Help Your Team Build Real Confidence
The Project Manager's Desk Reference by James P. Lewis
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Dallas, coaching a very successful District Manager. His team is very, very good. However, at one point in our conversation, he said to me, “If I could just get them to realize how good they are, they would be even more successful. They could really blow the doors off of their sales! But, it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell them how great they are, it just doesn’t seem to sink in. I wish I could help them become more confident.”
As a manager, you can help your team become more confident; but you cannot do it by praise alone. How many of us hear a compliment and say, “Oh, thanks” and then we go about our business without ever really accepting – much less – processing the compliment?
Here are a couple of things to try:
Praise from oneself is ultimately better than praise from others
First, while praise from an external source (you) is valuable, the praise that we give ourselves is more important for building confidence. So try this instead: ask them questions that reveal to them and gets them to articulate their strengths, qualities and what they do well.
Here’s an example:
Part of what I do is coach supervision (which means that I observe managers who are learning how to coach and then I coach them on their coaching). In a recent observation, the manager asked a brilliant coaching question of their employee. In our coaching session afterward, I asked the manager, “At one point, you asked Jane about . . . I’m curious, what was your intent behind the question?” As she told me I affirmed and validated but I continued the exploration with her. I also asked her, “How was it effective in helping Jane move forward?” Essentially, I am helping the manager to understand her own effectiveness, which helps build capacity in the future.
(By the way, when you do give praise, make it specific and turn it into an exploration. No one really even hears generic praise.)
Confidence comes from doing and achieving, not just hearing praise
Second, confidence comes from doing and achieving. You really don’t gain confidence by sitting on the bench watching the ball game! Help the person have mini-wins. This is especially true if they are trying to tackle some large challenge. Help them break it down into manageable segments that they can tackle. And, here’s a critical piece to this: when they tackle it, help them see that they did it, help them celebrate it and help them extract the learning from it.
Some sample questions:
- What did they learn about themselves?
- What did they learn about their ability to face a challenge?
- How did they grow by taking on something new?
- What new skills/behaviors did they acquire?
- How will those help them in the future?
(Of course, you don’t always have to ask all those questions!) This process helps build resiliency, confidence and the courage to take on bigger challenges in the future.
Today, I was coaching a manager in St. Louis who shared with me that one of the things that has helped her the most in our coaching sessions is that she has really gained a sense of confidence. I asked her what it was that had caused that shift. She replied that she has never been good at accepting compliments; that they’ve never really meant that much to her. Then she said, “You don’t give me compliments. You help me give myself compliments. You help me explore what I do well and why it’s effective and even what I can do with it in the future. You ask me questions in such a way that the positive feedback comes from me and because of that, I believe it.”
It was a great compliment for me – and it was exactly the outcome I wanted for her. Long after our coaching relationship ends, I want her to be able to self-evaluate and to affirm for herself what she does well. Of course, self-evaluation doesn’t run just one way (all positive). This manager, in the course of a few short months, can tell me with tremendous accuracy what she does well, where she struggles and what she can and needs to do to work through the struggle. Because all of this is her data, not only does she not argue with it, but she runs with it! Her level of motivation is very high (in spite of a rapidly changing and somewhat difficult work environment). I know that by the time we meet again the next month, whatever she said she wanted to work on she will have tackled it and triumphed.
As a manager, you have it in your power to help your employees build confidence. If you could help them build their confidence by even 10% what would they be able to achieve?
The article relies on ideas from the following sources:
Marva Collins Way: Returning to Excellence in Education; Marva Collins and Civia Tamarkin
The Resiliency Factor; Karen Reivich, Ph.D., and Andrew Shatte, Ph.D.
Coaching Skills: A Handbook; Jenny Rogers
© 2011 Bobbi Kahler. All rights reserved. Developing Leaders, Creating Possibilities: Kahler Leadership Group
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