The Four Mindsets

chapter 9 How to teach people confidence

One of the most important and significant roles of a manager is to help your people gain confidence in their roles. Confidence is essential for all high-performing individuals and teams. Building confidence in your team members ensures they keep growing, stretching their abilities and attaining new skills they often did not know they were even capable of.

Our experience shows that the best managers see qualities in individuals that the individual themselves sometimes cannot see. These managers identify hidden potential and actively work towards building confidence in that person to help them realise it.

We have worked with numerous people in whom we have recognised potential, actively boosting their confidence using a structured process, until at some point they could see it themselves and feel confident enough to go after it themselves.

Think about it: how do you help build your team's confidence levels? Contrary to what many people think, confidence is a teachable skill that a person is not necessarily born with.

There is a specific pathway to building people's confidence, and as a manager you should know it and develop it in others every day. But first you must understand that there are two types of confidence, confident competence and confident incompetence.

There is a strong correlation between competence and confidence; that is, the more competent you are, the more confident you become. However, the reverse is not true: becoming ...