Unconfident and Frankly… Intolerable
Many only focus on professional development when looking for a job. As a job seeker, you figure out how to communicate your experience and present the ‘best you’ possible. You walk into the interview full of confidence as you feel prepared. The night before, you went over behavioral questions and developed the perfect response for ‘Can you walk me through your background?’ But, where does that confidence go after the offer letter is signed and a you are a member of the organization? The very charm and tenacity that got you the job quickly goes away as reality hits… you spent weeks ‘pretending’ to be confident for the role, but you never gained REAL confidence in your actual abilities. Over the years while serving as a professional coach, I’ve identified two very obvious signs that you lack confidence: (1) you take credit for work that isn’t yours and (2) you try to over-complicate things. Let’s start with the latter:
As amusing as Sheldon is to watch on ‘The Big Bang Theory’, NO ONE would want to work with someone who spoke like that. If I asked you how to sharpen a pencil and you started describing the malleability of graphite and the origins of how cedar trees became the core component of the pencil’s wood coating… I would ask someone else. This is the same for describing a work-related process or presenting deliverables to others. If it sounds like you read the dictionary right before, no one is going to be impressed that you’re just so intelligent. They will be annoyed that their time was wasted because they gained NOTHING from your presentation. This over-complication in your delivery is often attributed to a lack of confidence and experience.
My all time favorite quote is from Albert Einstein who stated “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Once you’re confident in yourself, you drop the ‘genius’ act and let your work speak for itself. You realize there is no need to rely on superficial ‘fancy’ words to imply knowledge and expertise when you actually know what you are doing. Trust me… it is EASY to spot and very intolerable to deal with.
Now, on to the next one.
Everyone has heard the trope of a boss taking credit for their employees’ work. Sadly, this is true and very common. But, what is often misunderstood is why. It is not simply because your boss is the devil or hates you. It is a sign of a lack of confidence. Leaders generally take two approaches to do this: (1) the ‘I’ method or (2)the ‘WE’ method.
The ‘I’ method implies that they took full ownership of your work, often excluding you from the conversation entirely.
The ‘WE’ method is when they claim a role in your work though they had no part in it.
Both stem from leaders not understanding what their role on the team is and lacking confidence in the value that they bring. As a leader, you do not need to know how to do your employee’s job. Therefore, you don’t need to force ownership of their work to be respected by others. Your role is to ensure your employees have the necessary resources and direction to execute.
I’ve worked on a few projects as a strategist where leaders felt intimidated by my contributions as a process developer. They would make this obvious by giving me credit for smaller deliverables but would ‘WE’ my contributions they felt less confident about admitting wasn’t theirs. The thing is, there was nothing to feel bad about because what I contributed was different from what they contributed, but not more significant. In this example, the individuals were not confident in their roles as transactional leaders that managed people when comparing themselves to me, a process strategist that must adopt a more transformational perspective. The issue with lacking confidence as a leader and taking either the ‘I’ or ‘WE’ method to overcompensate is that you’ll end up devaluing your employees, resulting in a reduction in their engagement. Or worse… they leave. It will become painfully obvious who was doing what when they’re gone.
Confidence is not something you can muster up for an interview and then leave behind once you get the job. It is something that you consciously and actively work on nurturing throughout your career through continuous professional development. This can be in the form of gaining more experience or truly understanding your role on a team so you don’t have to sign your name on the work of others to feel more important.
A lack of confidence is not just hiding in the shadows or refusing to speak up at meetings as is stereotypically portrayed. It is often the loudest people in the room that have the least amount of confidence… making them the most intolerable people to work with.
