The Pressure To Appear Confident

Do you feel pressure at times to appear confident in your decisions and plans? Are you actually certain, or are you trying to put on a brave face for your team members and/or external constituents? Are you afraid of appearing as though you are not sure how to proceed, or how the future will unfold for your organization? Fast Company's Kate O'Neill addresses the topic of confidence in a great new article titled Why the best leaders embrace ‘strategic disappointment’ (and how you can, too)  

O'Neill argues that the more success you have, the more likely you will disappointment your followers at some point. After all, expectations grow quickly if you deliver good results.  Moreover, she argues that you are probably not pushing the boundaries of innovation if you never disappoint.  O'Neill argues that we have to work through lofty expectations and potential disappointment, rather than trying to avoid ever disappointing others.  Managing expectations (our own and others' expectations) means understanding feelings of confidence very clearly. She writes: 

Part of the challenge is that we fundamentally misunderstand confidence. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explains, “Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.”  In other words, our feeling of confidence often has more to do with how neatly our story fits together than with its actual likelihood of being correct. This creates a dangerous dynamic in leadership, where seemingly “confident” decisions may simply reflect coherent but flawed narratives, especially when those narratives align with what stakeholders want to hear... True confidence comes not from eliminating uncertainty, but from understanding precisely what we know and what we don’t, and responding appropriately.

In my view, this last sentence makes a crucial point. The best leaders acknowledge the gaps in their own knowledge and expertise.  As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says, they are "learn-it-all" leaders, not "know-it-all" leaders.  You can be confident without fooling yourself into thinking you have made all the correct assumptions and have made clear and accurate predictions of how the future will unfold.  Christa Quarles, CEO of Alludo, put it well when she says that effective and authentic leaders explain, "Here's what I know.  Here's what I don't know.  Now let's assemble the team and the people to go solve those problems in a holistic way."