If you are a boss, one of the things you are frequently having frustrations are people who don’t know how incompetent they still are on a certain skill, and how much they need to improve.

I originally thought it was just me, or isolated cases, but apparently it is not.  This has repercussions on management, and probably should be better understood especially for educators and leaders.

According to Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University, this is a proven phenomena, and in fact, they were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for their work.  This has since been called the Dunning Kruger Effect which in essence has for its hypothesis:

1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
4. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

So we know that this can be a problem.  What is the solution?  As a manager, how do you coach, or manage a person who does not know he does not know?

Businesspundit: Why The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Ruining Your Business

The essence of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge." Studies have shown that the most incompetent individuals are the ones that are most convinced of their competence. At work this translates into lots of incompetent people who think they are superstars. And what is worse is that if you have a manager that doesn’t closely supervise work, he or she may judge performance based on outward appearances using information like the confidence with which these incompetent blockheads speak.

An important corollary of this effect is that the most competent people often underestimate their competence. This is a result of how you frame knowledge. The more you know, the more you focus on what you don’t know. For instance, people who can name 15 of the 50 state capitals tend to think "I know 15." People who know 45 of the 50 state capitals tend to think "I don’t know 5."