Organizations claim to hire and promote based on competence, but most of that judgment happens through communication — interviews, presentations, meetings — where fluency and confidence can stand in for ability that was never actually demonstrated. Risk management professional Adley John Fisher calls this “competence perception risk”: the danger of buying the packaging instead of the product.
Everything we do involves communication. Interviews, meetings, presentations, executive discussions, performance evaluations, even choosing a partner — you reading this, now. Communication is foundational, both to human beings’ lives and to the working world.
Inside organizations, individuals employ and are influenced by a variety of communication styles, and these styles can serve to help or hurt their careers. We’ve all seen individuals who communicate smoothly and with confidence win the favor of higher-ups, and we’ve seen their communication style give them a career boost. Indeed, the influence of communication as a personality trait, along with things like agreeableness, extraversion, dominance and emotional awareness, has been the subject of much study.
Communication is a form of product packaging in corporate contexts, except the product is a person, and individuals use communication to market themselves and make themselves more visible within organizations.
This isn’t an inherent problem, but when communication is employed as a substitute for evaluating actual capacity, organizations risk elevating the wrong people. And companies may end up using a polished or familiar communication style as a proxy for aptitude.
Competence perception risk is the risk that organizational decisions are based on perceived competence generated through communication signals rather than demonstrated competence. In other words, organizations may end up buying the packaging instead of the product.
What are we really promoting?
Organizations claim to hire and promote based on competence, but how is competence perceived and delivered? Most assessments of competence occur through communication like interviews, performance evaluations and meetings.
But how can we be sure we are separating the substance from the style? The truth is we aren’t sure.
Illustrative presentations, confidence, clarity of speech, fluency and increasingly, entire industries built around teaching people how to communicate effectively, all become visible signals for assessment. As a result, organizations often assess delivery quality, rather than the underlying reasoning or expertise. This shortcut provides a stage for fluency to act intelligent and confidence to don expertise, where visibility may be mistaken for capability.
One might argue that assessment through communication alone is efficient, but being efficient may not be enough.
Communication is tied strongly to language, and if you have been working in an organization that engages with multiple countries and languages, you have seen that language proficiency varies significantly across different regions.
And perceptions of competence can suffer. A person’s subject-matter competence may have been developed in another language. This is where perception risk kicks in hard. Vocabulary limitations may be mistaken for knowledge limitations, a small grammatical error may be painted as an intellectual weakness, and some may be judged unfairly due to their accent.
Some communicate well because they are competent while some communicate well because they are confident. These two are far from identical. Confidence and visibility are rewarded, but visibility is not the same as capability.
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Read moreDetailsLearning from the deaf community
Consider the deaf community, which beautifully exposes a weakness in how we perceive competence where communication barriers are often interpreted as competence barriers. Sign language is a language, as the name implies, but how many hearing people reading this now can “speak” that language? A hearing person’s lack of understanding of sign language is not evidence of a deaf person’s subject matter incompetence.
Most organizations are designed around the spoken word as much as the written word. Meetings, presentations, networking activities and informal discussions all assume verbal interaction.
For deaf and hearing-impaired professionals, the stakes are very real. According to the most recent available data, more than half of deaf adults are unemployed. Is that because they are incompetent or because of a very obvious language barrier and this competence perception issue?
Instead of asking, “Why can’t deaf individuals communicate with us?” hearing people should ask, “Why can’t we communicate with deaf individuals?” If sign language is a language, then communication limitations exist on both sides. Communication privileges the majority, and the dominant communication channel is often mistaken as the correct channel, limiting opportunities for actual competence to be recognized and delivered for those uncomfortable in those channels or without access to them altogether.
What becomes visible through the deaf community is a challenge that extends far beyond disability inclusion and can affect multilingual professionals, neurodivergent workers, technical specialists and individuals whose expertise is not easily expressed through dominant communication channels.
The organizational risks
This perception creates organizational risks that are often overlooked. Hiring, promotion, succession, innovation, retention and operational decisions can all be distorted when perceived competence is mistaken for actual competence. Experts may remain undiscovered and critical voices may never be heard.
Hiring risk triggers when the candidate is convincing rather than capable. Promotion risk comes when better PowerPoint transitions are rewarded more than actual performance. Innovation risk follows when technical experts and unconventional thinkers struggle to gain traction because their ideas are evaluated through communication style rather than merit. These small assessment errors build up, influencing who gets hired, promoted, retained and ultimately entrusted with critical organizational decisions.
Most inclusion initiatives focus on demographics rather than communication inclusion. We celebrate diversity while still favoring a single communication model.
This challenge becomes more complex with how fast we are assimilating with AI in the workplace and daily life. AI models can improve grammar, draft reports and emails, create presentations from scratch, which helps to make communication much more fluid than before. While these are all a massive contribution to accessibility, it may result in making communication an even weaker proxy for competence, as everyone sounds just the same. Organizations will have to be more attentive and deliberate in identifying genuine expertise.
Truth be told, communication plays a big part in many jobs. Some roles genuinely require strong communication. Leadership positions and regulatory engagement roles are obvious examples. However, communication requirements should be role-specific. Not all roles require an executive-level communication style. Organizations should evaluate communication competence, technical competence and leadership competence separately when assessing individuals.
Fixing the system
Fixing this starts with how competence is actually tested. Boards and management can address this in several ways:
- Replace interview-heavy hiring and promotion processes with work-sample assessments, case studies and project-based evaluations, so what is scored is the output rather than the pitch.
- Separate technical scoring from presentation scoring on every evaluation form, so a candidate cannot compensate for a weak solution with strong delivery, or lose marks on a strong solution because they are quiet.
- Train managers and interview panels to recognize communication bias before it shapes hiring or promotion decisions.
- Measure outcomes rather than impressions wherever possible: what did the person actually build, fix or decide, not how well they narrated it.
- Build accessible communication channels into standard practice rather than treating them as accommodation requests. Sign language interpretation, captioning and the option to respond in writing should be available by default in interviews and assessments.
- Evaluate ideas separately from delivery style, particularly in cross-border or multilingual teams where a strong solution may arrive through an unfamiliar accent or imperfect grammar.
All these measures still allow communication to remain part of the picture while framing it as a role-specific requirement to be assessed on its own, not as a stand-in for everything else.
The biggest organizational risk may not be hiring the incompetent. It may be overlooking the competent simply because they do not communicate in the way we expect.
Adley John Fisher is a risk management professional with experience in enterprise and operational risk across complex organizations. He has advised audit and risk committees on enterprise risk management frameworks and writes on how organizational structures shape risk visibility and decision‑making. He is the author of the risk culture management framework (RCMF), a practitioner model exploring the implementation gap in organisational risk culture. 
