5 steps to fast-track confidence and competence

[Read time: 3 minutes]

Ahoy,

Where you born confident in all situations?

I think it would be a pretty safe bet to say no… If you’re a person that has never been anxious going into a new situation please get in touch and share your secrets!

A safe assumption is that people are not confident every time they encounter a new situation.

And generally speaking, the bigger the situation or the more important that situation is, the less confidence you’re going to have.

Like confidence, competence follows a similar pattern.

And like confidence, if you’ve never not been competent going into every new situation, please get in touch and share your secrets!

We know from our own lives that these things require time and work to build upon. So how can we take our own experiences and build a confident and competent team?

Confidence is situational

I have delivered no end of presentations over my time in the military.

Whether that’s training anti-submarine tactics to command teams, or delivering briefs on the importance of mental health to my department, I’m familiar with that situation.

Public speaking isn’t everyone’s strong point, and it wasn’t mine when I first joined the military either!

But experience built my confidence.

Now when I stand in front of people and deliver a brief I appear confident, but if someone handed me a microphone and said sing…

That’s a whole different box of frogs!

You see, confidence is situational. You can build confidence in specific scenarios, it’s much harder to build overall confidence in all things.

The same is true with competence. This one is even more obvious.

When it comes to the work I do day-to-day, I like to think I’m at least half competent!

Does that mean I can do your job? Absolutely not!

The best degree in the world wouldn’t prepare me to walk into a job and do it better than someone already there. It takes experience to build a developed competence (this is not neglecting the importance of turning up prepared!).

Growth happens just outside the comfort zone

So we’ve established that confidence and competence are situational, and therefore the logical step is to put them into the situation we want to build confidence in so they get used to it.

Kind of.

Well, the answer is yes… But not straight away. It is absolutely true that growth happens outside of the comfort zone, but I like to add the word “just” in there to make it a bit more accurate.

If you wanted to be a better runner, “growth happens outside of your comfort zone” would suggest a marathon a day would make you better…

(Obviously an exaggeration, but you see the point!)

You need to be stretched, but not too hard, too soon. Like running, you need to build the distance over time.

Sink or swim might be thrown around by the old and bold:

But you risk losing really great team members that just needed a little extra support.

By building up the intensity, and slowly opening up that comfort gap, we can help people grow.

Practical steps

“I’ve got a team member that’s not very confident in their ability to handle problems. I need them to be more confident so they can support the team better.”

“I’ve got a new member of the team. I need them to get up to speed ASAP so they can start running their own projects soon.”

There are countless examples that follow these kinds of patterns, and luckily the solution is the same for all of them:

1. Identify a benchmark. What can they do? What can’t they do?

2. Identify what’s holding them back. What is stopping them from being where you want them to be?

3. Identify tasks, that increase in difficulty, that eventually lead to the point you want them to be at.

4. Start them on task one, just before they are 100% comfortable with that task, move them to task 2.

5. Repeat this until they are where you need them to be.

Simple.

Keeping people just a little bit stretched has so many benefits, but it is a delicate balance to achieve! You still need them to build confidence.

I don’t want to see any:

The more a team member succeeds the more confidence they’ll gain and they can be stretched to harder and harder tasks, with the confidence that they’ll keep succeeding.

Remember, you want them running, just not daily marathons!

I’ve written today’s post, as always, from a leadership perspective. But this approach is really how you gain confidence and competence in anything you want to do personally!

If you have any comments or questions get in touch through X (Twitter) using the link below.

And make sure to share this with other leaders so we can improve healthy leadership in the workplace.

As always, have a great day!

Reece