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."  

The Benefits of Giving Advice (not just receiving advice)

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Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Katherine Milkman, Angela Duckworth, and Dena Gromet have conducted some fascinating new research on the benefits of giving others advice.   Of course, we all believe that we can learn and grow by seeking advice and feedback from others, perhaps with more experience and expertise than us.   However, this study examines the benefits from giving advice to others.  How does the giver benefit?  According to the authors, giving others advice, even on an issue about which you are struggling or feeling challenged, can raise your self-confidence and motivation.  In so doing, it can help us achieve our goals more effectively. 

The scholars conducted an experiment with approximately 2,000 high school students.  Eskreis-Winkler explains the research and their findings in this article for Knowledge@Wharton:  

We recruited about 2,000 students and randomized them to one of two conditions. Either they’re in the treatment, which is that they give advice to younger students, or they’re in the control condition, which is practice as usual and they didn’t receive anything in particular. The program was online, so teachers took their students to the computer lab and students signed in. There was this very aesthetically pleasing, graphically designed program that students walked themselves through. They were asked to be coaches. We said, “Help us help other students.” Then the treatment — they went through a series of exercises that tried to elicit their advice.

There were some multiple-choice questions that asked them to advise on optimal study locations. There were some open-ended questions where they were writing notes of advice to younger students. The whole experience was short, but it was meant to make them feel like bona fide advisers. They had information to give, and we were getting it, and we were actually going to give it to younger students.

The hypothesis was that this act of stepping into the adviser role would raise the students’ confidence, increase their motivation. It was a pretty high bar, but we were hoping and expecting that it would, in turn, raise the students’ achievement levels. We collected the students’ grades over the academic quarter to see whether this intervention, which was delivered to students at the beginning of the third quarter, would increase their grades. And it did. We specifically pre-registered and predicted in advance that it would raise their grades in a target class. This is a class in which students self-report that they’re most motivated to improve. Math is a subject that’s notoriously difficult to change student achievement and a subject in which many students lack confidence. We thought this advice-giving intervention would be effective in math, and we did find that the students’ target grades and their math grades improved relative to students in the control condition.

How Leaders Shape Team Creativity

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I recently came across an interesting article by Lei Huang, Dina Krasikova, and Dong Liu. It's titled, "I can do it, so can you: The role of leader creative self-efficacy in facilitating follower creativity."  They find that teams produce more creative work when leaders are highly confident in their own creative capabilities.   Writing in the BPS Research Digest, Alex Fradera points out that this result is not necessarily what one might predict.  the opposite could very well be true - leaders with confidence in their own creative abilities could focus on performing well individually, rather than faciliating the creative work of their team members.  Fradera writes: 

You could imagine the opposite to be the case: that creative leaders pursue their own creative ideas to the cost of supporting their followers, and are reluctant to view what their followers produce as creative, due to their own higher bar for what counts as such. No doubt such cases exist. But this study suggests that in normal functioning leadership contexts, managers recognise that the route for delivering the kind of work they care about is through their followers, so if they want creative results, they have to facilitate it, not produce it personally.

Naturally, a follow-up question might be:  What builds a leader's creative self-efficacy?  How do you build up what IDEO's David and Tom Kelley call "creative confidence"?  I believe that you can only enhance your self-efficacy through action.  You must learn by doing.  If you engage in small projects that require you to exercise your creative muscles, and if you are provided support and training, you can produce good creative work and build your confidence.  Practice, practice, practice.  Stop believing that creativity is simply a genetic trait, and start acting in ways that prove to yourself that you have creative capabilities.