Who Gets to Hold Professional Authority?

One of the oldest and toughest challenges in professional development is the belief that there exists a direct relationship between competence and authority.
This is rarely the case in mature professions.
Being able to complete a certain task does not mean that one is competent enough to handle other tasks as well.
Similarly, having the competence is not necessarily a sufficient condition for the authority to follow.
Authority has some weight in any profession.
It has its own impacts on decision making, outcome, accountability, risk management, etc.
Professions therefore do not only consider whether someone is capable of performing the job.
Professions also want to know whether the person in question possesses the appropriate level of competence, judgement, responsibility, and professionalism to handle authority.
The point here is that incompetence is not what causes failures in many professions.
The truth is that the expansion of authority outpaces the mechanisms put in place to control it.
What seems like an operational challenge may actually be a result of institutional deficiency.
In other words, capability is not the issue.
The issue is the connection between competence and capability, responsibility and competence, and authority and responsibility.
As security itself evolves into an increasingly complicated domain of activity, one that includes intelligence gathering, behavioral analysis, organizational resilience, and strategic risk management, these distinctions will become even more significant.
Professionalization is more than just training people to be better at their jobs.
It is establishing frameworks for understanding how professional authority should be created, structured, and used.
The question in the future may then no longer be, “Who is the most skilled?” but rather, “How is the profession defining who will wield authority?”
Where do you think that these concepts of skill, competence, and authority get confused most often in security today?

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