Confident employees have higher self-esteem, are more productive, cope better with change and achieve more aspirational goals. How can you encourage your team to think more confidently?
Confidence is a crucial building block of personal and professional success. It defines how we think, what we do, how we manage our emotions and the impact we make. It is an Inside Out/Outside In construct – if we behave in a more confident way, it makes us feel more confident.
The good news is that confidence canbe learned. Even in the most pessimistic of views, 50% of our behaviour and thought processes comes from our genes and 10% comes from life events. So 40% is under our control.*
Here are three ways for managers to boost their employees’ confidence:
1. Encourage them to Just Do It
Confidence comes from our perception of our ability to achieve a specific outcome. Unlike motivation, which comes from our desire to fulfil that outcome and enjoy the rewards that follow, confidence is generated from past experience. ‘I’ve done it before, so I know I can do it again’. In other words, you only become confident through action, not the other way round. You can’t wait to be confident, you just have to get on with the task and not over-think it.
Encourage your staff to acknowledge their concerns about tacking a task, then to start doing it. Help them to break tasks down into manageable chunks and get started on the first stages. Doing what they are afraid of will eventually extinguish their fear to a greater or lesser extent. Their confidence will build once they accumulate some wins, spurring them on to greater goals next time.
2. Schedule adequate planning time
One of the major ways of influencing outcomes is to plan properly for their successful achievement. We go into anxiety-provoking situations with more confidence if we have prepared properly. If you don’t schedule adequate preparation time, your stress levels escalate and so your chances of success are more of a lottery. Doing everything at the last minute can be a sub-conscious defence mechanism against potential failure – by not allowing yourself to commit 100% you are protecting yourself from the causes of failure: it’s not your ability that was the problem, you just didn’t have enough time.
Ditch the bravado culture of living on the edge and make sure people schedule in time to prepare fully. Block it out in the diary. If things still go wrong, you can address the real reasons. If they go well, then the building blocks of confidence are formed for next time. Lead by example on this: don’t rush around from one meeting to another, with not time to plan.
3. Encourage healthier thinking
Do your colleagues think themselves into a lack of confidence? ‘That will never work in my market, those targets are ridiculous, the Marketing department will never follow that process, the client just doesn’t buy from smaller suppliers, etc.’ This thinking is so defeating that they fail in their own minds before they even try. It’s self-fulfilling, so they prove themselves right. You are then stuck with negative, demotivated employees.
It’s not the challenge that creates a lack of confidence, it is their perception of it. Shakespeare said it 400 years ago: ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’.
Other examples of distorted thinking include:
- Rigid, black and white thinking styles with no compromise in the middle (I’m right/they are wrong, it’s good/it’s a disaster),
- Discounting anything positive and focusing instead on what went wrong,
- Over generalising so taking one small example as as a blueprint for how everything will turn out in the future
- Taking everything personally.
It’s not easy to change how people think, but Managers can help by creating a ‘glass half-full’ culture and getting people to take responsibility for both their actions and their thoughts.
Point out patterns of unhelpful thinking. They might be making irrational assumptions so ask them if they have evidence for what they believe to be true. If they don’t, then encourage them to put the assumption to one side and carry on with the task, assuming success until proved otherwise. ‘It might be that Marketing will never follow the process, but let’s encourage them to test it for a month.’
Try and focus on what’s working well – ask that question first in meetings and reviews. Acknowledge successes quickly. Get people to define specifically what they did to get the right result, so they can repeat the behaviour next time.
Next Steps
I hope that’s helpful and I’d love your feedback and experience of changing how people think. As ever, please feel free to share with anyone you think would benefit and talk to me if you want a lively Career Strategy & Confidence or a Crazy Busy: What to Stop doing to get more Done session at your next Away Day or Conference.