadership Assessment takes about five minutes.

The bit we'd rather not accept

There's something very seductive about believing that if we just try hard enough, prepare enough and care enough, we can avoid the really uncomfortable bits of life. We can't.

Things will go wrong. People will misunderstand us, and we'll misunderstand them. Organisations will make decisions we don't agree with. Children will do the things we specifically asked them not to do. Dogs will regard unattended grapes as an all-you-can-eat buffet. And we will occasionally get things wrong despite being intelligent, experienced people with the best of intentions.

Perhaps the work isn't becoming so competent that nothing ever goes wrong. Perhaps it's building enough trust in ourselves that when it does, we can resist turning one difficult experience into a verdict on who we are.

Juno came home at the weekend, with no reflection whatsoever on what eating grapes says about who she is. She's happy, healthy and, as always, hungry in the way that only Labradors are. I'm hoping I've learned something from those 48 hours that goes beyond never buying grapes again.

Because I suspect many of us could afford to be a little less interested in proving we're good enough, and a little more accepting of the fact that being human was always going to involve getting some things wrong — even when we really care about getting them right.

A version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn as Edition 7 of The Grounded Leader.