Joel Garfinkle’s post on Smartblog on Leadership has a great title: “The One Trait Successful Leaders Share.” Spoiler alert: it’s confidence. Here’s the opening paragraph.
“So what can you do, then, short of hoping that a gust of self-assurance will just come along and fill your sails? You can practice. Like any other skill, you can exercise your confidence muscles and build skill. You don’t need to worry about big leaps — especially not to start — but practice self-awareness, and work at making small but significant changes to your behavior. Try these techniques to genuinely build your confidence and increase your management potential:”
It’s easy to understand why Joel’s article should be a must-read for any leader or would-be leader with a confidence issue. But I want to come at the issue from the other side.
Leadership development and confidence
If you’re a mentor or a coach or a manager you may find yourself dealing with other people’s confidence issues. Then confidence becomes a leadership development challenge.
Confidence is not always a global trait
The biggest leadership development challenge is when a person is generally confident, but has trouble with a single issue or task. Then you have to zero in on that one thing and help the other person develop task-specific confidence.
Make sure the skills are there
First, make sure they can do the work you want. Sometimes a confidence issue is really a training issue. But if they have the ability but don’t have the confidence to do something, there are two things you must do.
Take lots of small steps
Confidence won’t develop all at once. Help the person move to task-specific confidence in small steps.
Praise progress religiously
Praise keeps progress going. Praise every bit of progress.
Don’t let the people you work with stall out because of a task-specific confidence issue. Be there for them. Help them make progress. Praise the progress.
