Episode #52: Confident Organizations

The confidence of the people sitting in your office is up against the confidence of your competitor’s people, sitting somewhere else in a similar building. Are you arming them to win in the market place by instilling greater amounts of confidence in them? Or are you allowing your rivals to beat you by developing more confident people? Find out why having confident people allows your organisation to win over the competitors.

Are you confident? If the answer is “no”, then how can you become more confident? If the answer is “yes”, does that extend to areas where you lack existing expertise and experience? Generally speaking, we are all confident while operating within our Comfort Zone. How do we either gain confidence in the first place or how do we extend the scope of our confidence?

The work environment has a huge impact on how we grow our confidence. If we work with or for people who are supportive, we can try, fail and grow. If our boss or teammates deride us for making mistakes, we learn to avoid doing anything new. If we offer up an idea or suggestion and are met with rebuke, derision, sarcasm or mock, we learn very quickly to never repeat that humiliation.

On the other hand, if we are supported when we make mistakes and they are treated as a vital part of our professional growth, then we expand our range further and further. We are also more likely to come up with insights, ideas and proffer innovations. Let’s take a quick reality check: if we are not getting sufficient innovation in our organisation, it might not just be the lack of a good idea creation framework. It might be our toxic environment toward the new and different, that is overwhelming the creative process.

The boss stands in front of the whiteboard, black marker pen in hand and commands ideas from the team. Any ideas which are not perfectly formed are critiqued right there and then. The idea exponents are left in no doubt they are idiots for coming up with such a useless suggestion and the next idea is called for. A few rounds of this “fillet the idiot” game and the same three people put up their thoughts while the rest of the team sink a bit more deeply into their chairs, silently disappearing into the background.

Leading the most self-motivated 5% of any group is pretty easy, because they don’t need us in the first instance anyway. The tricky part is leading the people who are not like us.

If our whole organisation can become more confident than our competitors, we will do much better. How much does it cost to achieve that? How about nothing! Our leaders determine the work environment, the ethos, the vibe. If we understand how to grow people in confidence, then the organisation moves forward, because more people are able to come out of their Comfort Zones and grow.

If we had “build confidence in our people” as a performance measure, we would start a virtuous circle, creating organisation wide progress. Take a cold hard look at the environment our organisation’s leaders are creating. Are we leaving money on the table because we are not getting as much from our team as we should? Are we focused enough on expanding confidence and Comfort Zones? If we aren’t, then it is probably time to reexamine the education of the leadership group and turn that around.