Confidence or Competence – chicken or egg?

Today I received an online invitation to attend a course that promised to teach me “How to win at absolutely everything!” You may imagine that it didn’t spend much time in my Inbox before being deleted but it got me thinking about the expectation in modern society that everyone can have everything and that they can have it now (although yesterday would be preferable!) One area in which these unrealistic expectations seem to raise their heads is in the area of self confidence, with various self-help gurus promising us ‘Instant’ self-confidence as if it’s something that can be bought off the shelf in a bottle. In this blog I will be looking at why the expectation that one can have, and is entitled to, instant confidence is often unrealistic at best and dangerous at worst.

To begin with let me draw a distinction between two different concepts – self worth and confidence. The first of these qualities I suggest relates to a fundamental sense of worthiness, a right to exist, actualise oneself and pursue happiness. I have no argument with instilling this fundamental sense within people and I believe that good parenting, education and socialisation should foster in children a sense of their own innate worthiness and goodness.

The kind of instant confidence that I am referring to in this blog relates more to the sense of capability and proficiency in a particular field. It may help if I deconstruct the word confidence itself. Confidence comes from the Latin con fide, which means ‘with faith’. So when we talk of acting with confidence we are talking about acting with faith. The question obviously arises – faith in what? When engaging in coaching or training, those we interact with often wish to be a “confident presenter”, or “confident in my work”, “confident in my abilities”. This is understandable – we all wish to have a sense that we are capable and skilled at our jobs. What the client is effectively saying, however, is that they wish to have faith that they are a good presenter or have faith that they are skilled at their job or whatever. This raises the question as to whether the person objectively has the skills of a good presenter or actually has a sufficient degree of knowledge, skill and experience at their job.

The risk comes when people put the cart before the horse and think that they are entitled to confidence before they achieve competence. If one were to ask a client seeking confidence what they wish to be confident about, and assuming our hypothetical client were to say “I want to be a competent presenter”, it might be appropriate rather than attempting to cheerlead and boost our client’s self-confidence to ask the question – “Have you earned the right to feel confident?” While this may seem a little deflating, I think it is an honest and appropriate question. Presenting, like a great many skills, requires practice, skill and rehearsal. Being a good doctor, lawyer, accountant, coach, therapist, chef, driver – indeed almost anything – requires skill, knowledge, practice and experience.

There is, for example, little more alarming than the phenomenon of teenage (often male, I am sorry to say) drivers who pass their driving test and assume, based upon limited experience and nothing more than a test of rudimentary competence, that they are expert drivers and go out on the roads with a confidence in their abilities that far outweighs their limited knowledge and experience. It is for this reason that the road traffic accident rates (and insurance premiums) for young male drivers are notoriously high. I have seen this same phenomenon replicated in a number of other areas, whereby individuals with limited skill and experience have been ‘cheer-led’ into developing an utterly exaggerated sense of their own capabilities. It’s as if it doesn’t matter whether one can walk the walk as long as one can talk the talk. The mismatch between their resulting confidence and their objective competence has led them and others to come a cropper when it has actually been put to the test.

What I am suggesting, therefore, is that confidence should be commensurate with competence. I am currently developing a model which will look at this concept in more detail but essentially there will be an exercise in plotting confidence against competence and three possible combinations will emerge.

1. The individual’s level of confidence accurately reflects and increases or decreases in relation to their competence. With such an individual training and/or experience to increase their competence may well be beneficial and will lead to an appropriate increase in confidence as a result.

2. The individual’s level of confidence far exceeds their actual objectively assessed competence. Think David Brent from The Office. Those in this group may be very similar to the Stupid/Hard-working category of the Von Manstein Matrix proposed by Richard Koch based upon the reflections on the German officer corps by the brilliant Field Marshal, Erich Von Manstein. Individuals in this group can cause considerable problems due to the mismatch between what they believe they can do and what they are actually able to do. Von Manstein recommended that those in the Stupid/Hardworking category be got rid of as quickly as possible as the amount of trouble they would cause was enormous. In the modern business world it might be more appropriate to keep a careful eye on such people and ensure their egos are kept carefully in check until their competence catches up (if it ever does!)

3. The third category is those who do not have the level of confidence in their performance that their competence would justify. This category of individuals comprises those who might justifiably benefit from coaching, counselling or mentoring to obtain a more appropriate realisation of the genuine skills and competence they possess.

So I suggest that if a colleague, client, supervisee or anyone else you have a mentoring role with, comes to you and complains that they would like to have “more confidence” you avoid immediately engaging in exercises to mindlessly boost their ego and confidence. How can someone have authentic, justifiable confidence if they know they don’t have the skills or experience required to justify it? Encouraging someone to build confidence in such circumstances will be building on foundations of sand. Instead, take time to ask what specifically they wish to have confidence in? Once this information has been elicited, engage in an objective audit to assess whether the person’s ability and experience merits the degree of confidence they wish to have. If it does not, then providing appropriate training or opportunities to obtain experience in a safe manner in the area under discussion may well be the most appropriate intervention.

Encouraging people to believe they can do what they do not have the skills or experience to do, simply by engaging in varieties of positive thinking that are disconnected from the reality of the situation, will likely have the net result in the long run of damaging the individual’s confidence further and perhaps also harming those around him or her.

At Watt Works we offer a wide variety of training courses and programmes designed to assist you in increasing the competence and skill base of your staff. Developing such competence can often be the first step on the ‘Royal Road’ to an appropriate and balanced degree of self-confidence – a self-confidence that can endure when stress-tested in real world environments.

Tags: performance management, self-confidence, staff training

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