The most challenging thing to achieve in life is balance. This statement is true, and leadership is no exemption. For example, people are more willing to follow and trust leaders who exude confidence yet are humble. The question now is, how do you balance confidence with humility?
Because chronic instability is the new normal, business, culture, and even the economy is increasingly complicated and unpredictable, team members long for confidence.
As our world experiences uncertainty, the human longing for confidence grows proportionately. Leaders cannot afford to be tentative. Although they do not have all the answers upfront, they still have to be confident and decisive, yet they are humble enough to accept corrections, rectify errors and admit mistakes.
• When leaders are confident, their symptoms of confidence become contagious.
• Their passion and energy become viral.
• Their clarity tends to motivate people to act.
• They pass on a sense of security to their team.
• Their sense of ownership expands to others, and their assurance that something must be done spreads.
The challenge here is that confidence can leak over time.
Book author and speaker Tim Elmore says the opposite of confidence is not insecurity. It is cynicism. The older we get, the more experience we gain and become cynical—our worldview changes. We no longer blindly trust others; we become self-protective. Our confidence can wane. But people want to follow confident and not insecure leaders.
As our lives become more complicated and overwhelming, people feel they don’t have time to research every decision they make. People follow the most precise and confident leader, not necessarily the right one.
Another challenge is that, left unchecked; confidence can morph into EGO. And this is not a good thing because ego fogs our objectivity and diminishes our logic. Leaders want to win; leaders do not just want to achieve things. They need to aim for achievement, and they may become convinced that they can do no wrong. It is possible that the more we succeed, the larger our ego can grow. Momentum can cause us to look better than we are. And over time, confidence can be fed by our egos, and our egos by our confidence. Ego also leads to cockiness. Cockiness and confidence are two entirely different things.
Cocky leaders don’t want to be questioned. They don’t want any roadblocks in their way. And when someone challenges them, the cocky leaders automatically assume that the questioning party does not believe in their mission. Their actions become smug, their words sarcastic, and they now are preoccupied with maintaining an image or a persona instead of being truthful and honest. In his research, Jim Collins observed that “Level 5 Leaders” have no illusion that they alone can accomplish goals.
• When something went wrong, they looked in the mirror and said, “how can I improve to lead this team better?”
• And when something went right, they looked out the window and said, “look at this team, and look what they achieved.” Both confidence humility is attractive and doubly so when combined.
A leader who is always confident and has little humility creates suspicious team members. People stop trusting this kind of leader. They know their leaders are human and begin thinking, “You can’t be so sure, and you can’t be right all the time.” Eventually, they stop taking the leaders seriously.
Humility makes the leader magnetic, and when present alongside competence and confidence, it makes the leader easier to follow. People are drawn to humble leaders because they feel reachable, teachable, and touchable, not some prima-donna who resides in an ivory tower. And when humility is present, trust deepens among team members.
Leaders should exhibit confidence, but this confidence should be tempered by humility.
Former World Bank president Jim Yong Kim says: “No matter how good you think you are as a leader, my goodness, the people around you will have all kinds of ideas for how you can get better. So, for me, the most fundamental thing about leadership is to have the humility to continue to get feedback and to try to get better – because your job is to help everybody else get better.”
And yes, confident yet humble.
(Francis Kong runs his Level Up Leadership 2.0 Master Class Online on April 20, 21, and 22. For inquiries and reservations, contact April at +63928-559-1798 or and for more information, visit www.levelupleadership.ph)