Punching Above Her Weight

by David Bennett on August 20, 2010


We were discussing what someone had done that indicated she was punching above her weight in her job. She was in online sales and in charge of people who were better at their jobs that she was – they could probably do her job better than she did.

We said one of the hallmarks that showed she punching above her weight was that she did not take time to reflect on what she did not know and to admit what she did not know.

Instead, she just wanted to make it seem like she always knew everything.

This delayed her learning curve.

The problem was that what she did not know spilled over into what she could not know.

Because there were big gaps in what she knew, she did not know how to distinguish between what she did not know and what she has no reason to think she should know.

So she pretended she knew – and then events revealed that she had pretended to know something she could not have known.

In this particular case she said that such and such was what normally happened when in fact it transpired that there was no ‘normally’ because this was the first time such and such had arisen. When that came out she had egg on her face. Did she admit anything? No, she just skipped on by. One day she will skip into a chasm out which she cannot skip.

She could have managed the problem so much more easily by simply saying that this was a new situation and …. etc.

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