On Confidence

In my last months, I'll take the liberty of recycling a few blogs from before my readership grew. It is easier than finding new topics, and some of them might be appreciated by a wider audience. This is the first. I first wrote about confidence a couple of years back.

What drives top performance? Capability. Leadership. Clear roles and accountability. Teamwork. External environment. All are important, of course. But I would argue that if you only had one lever, a good one to pull would have the label Confidence. Yet in business this is scarcely talked about.

Those who watch or play sport know all about the effect of confidence. I love watching and supporting sports. It is one of life's little examples of games that are not zero sum. When my team wins a game, I am so happy, it carries my mood for days. Yet when they lose, it is generally easy to remember that "it is only a game". So, even when cursed by supporting perennial losers like West Ham United, there is a net gain.

When you observe sports people and their coaches, the effect of confidence is crystal clear. It is huge. A mediocre but confident team will beat a talented team lacking confidence every time, and the best coaches know it and work on it relentlessly. There are countless examples. At soccer, England under Capello compared with under MacLaren. In Rugby Union, the English again under Woodward and then Robinson/Johnson, or the Irish now with their collective belief. Some coaches just drain confidence with their demeanour - poor old Tony Adams may have been great technically, but he destroyed confidence. Look at your own favourite sport, team or individual, and correlate performance with confidence.

Listen to the best coahes giving interviews, and it is clear that they understand about confidence and use it. Wenger of Arsenal is a good example, always praising the team, the players individually and what he calls spirit. They always support and build up the players, it is the players which win and the coaches (or the referee or whatever) that leads to defeat.

So confidence helps. What leads to confidence? Well, the biggest factor is success. Success really does breed success. The Americans often call this momentum. That is not much help when you are trying to turn things around. So we'd be better focusing on factors that can be influenced. There are many. We can categorise them. Belief in the leadership. Belief in each other. Belief in self.

Belief in the leadership comes from clarity of stated goal. From track record. From consistency of goal and message, and ownership for outcome. From perception of courage.

Belief in each other comes from understandingand respecting the roles of each team member. From having been dug out of holes when required. From a positive mindset and can do attitude. From shared purpose. From celebrating successes and learning from setbacks.

Belief in self comes from being given a stretch but with the saftey net of caoching and support. From being deployed in areas of one's strengths. From seeing a clear and consistent development path. From balanced feedback. From being given freedom to express oneself. From feeling valued. From recognition.

Confidence is killed instantly in some ways. By betrayal and mutiny. By dishonesty. By unsignalled changes of goal and direction. By loss of togetherness and shared purpose. By blame and threats (at least if these become pevasive). By bullying.

Overconfidence can be an enemy, but is not so common a problem. It manifests as complacency. Some sports teams lose to lesser opponents if they do not respect them or take the task seriously. It is good to always talk up the opposition, to make sure people understand that competition improves and winners improve faster.

OK, so this is all very nice, but perhaps you are thinking this is only about sports. Let me share some other examples then. What about the USA under JFK? Japan in the 70's and 80's or China now? The British labour government under Blair and then Brown, or the tories under Thatcher and then Major? The US army in Iraq before and after Petraus? The entire financial community in 2008-09? Singapore before and after President Li? Toyota (well, Toyota until very recently). GE under Welsh. You can even look at how people combat serious illness. The ones who can stay positive and buoyant tend to do better.

So I firmly believe this is a very valuable indicator, and I feel it could be used much more in business. True, there is a lagging element to it, but I also believe that working on confidence can be a driver to performance improvement. I would go so far as to put it on dashboards and in GPA's. You can measure confidence through things like the Shell People Survey very easily or in more ad hoc ways.

As line managers, team members and senior leaders, we might learn to act very differently if building confidence was an explicit goal and part of our mindset. Look at at all the ways to build and destry confidence above, and judge yourself against your current behaviours and actions. If someone new joins your team, imagine if you saw your sole goal for the first three months as building their confidence? I suspect you could manage stretch with safety net. You could really seek to discover strengths and exploit them. You could be much clearer and simpler with goals and metrics. You could utilise buddies and other support from elsewhere within the team. And my contention is that this would be one of the simplest and most effective ways available to you to make a step change to your team performance.

It could also be a lever to steer and judge HR and the senior leadership. Confidence is lacking in Shell just now, that is so clear. What does a sports chairman do in those circumstances? Fire some of the coaches seems to be the knee jerk reaction, though not normally the most effective one, at least not always and certainly not when it becomes a habit.

Like so many other things, this can apply easily to all of us, whatever our position. Great sports teams have individuals within them, not always the captains or most talented, who serve to build confidence. In your teams, that could be you. Is it today? What will you do about it?