Radical Competency
Part One in a Series about the people you ignore at your peril.
Most organizations have two kinds of people:
The ones who quietly keep the whole house standing and the ones who seem committed to burning it down out of boredom, negligence, or sheer talent for creating gravity wells of nonsense.
The first group never gets the spotlight. They do not crave it. They are too busy keeping the place from sliding into the river. I have started to think of them as practicing a kind of radical competency. They are the backbone of every team I have ever been part of. They are the reason anything gets done at all.
Think of them as the pit crew in racing. Nobody watches a Formula 1 race to see the tire change, but without those two-second stops, the driver never crosses the finish line. Or better yet, they are the Ringo Starr of your operation: criminally underestimated until you realize the whole thing falls apart without the backbeat.
Radical competency is not just skill. Plenty of people are technically skilled and still manage to create chaos. Radical competency is a blend of reliability, resourcefulness, steadiness, and something I have come to appreciate more as I get older. Anticipation.
The best people have a talent for seeing what leadership will need before leadership realizes it. They look around corners. They sense friction before it starts. They save entire days with a single sentence that begins with something simple like, I already took care of that.
When you lead a team, these people are oxygen. They are the difference between spending your energy on the work and spending your energy on herding cats through a smoke-filled maze.
Years ago I worked with someone who was the definition of radically competent. She never made a show of it. She just delivered. Every time. She would listen, nod once, then reappear with a solution that made the rest of us rethink what good meant. She was the person you wanted in the room when the rest of the building was shaking. The kind of individual who never needed a rescue and often did the rescuing.
You probably know someone like that. You probably rely on them more than you think.
Then there is the other camp. The troublemakers. And I do not mean iconoclasts or healthy contrarians. I mean the people who are either incompetent or just not worth the emotional labor it takes to keep them pointed in a productive direction. They are the walking time sinks. They turn simple tasks into full productions. They ask the same question three times because they did not bother to listen the first two. They weaponize confusion. They thrive in the fog. They create elaborate smoke screens and then complain about visibility.
These folks are not evil. They are just expensive. They drain the people around them. They inexplicably create work for the sake of it. They make leaders wonder if they accidentally signed up to run a summer camp instead of an organization. They absorb bandwidth that should be spent on strategy, execution…or frankly anything else.
Every hour spent coaxing someone toward the minimum expectation is an hour taken from someone who consistently exceeds it.
If that sounds harsh, it is only because reality is harsh.
Organizations do not crumble dramatically. They erode through the countless tiny delays, conflicts, and misfires that come from tolerating the wrong people while taking the right people for granted.
Radical competency is not glamorous. It does not trend. It does not get featured in business books with glossy covers. But it is what keeps institutions healthy. It is what makes teams trust each other. It is what lets leaders focus on the mission instead of babysitting adults who should never have been hired in the first place.
The older I get, the more I value the radically competent. They free up leadership to do actual leadership. They make space for creativity. They clear obstacles without being asked. They protect the culture by simply embodying it.
If you lead people, take stock of who is quietly holding the place together. Invest in them. Support them. Promote them. Do not treat their steadiness as a natural resource that replenishes itself.
It doesn’t.
Radical competency deserves a better reputation. It deserves recognition. It might even deserve a new place in how we think about talent altogether. Because the truth is simple. Visionaries are great, disruptors have their moments, but the people who carry the place on their shoulders are the ones who keep the lights on.
They are the reason the work works.
Look around your team this week. Who is the person you never worry about? The one who makes problems disappear before they land on your desk? That is your radically competent MVP.
Do not let them feel invisible.
About the Radical Competency Series:
Radical Competency is my ongoing exploration of the habits, mindsets, and instincts that separate people who merely get through their work from those who shape it. These essays look at context, clarity, power, leadership, pattern recognition, and the everyday skills that never appear on a job posting but determine how far someone can go. The series draws on history, psychology, liberal arts thinking, and lived experience from the world of crisis communications. It will eventually form the backbone of a larger project.
Another edition in this series is available here, with more to come. Subscribe now and never miss a post: