Why you may not want to feel overly confident

The phone call came earlier in the morning than I would have liked. When you work in the bar business, you get used to the world not revolving around you. That leaf-blowing person at 8 a.m. doesn’t care that you got home at 2 a.m., and that espresso martini-ordering guy at 11 p.m. doesn’t care that the bar closed at 10:30 p.m. That’s just the way things work.

This was different, however, because the person calling me also worked in the bar business.

“8:30? Really?” I asked sleepily, holding the phone to my ear.

“I’m sorry, I was jogging,” my friend replied. “I need to talk to Monica.”

I knew who she was talking about. Monica had been let go from where I worked for her inability to get her job done in a timely fashion. Of all the employees we had, she always had the most overtime and the most complaints about slow service.

“I warned you when you hired her,” I said, knowing that not being a manager at my place of business made me freer to discuss things in a personal conversation than if I had held a supervisorial role.

“I know, but I’m good with people. She’ll understand.”

My friend was good with people and Monica wasn’t a bad bartender; she just wasn’t the fastest bartender. In fact, using the word “fast” in any way related to her was a disservice to the word.

“I’m just going to sit her down and tell her that she needs to pick up the pace. I have a whole list of little things that she can do,” my friend said. “Concrete ways that she can improve.”

A perfectly reasonable way to deal with a situation, I thought. So often people have complaints but not solutions or even guesses.  “Every unsuccessful person has a reason or can explain their obstacle in exacting detail, where successful people just tell you about their solutions,” a friend once said.

Two weeks later, I made a call (at a much more reasonable hour) to find out how things went.

“Well?” I asked. “How did your suggestions go?”

“We never got there.”

“Why not?”

“I pointed out the obvious, that she was slower than everyone else. And she just disagreed with everything that I said.”

“What did you do?”

“I couldn’t do anything. She simply wouldn’t acknowledge any facts that I presented.”

For anyone who has ever given an employee a self-evaluation form, this isn’t much of a surprise. It’s ironic that people who do the worst often think they are doing the best. There’s an adage in the restaurant business that the person who claims to be “doing everything” is usually the person who is not doing anything. The employee who is always late gives themselves 100% for punctuality. The one whose cash drawer is always short gives themselves 100% for cash handling. It goes on and on. The irony is that the really skilled employees usually don’t give themselves 100% on anything.

Social scientists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect, which postulates that often lower-ability people believe they are smarter and more capable than they really are. And because of their own low ability, they do not actually possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. This effect is not limited to low-ability people per se, but the studies suggested that it tends to be more prevalent among them. Simply put, the Dunning-Kruger effect perceives that many people are overconfident about their abilities, but, ironically, the least-competent people are usually the most overconfident.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• “The problem with the world is that intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence,” said Charles Bukowski, author of the book, “Barfly.”

• “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge,” wrote Charles Darwin in “The Descent of Man.”

• “Nuh uh!” A defense mechanism usually employed by toddlers, but occasionally trotted out by an adult and often in a professional setting.

• Changing jobs is easier for some people than changing behavior.

• Confidence manifests itself in silence, whereas inability often increases along with volume.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com