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What if your company culture wasnāt just an HR buzzword but the secret weapon to scaling your business?
Welcome to Kan Talk Kulture, the podcast that dives deep into how remarkable company cultures are intentionally built and how they can transform your team, your business, and your bottom line.
Hosted by Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture and a passionate expert in people, culture, and leadership, this show is designed for business owners, CEOs, HR professionals, and anyone who believes that empowered people are the key to long-term success.
Each episode features real conversations with inspiring CEOs, business leaders, and culture champions who share how theyāve shaped their team environments alongside case studies, practical tips, and bold questions that challenge the status quo.
Whether you're looking to boost employee engagement, create a high-performance team, or align your people with your vision, this podcast will help you connect the dots between culture and growth.
At Kan Kulture, we believe in Kindness, Understanding, Learning, Trust, Uniqueness, Respect, and Evolving, and this podcast brings those values to life.
If you're ready to turn your team into your biggest brand ambassadors and create a workplace people love, this is the podcast for you.
Find out more at www.kankulture.com
āHi, I'm Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture, and welcome to you Kan Talk Kulture. In this podcast, I sit down with some of Australia's most progressive founders and CEOs to explore the heart of their company cultures, what drives them, what they value, and what it's really like to work for the companies they lead.
You'll also find occasional episodes packed with practical HR insights to help you build s- safer, stronger, and more trusted workplaces. So whether you're a new team member getting to know your workplace, curious about creating remarkable company cultures, or just wanting to know more about implementing HR best practice, you're in the right place.
Let's dive in
Welcome back to the Kan Talk Kulture podcast. I'm your host, Kylie Neal, founder of Kan Kulture, and someone who has spent a long time sitting inside organisations watching how people actually operate rather than how they say they do. And today, I wanna talk about something that's been sitting with me for a while.
Something I see play out constantly in leadership rooms, in hiring decisions, in who gets promoted and who gets overlooked, and it comes down to this: we have, somewhere along the way, confused confidence with competence, and that confusion is really costing us. And it's not just in dollars, not just in productivity, it's costing us our people.
So let, let me paint you a picture. So you're in a hiring panel or a leadership review. Two people are being considered. One of them speaks first. They're fluent, they take up space in a room, their body language says they've already got the job. They have an answer for everything that is fast, it's certain, it's almost re- rehearsed.
The second person, they ask a question before they answer one. They qualify their statements. They say, "I'd wanna look at the data before committing to that." They're slower, more considered, and maybe even a little more nervous Who do the panels choose most? The first person almost every time. And here's the problem.
We've built cultures and hiring frameworks that selects for performance of certainty rather than capacity for judgment. What we've done is we've optimized for presentation of competence rather than actual presence. Research from the University of California found that people who spoke with confidence were rated as significantly more competent by peers, even when their answers were factually incorrect.
We're actually wired to read certainty as a signal of capability. That's a, a human instinct. It made evolutionary sense. In high-stake situations, a decisive voice feels safe, but the problem is that in the modern workplace, it isn't a savanna. It's complex, it's ambiguous, and it requires nuanced thinking, and nuanced thinking almost never looks like certainty.
So let's talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect. In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger published research that would become one of the most cited studies in the field of social psychology. Their central finding was that people with limited knowledge in a domain tend to overestimate their own competence, while people with genuine expertise often under- estimate it.
So this is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's absolutely rife in leadership. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that leaders who rated themselves highest in capability were rated lowest by their direct reports, and the inverse was also true. The most humble self-assessors were consistently identified as the strongest performance by the people they lead.
So think about what that means for a moment. The leaders most aware of their limitations are the ones creating the best outcomes, and the ones most certain of their brilliance are the ones doing the most damage Uh, that's not a performance issue, that's actually a culture issue. Because those over-competent leaders didn't appear from nowhere.
Organizations created the conditions for them to thrive. So let's look at what competence actually looks like. What does genuine competence look like if it doesn't always look like confidence? It looks like intellectual curiosity, the willingness to hold a position lightly and update when evidence demands.
It looks like tolerating ambiguity without rushing a false certainty. It looks like asking better questions than you answer. It looks like knowing where your edges are. And here's what I find fascinating from a psychological standpoint. Highly competent people often carry what's called calibrated uncertainty.
They know what they know, they know what they don't know, and they don't pretend that the gap doesn't exist. Google had a project, Google's Project Oxygen, which was one of the largest internal studies of leadership effectiveness ever conducted, and they found that technical expertise ranked last in what made a great leader.
The top predictors were things like empathy, psychological safety, communication, and notably, intellectual humility. Intellectual humility. That's the ability to say, "I might be wrong. Help me understand this better." This is not a weakness. This is the architecture of sound decision-making, and in a world that's changing faster than any person can track, it's the most valuable leadership quality in the room So let, let's now explore the psychosomatic cost of performing confidence.
I wanna come at this from a different angle because this podcast is about the human side of how we work, and there is a cost to performing confidence you don't actually feel. Because when people are rewarded for projection rather than substance, when the culture signals that vulnerability or uncertainty are threats to your position, people start managing their image above their actual development.
They stop asking for help. They stop admitting mistakes early when they're still fixable, and they stop learning. And here's what that does to the body. The sustained effort of making a persona at work activates the body's stress response. We're not designed to perform, we're designed to be. And when these two things diverge, when you perform at work significantly different from who you actually are, the nervous system registers that as a threat.
There was some research done from Stanford's Center of Compassion and Altruism, and this research found that surface acting, which is suppressing authentic emotion and displaying required emotion, is actually associated with significantly higher rates of burnout, emotional exhaustion, and physical health complaints like chronic pain, sleep disruption, um, and cardiovascular markers.
And that's the psychosomatic reality. The body keeps the score, and if it keeps it loudly when you're spending eight to 10 hours a day performing at a version of yourself that doesn't quite fit- We have a problem. So when we build cultures that reward confidence over competence, we're not just making poor talent decisions, we're actually engineering chronic stress in our people, and that should alarm every leader in the room.
So, uh, what should we do instead? First, let's redesign how you assess people. If your performance conversations, your hiring criteria, your probation frameworks, if they're rewarding presence and articulation over track record and judgment, you need to audit that. Build in mechanisms for evidence. Ask, "What decisions have you made that didn't work out, and what did you do next?"
That tells you far more than, "Describe your greatest strengths." Second, model what you want. If you're a leader, you have enormous power to shift what's considered acceptable in a room. When you say, "I've got that wrong," or, "I don't know. Let's find out," you are giving your team explicit permission to do the same.
What you're doing is you're widening the scope of what safety looks like. And third, project the quiet people in the room. Not every brilliant thinker is a loud one. Some of the most operationally sound people I've worked in, with my-- in my career were the ones who barely spoke in group settings. And if your culture rewards volume, you're losing signal in the noise.
So confidence has its place, and I'm not here to tell you to second-guess yourself into paralysis. But we have, for far too long, inflated the performance of certainty with genuine capability, and in doing so, we've promoted the wrong people, we've overlooked the right ones, and we've built organizations where authenticity actually feels like a liability So it doesn't have to work that way.
We can build cultures that reward the harder thing, the real thinking, the real uncertainty, the real growth, and that's the work. And it starts with the decisions we make about who we trust to lead. So thank you for being here on the KanTalk Culture Podcast. I hope you found this episode helpful. And if you did, please share it with your leadership team.
Share it with leaders that you know that this could be useful for. And if you ever wanna talk about anything HR related, please reach out. My details can be found on the website at kanculture.com. Thank you very much for listening and we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for joining me on KanTalk Culture.
I'm Kylie Anne Neal. I hope today's episode gave you a clearer view into the values driving your workplace or sparked new ideas about building a remarkable company culture. If you're a founder or CEO interested in sharing your culture story, or if you're looking to build a safer, stronger, and more trusted workplace, let's connect.
Visit kanculture.com. That's K-A-N-K-U-L-T-U-R-E.com to learn more. Please hit that subscribe button to hear more real conversations with founders and CEOs and hands-on episodes full of people first culture advice. I look forward to connecting with you on our next episode.