By Julie Smith
I see brilliant individuals who don’t know just how brilliant they are. I see brilliant teams who seem unaware of the extent of their brilliance. This is the confidence gap and it opens up when the felt sense of confidence lags behind the reality of capability. I advocate ‘humble confidence’ – a level of confidence where our sense of what we are capable of aligns with the reality of our skills and abilities. It’s a solid and balanced form of confidence and it unlocks the assurance and ease that underpins sustained performance.
Closing The Confidence Gap in your team
Whilst it’s possible for individuals and teams to deliver outstanding results despite the nagging self-doubt that inhabits the confidence gap, there’s a price to pay: the self-doubt tax. In high performers who lack confidence, the self-doubt tax is levied in the form of overwork and exhaustion. These high performers fill the confidence gap with self-defeating habits such as over-preparation and punishingly high standards. Whilst these work in the short-term, the cumulative effect is draining and burn-out becomes a real risk.
Let me offer four practical things that you can do as a leader to close the confidence gap and unlock humble confidence in your team:
Stretch them just enough
There’s a paradox that in order to build confidence, we must push ourselves to take action without it. It’s the repeated experience of acting, learning and progressing – in spite of our self-doubt – that grows our confidence over time. By pushing ourselves to do something new and scary, we find out a bit more about what we’re capable of. This is the truth that sits behind my suggestion that you stretch your team members just enough. This is about helping your people to be brave. Challenge them with assignments that they see as just beyond their capability and then offer your support as they gather their courage and push themselves to tackle this new and scary thing.
Give confidence enhancing feedback
Tell your team members (clearly and frequently) what you value about their contribution. Take the time to give specific, positive feedback, and vary the mechanic that you use – the occasional voice note, text or email is great because it’s something that they can come back to multiple times. And if something doesn’t go well? Support your team members to pull out the learnings and to avoid the trap of black and white thinking – rarely is anything either a 100% success or a 100% failure.
Embrace ‘grow not know’ as your leadership mantra
As a confidence-building leader, your role is not to be the expert who knows all of the answers. Your role is to be the facilitator who supports your people to grow, enabling them to see how capable they are. In practice, this means favouring asking over telling, coaching your team members to find solutions for themselves. Useful coaching questions include “remind me what you’re trying to achieve here?” “Walk me through the thinking that you’ve done so far?” and “If there were no constraints, what would you do?”
Step back
Set clear performance outcomes and then step back to ensure that the team has sufficient space to operate and to figure things out for themselves. Don’t be tempted to step in and resolve issues or disagreements. Whilst it’s likely that there will be occasions when your role as final decision-maker is required, stepping in too quickly or too often builds a reliance on you as the arbitrator and stunts the development of the team. Instead, provide support for the team to resolve difficulties between themselves. As the team builds that muscle, it will deepen their sense that they have what it takes to succeed, to tackle (together) whatever is thrown at them.
With humble confidence, your team knows where they are collectively strong and they understand where there is room to develop. They identify where they must reach out beyond the team to access the capabilities they need. The team is proud of its accomplishments to date, and knows that there is more to come. There’s no complacency. Team members back themselves to continue to learn and grow. Your team is set up to succeed.
Julie Smith is a leadership coach, founder of Talent Sprout and author of award-winning book Coach Yourself Confident (Practical Inspiration Publishing, £14.99).
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