Managerial confidence is based on the ability to make decisions or offer solutions when it should be on drawing solutions out of others.
How confident are you on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is high? Many managers are not as confident as they want to be. Why is this? It’s a matter of what we base our confidence on. The key to success in business, we feel, is the ability to think, to solve problems and propose solutions. This is a very masculine drive as it is based on the need to be right, to score goals, to be seen as having more to offer than our colleagues. This formula works well enough when we’re in technical roles, but as we ascend to management positions, we need to get work done through others. To be successful in management we need to reframe how we add value from that of an individual goal scorer to that of a coach, catalyst, facilitator, broker or coordinator.
The crux of the problem is whether we base our confidence on our ability to offer great solutions or on the skill of drawing solutions out of others. If we opt for the former, we can’t win because, as managers, we are too removed from the technicalities that our specialist subordinates know more about than we do. The world is too complex and fast changing for any one person to know it all. It’s much easier to base our confidence on the skills of the facilitator. This means asking questions about what others think, what they see as the options for dealing with a problem, the pros and cons of their preferred option and what steps they think need to be taken to implement their solution.
Unfortunately, switching to being more of a question-asker than a solution-generator is easier than it sounds. The reality is that we work in very masculine cultures where we are expected to know what we are talking about. Managers are seen as decision makers, people who know their stuff. To change your style at work, therefore, you need to manage the expectations of key stakeholders. This means selling them on the advantages of being a facilitator rather than a know-it-all, pointing out that your role is to get the best out of people reporting to you. This requires you to stimulate their thinking, not disempower them by creating the impression that you have all the answers.
The bottom line is that you should reframe your role from that of an individual contributor (thinker) to that of someone who fosters smart thinking in others by continuously asking them what they think.
