Creating Confident Leaders - Confidence v Capability

I am all about helping leaders to develop a strong sense of self belief and confidence in order to perform at their best, however, I wanted to say something about a question I often get asked………

Q – Surely its not just about confidence, but about ability – isn’t over confidence without ability a liability in a leader?

My answer to that is “yes absolutely” and my approach to confidence is to look at both.   I work with leaders to honestly assess themselves.  Accurate self assessment is crucial to confidence.  When we understand what we are good at, work with our strengths and focus on success we build confidence that has a solid base.  

A confident leader starts with developing self awareness, being willing to self assess and also seek feedback.   Willingness to listen to feedback and work on yourself is a cornerstone of confident leaders and is what the best leaders do on a regular basis.

Lack of confidence is underpinned by fear.  Some of the most common leadership fears I come across in my work are:-

“I’m not good enough”

“I will get found out”

“I don’t deserve this”

“Its’ all my fault”

“I will get the blame”

“I won’t get the results I need”

“I’m just spinning plates and I can’t move forward”

“I will fail, fail, fail”

We could add many more, however, I am guessing that at least one of the above will resonate with many of you.  When we learn to honestly self assess, we can deal with many of those fears by creating evidence of our strengths and how we use them to create success.  We can also then look at our weaknesses and how we work with those so they do not compromise our leadership.

We will address tackling fears and working with weakness in future blogs, however, the starting point to understanding our capability and from there building our confidence is the ability to look honestly at ourselves😃