Couldn't agree more: if people think team outcomes would improve "if only the smart people spoke more confidently", it's a sign of incompetent leadership to me. This problem is as damaging as it is pervasive, and scales from pub trivia to national elections (where voters are the collective team captain).
However, the most fascinating example is found in large hierarchical organisations (i.e. large corporates and government agencies). Poor managers have no relevant domain knowledge. So the only basis they have for decision making is 'who sounds the most confident', because they lack the ability to judge who is actually correct. Worse still, the 'captains' (managers) decide who gets to be the 'sub-captains' (and therefore future captains).
I watched it happen in real-time once. I worked in a relatively young organisation that put 2-3 incompetent guys in upper management. They made bad hires and bad decisions, because they had zero domain expertise (IT). I was startled at how quickly incompetence spread throughout the organisation, like a metastasising cancer. Within 6 months they had virtually ruined the place, and the (few) competent hires they had made were rapidly jumping ship.
That's the big problem with the modern workplace, right? It's impossible to be an expert in everything, and so you need to quickly judge who the experts are and defer to them. And it's made doubly difficult because competence and confidence are often inversely proportional: once you've put in all the detailed study necessary to actually become an expert, you understand just how much you don't understand.
Anyway, I'm actually with the article on this one: it's on Linda to learn to speak up and become more confident. Why? Because of game theory. The situation where everyone projects a realistic assessment of their own confidence is not an evolutionarily-stable strategy. It is trivial to "defect" and project high confidence in an area of low competence, the cost (to the individual) of doing this is low, and the chance of detection is also low in most situations. That means that any large population will tend toward being filled with blowhards; statistically, somebody is gonna do it, and then once they do it everyone else has to become a blowhard to keep up. And so analyzing this rationally, your only choice is to become a blowhard yourself, ideally while also keeping factual discipline so your ideas are themselves usually right.
Interestingly, I've seen some very good managers make their careers off of "confidence arbitrage". Basically, they learn to recognize and surround themselves with people who have low confidence but high competence. They then take the opinions of these individual contributors (which are often right, but often stated equivocally) and then repeat them to upper management with zero doubt, basically providing a confidence boost to other peoples' opinions. This helps viewpoints that are right but imperfectly stated get heard, and it makes the manager seem like a genius. Win-win for everyone.
As you point out, it's interesting how this problem is amplified by the dunning-kruger effect. I've also observed this issue to be worse in environments when success or failure is difficult to measure (or is only measurable far in to the future).
And I very much agree with your last paragraph: good managers and leaders are people who recognise competence and use it to further an organisation's goals. I don't mean that in the "take credit for your subordinate's idea" kind of way, as that's clearly an unsustainable strategy (the uncredited start withholding information and ideas, eventually).
On the game theory/evolutionarily stable strategy side of things though, I think it depends on context and perspective. If the context is one with a ubiquity of good managers, the pay-off for 'unjustified confidence' is probably pretty low or even negative. Also, as this is a multi-round game, the pay-off for 'unjustified confidence' gets lower and lower with each successive round (as good managers will factor past experience into their estimation of subordinate competence).
On the flip side, in a context with mostly incompetent managers, I'd agree the dominant strategy for individuals, competent and incompetent alike, is to 'act confident'. Although, as mentioned before, the competent are hobbled by the dunning-kruger effect here. Even if they weren't (i.e. competent and incompetent subordinates display equal levels of confidence), the outcome for the organisation would be indistinguishable from random decision making. In other words, you could replace managers with a coin (or a n-sided die, for problems with n possible solutions). And you don't have to pay coins or dice six figure salaries, making it the better option...
From the organisation's perspective, it seems crazy to rely on getting the competent people to 'be more confident'. In fact, it seems impossible. If your organisation needs to rely on 'confidence' to determine who is competent, then by definition it cannot directly discern which employees are competent. So how would it know which employees to encourage to be 'more confident'? This seems to reduce back to the '(at best) random decision making' outcome in the previous paragraph.
Funnily enough, if you factor in the dunning-kruger effect, in the 'bad managers' context the best way to make decisions (on average) would be to follow the advice of the 'least confident sounding' employees.
The only viable (albeit less hilarious) solution from the organisation's perspective (and therefore dominant strategy) is to try very hard to only hire competent leaders and managers.
> If your organisation needs to rely on 'confidence' to determine who is competent, then by definition it cannot directly discern which employees are competent.
That's correct specifically because in the absence of the ability to judge competence (the original research by Dunning and Kruger showed that those low in competence overestimated the competence of others as well as their own), confidence becomes the stand-in. So over time if you don't start with the most competent people in positions of leadership, and maybe even if you do, you end up with the most confident (and probably least competent) people in them over several refresh cycles.
You have to be careful with that word, "team." It does not always mean what you think it does.
On a real team, as opposed to what I describe as "a group of people who just happen to be working at the same goal," the leader and the others should understand each other well enough to know when they speak confidently they'll be taken seriously, and to back off when they are unsure.
In the typical corporate "team" (i.e., people who were told to work together), you get exactly the behavior you describe because people don't know each other well, don't think as a group -- tends to be everyone looking out for themselves, and have little invested in the success of the team because they know that their contributions aren't likely to be valued very highly.
However, the most fascinating example is found in large hierarchical organisations (i.e. large corporates and government agencies). Poor managers have no relevant domain knowledge. So the only basis they have for decision making is 'who sounds the most confident', because they lack the ability to judge who is actually correct. Worse still, the 'captains' (managers) decide who gets to be the 'sub-captains' (and therefore future captains).
I watched it happen in real-time once. I worked in a relatively young organisation that put 2-3 incompetent guys in upper management. They made bad hires and bad decisions, because they had zero domain expertise (IT). I was startled at how quickly incompetence spread throughout the organisation, like a metastasising cancer. Within 6 months they had virtually ruined the place, and the (few) competent hires they had made were rapidly jumping ship.
It was like they'd read the Netflix Culture slides (http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664) and decided to do the exact opposite...