*Image from http://natureleadership.org/
You cannot be one without the other. Confidence here does not mean ego, it is belief and care for yourself. Humility comes from that—and the heart. —from Quora
I am in the middle of an interesting conversation with a client about leading with confidence and humility. It has been a fascinating topic to study. I pulled some articles together for the two of us to discuss and I have personally learned a lot along the way. One of my favorite quotes that I discovered was, “When you realize your value to others, confidence is no longer about self-promotion. In fact, confidence is no longer the right word. It’s about purpose.” This was from Kate Orenstein, founder and director of The OpEd Project. I realized that personally, I am not so much confident as purpose driven. This can work for you when you have the right team or against you if you don’t. I still remember an ex-business partner leaning in across the dinner table to say, “Can’t you care about our clients a little less?” Being purpose driven can be hard.
I see leadership as requiring quick thinking, good instincts, courage to make a decision even if it might be wrong, the ability to take risks, the understanding that even if something goes wrong, we’re smart enough to fix it and we will figure it out—all from a place of kindness and humility. Everyone has to find their own balance. I find that the more prepared you are and the more purpose driven, the better you can be. It is a process and there are many hard lessons along the way. Here are some of the excerpts I have come across during this study so far:
From www.scotthyoung.com.
Humility is an asset for self-improvement. By remaining humble, you are receptive to opportunities to improve.
Beyond personal success, humility is also a virtue for inner well-being. Frustrations and losses don’t have the same impact if you don’t get your ego involved. If you combine humility with motivation, you have the ability to drive towards successes without letting the failures knock you out of balance.
Don’t Confuse Confidence with Skill
I think a lot of the misguided advice towards improving confidence actually has to do with improving skill.
Unfortunately, some people believe skill and confidence are the same thing.
The same happens with social skills. Some people claim to want to be more confident with other people or relationships. But do they really? Or do they simply want to have better social skills. Confidence without skill would just mean that the person is oblivious to the negative reactions from other people.
Doesn’t Confidence Create Skill?
There are some areas where confidence is used as a signal. If a speaker is confident, I’ll believe she is more skilled. This is partially because I take her confidence as a signal of a deeper, but harder to detect, skill level.
While I believe confidence can have a signaling effect, I think the reason confidence is so sought after has an easier explanation. Skilled people have many successes; many successes create confidence. So, when looking at successful people, we also see confident people. Confidence didn’t create the success; it is just a natural extension of that success.
Skill creates both success and confidence. Short-circuiting the process by putting confidence before skill can have a temporary effect in signaling, but it usually doesn’t work. Confidence can’t make you a better mathematician, so why do people believe it is the only necessary ingredient for being a better presenter, writer or salesperson?
Does Confidence Make You Happy?
The second reason confidence is sought after, beyond its charisma building properties, is that it feels good to be confident. Standing up on a stage lacking confidence can make you feel sick. With confidence, however, you can love giving a presentation.
I would disagree with this perception, because once again, I think it’s easy to confuse correlation with causation. I believe skill, not blind confidence, creates a sense of well-being performing a task. When I have skill, I’ll get the feedback I desire from my actions. Like the skilled painter, every brush stroke gives the desired visual effect. This positive feedback cycle gives far greater rewards than a false sensation of confidence.
Humility is a valuable perspective. Humility isn’t the same as low self-confidence. Confidence and self-esteem imply a certainty in your actions. If you have high confidence, you predict you will be successful. If you have low confidence, you predict you will fail.
Humility doesn’t need to imply any particular skill level. Being humble is about being open to the possibility of improvement. While confidence is a scale predicting success, humility is an absence allowing for growth.
Humble Confidence
It’s in this sense that humble confidence isn’t an oxymoron. If you are skilled at something, you can be confident in your level of success, but also humble enough to realize there is still a great deal of room to advance.
“Because one believes in oneself, one doesn’t try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, doesn’t need others’ approval. Because one accepts oneself the whole world accepts him or her” – Lao Tzu
From HBR:
What the Experts Say
“Confidence equals security equals positive emotion equals better performance,” says Tony Schwartz, the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live. And yet he concedes that “insecurity plagues consciously or subconsciously every human being I’ve met.” Overcoming this self-doubt starts with honestly assessing your abilities (and your shortcomings) and then getting comfortable enough to capitalize on (and correct) them, adds Deborah H. Gruenfeld, the Moghadam Family Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior and Co-Director of the Executive Program for Women Leaders at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Get out of your own way
Confident people aren’t only willing to practice, they’re also willing to acknowledge that they don’t — and can’t — know everything. “It’s better to know when you need help, than not,” says Gruenfeld. “A certain degree of confidence — specifically, confidence in your ability to learn — is required to be willing to admit that you need guidance or support.”
On the flip side, don’t let modesty hold you back. People often get too wrapped up in what others will think to focus on what they have to offer, says Katie Orenstein, founder and director of The OpEd Project, a non-profit that empowers women to influence public policy by submitting opinion pieces to newspapers. “When you realize your value to others, confidence is no longer about self-promotion,” she explains. “In fact, confidence is no longer the right word. It’s about purpose.” Instead of agonizing about what others might think of you or your work, concentrate on the unique perspective you bring.
From Cultivating A Culture of Confidence:
The culture and support system that surrounds high performers helps them avoid these temptations. They can put troubles in perspective because they are ready for them. They rehearse through diligent practice and preparation; they remain disciplined and professional. Their leaders put facts on the table and review what went right or wrong in the last round, in order to shore up strengths and pinpoint weaknesses and to encourage personal responsibility for actions. They stress collaboration and teamwork—common goals; commitment to a joint vision; respect and support for team members, so when someone drops the ball, someone else is there to pick it up—and responsibility for mentoring, so the best performers lift everyone’s capabilities. They seek creative ideas for improvement and innovation, favoring widespread dialogue and brainstorming.
Resilience is not simply an individual characteristic or a psychological phenomenon. It is helped or hindered by the surrounding system. Teams that are immersed in a culture of accountability, collaboration, and initiative are more likely to believe that they can weather any storm. Self-confidence, combined with confidence in one another and in the organization, motivates winners to make the extra push that can provide the margin of victory.
The lesson for leaders is clear: Build the cornerstones of confidence—accountability, collaboration, and initiative—when times are good and achievement comes easily. Maintain a culture of confidence as insurance against the inevitable downturns. And while no one should deliberately seek failure, remember that performance under pressure—the ability to stay calm, learn, adapt, and keep on going—separates winners from losers.
From an interview with Jack Welch:
Jack Welch: I prefer the term “business leader.” Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. Above all else, though, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They don’t stick to the established channels. They’re informal. They’re straight with people. They make a religion out of being accessible. They never get bored telling their story.
What makes an effective organization?
For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple. For a large organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity. Frightened, nervous managers use thick, convoluted planning books and busy slides filled with everything they’ve known since childhood. Real leaders don’t need clutter. People must have the self-confidence to be clear, precise, to be sure that every person in their organization—highest to lowest—understands what the business is trying to achieve. But it’s not easy. You can’t believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simpleminded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse. Clear, tough-minded people are the most simple.
First, we took out management layers. Layers hide weaknesses. Layers mask mediocrity. I firmly believe that an overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people. Remember the theory that a manager should have no more than 6 or 7 direct reports? I say the right number is closer to 10 or 15. This way you have no choice but to let people flex their muscles, let them grow and mature. With 10 or 15 reports, a leader can focus only on the big important issues, not on minutiae.
“Reams of psychological studies show that being perceived as modest is associated with a wide range of positive outcomes. The message is clear: People do not value confidence unless it is accompanied by competence—and even when it is, they prefer to see as little confidence surplus as possible.” Chamorro-Premuzic.
And from Entrepreneur, 12 things confident people do differently. http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246024:
They get happiness from within. They don’t pass judgement. They don’t say yes unless they really want to. They listen more than they speak. They speak with certainty. They seek out small victories. They exercise. They don’t seek attention. They aren’t afraid to be wrong. They stick their necks out. They celebrate other people. They aren’t afraid to ask for help.
