When your team doesn’t feel confident it can have a real impact on you as a leader. It can mean constant interruptions as team members seek reassurance or permission to make decisions, distracting you from your strategic and potentially more impactful work. It can avert your focus into the detail and drain a lot of your mental energy.
When there is a lack of confidence in teams, people often deflect making decisions (because they might be wrong and don’t feel confident to learn from mistakes) and prolong the research phase of any piece of work or project longer than necessary, slowing down progress. Slow progress leads to reduced motivation and less collaboration. Your managers with low self-confidence may also avoid speaking up and addressing issues or conflicts, allowing them to fester and negatively impact team dynamics.
As a leader you have a massive impact on the confidence and emotions of a team and therefore the progress and impact they can make.
When your team members are confident, you spend less time overseeing their day-to-day work. This means that you have time and head space to focus on the big picture. Your time spent supporting them is focused on helping them to make progress, to have trust in their decisions and enabling more autonomy (which according to psychologists plays an important part in building motivation and confidence).
Building the confidence of your team is of massive importance if you want your team to be happy and high performing. Here’s 3 quick tips to help you right now.
Establish a feedback culture
Don’t save feedback for one to ones. Give feedback in the moment. Encourage feedback more generally. When your confidence is low you hold back from asking for feedback because you’re afraid of failure or not being good enough. Make asking for feedback just part of the culture. For example, start by leading by example, for anything where you can receive feedback, ask for it. At the end of the team meeting, ask for feedback on how it went and suggestions for improvements, at the end of a project ensure that feedback and evaluation is part of the project plan.
Learning and development builds confident teams
A good way to increase the self-confidence of the people in your team is by encouraging learning, and by providing plenty of opportunities for additional training. The more knowledge and skills that people have to do their job, the more confident they’re going to feel, especially when they approach challenging projects. As well as training courses also consider learning options such as work shadowing and mentoring and don’t underestimate the learning for both the mentor and mentee in a mentoring relationship.
Ensure your team understands what a growth mindset is
The term ‘growth mindset’ is attributed to psychologist Carol Dweck. It’s become widely used since the publication of her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success back in 2006.
Growth mindset is based on the belief that intelligence is not fixed and you can improve both your intelligence and results through your efforts.
Fixed mindset is based on the belief that intelligence is fixed and your results are limited by your own level of intelligence regardless of the efforts you put in.
Research shows that helping your team understand what growth mindset is, in itself encourages a growth mindset, which increases effort, motivation and capacity for learning.
If you’re serious about building the confidence of your team and supporting them to thrive, check out my recent training on Fixed mindset and learning from failure.
This training is part of the Lucidity Success System – my methodology for successful leadership and high performing teams. The Lucidity Success System is available to all members of the Lucidity Network. If you’re interested in joining check it out here.