Competency lists tend to read like a wall of nouns: communication, leadership, adaptability. Nouns are hard to rate yourself on. Behaviors are easier, because you can picture them happening. This article takes the six competencies rated by the JobCannon Competency Test and puts each one on an ordinary Tuesday, with one thing you could watch someone do and one blind spot that commonly hides inside it. The blind spots are general patterns, not findings about you, and the test is a self-rating, so treat everything below as prompts for reflection.
Communication and problem solving: getting understood and getting unstuck
On a Tuesday: you send a message that the reader can act on without writing back to ask what you meant, and in a meeting you check that what you said landed instead of assuming it did.
Observable behavior: a request that ends with what is needed, from whom, and by when. Common blind spot: treating “I sent it” as “they understood it”. Clear writing does not help if the person who needed it never read it, or read it differently from how you meant it.
On a Tuesday: a report does not add up. Instead of re-running it and hoping, you narrow down where the numbers diverge and check the simplest explanation first.
Observable behavior: writing down what is known, what is assumed and what to test next. Common blind spot: grabbing the first familiar explanation, or fixing the symptom without asking why it keeps coming back.
Leadership and planning: giving work a direction and a pace
On a Tuesday: no one is formally in charge of a loose task, so you say who will do it and by when, or you offer to. Leadership here is a behavior, not a title, and it can show up in someone with no direct reports.
Observable behavior: naming an owner and a date for something unowned, and owning the outcome when it goes badly. Common blind spot: mistaking leading for doing, taking the task yourself because it is faster, so the team never learns it. The opposite blind spot is waiting for permission to lead something you already own.
On a Tuesday: on Monday afternoon you looked at the week, noticed that two deadlines collided on Thursday and moved one earlier. Today runs smoothly because of it.
Observable behavior: breaking a task into steps, putting them in an order and leaving slack before the deadline. Common blind spot: planning for a best-case day, with no room for the interruptions that always arrive. There is also the reverse: polishing the plan as a way to postpone starting.
Adaptability and teamwork: staying useful when plans and people change
On a Tuesday: at ten o’clock a client moves a call, or a tool you rely on changes how it works. You re-order the day without a long sulk.
Observable behavior: asking what has changed and what has not, then saying aloud how the plan changes. Common blind spot: confusing adaptability with saying yes to everything. If you switch every time someone asks, something important quietly falls off the list and nobody notices. The opposite pattern, defending the original plan out of loyalty to it, is the other blind spot.
On a Tuesday: a colleague’s handover note is thin. You ask a question rather than working around the gap, and you tell the person waiting on your part that it will be a day late before they have to ask.
Observable behavior: raising a blocker early and crediting others by name. Common blind spot: being helpful but invisible, quietly absorbing other people’s work so the team never sees the load, or avoiding disagreement so that problems surface late.
Where the six overlap
The six are not six separate boxes. A handover note, about the simplest document in working life, uses communication (is it clear?), planning (is the next step listed?) and teamwork (does it make the other person’s job easier?). A sudden change of priorities is an adaptability moment, but handling it well also needs planning, to re-sequence the work, and communication, to tell the people affected.
Leadership without communication is guesswork for everyone else. Problem solving often needs teamwork, because the cause of a fault tends to sit in someone else’s area. This overlap is one reason to read a profile as a whole shape rather than as six separate verdicts: a habit such as telling people early can touch two or three areas at once, so a low result in one may echo in another.
Finding the blind spot you cannot see yourself
A blind spot is, by definition, something you do not notice, which makes a self-rating an awkward tool for finding one on its own. The Competency Test shows how you describe each area; it cannot show what you leave out. That is a limit of every self-rating, and how accurate is self-assessment at work explains it in more detail. Here is a way to work with it.
- Take the test and note your highest and your lowest competency.
- For each, read the blind spot above and ask whether it sounds like you. Be suspicious of a quick “no”.
- Ask a colleague what they have seen, using a specific question such as “When have you seen me move a task along, and when have you seen me let it sit?”
- Add a skills picture from the Skills Audit, since a behavior problem and a skill gap need different fixes.
If one area stands out, building one work competency in 30 days turns it into a small experiment, and showing competencies on a resume and in reviews covers how to talk about the strong ones with evidence. For how the result itself should be read, see what a competency test is.