Journey Into Mastery - Week 97: Calibrating Confidence and Competence

When it comes to correctly assessing our leadership, maximum confidence is not nearly as important as accurate confidence. Many of us often fall into the trap of being overconfident or underconfident in our abilities from time to time and there are issues with either.

For the sake of clarity, it helps us to define our terms. We are using competence to refer to your ability to effectively carry out a task, while confidence is the belief in your ability to do exactly that.

If you are underconfident, you will lack belief in your ability to make decisions and lead. This in turn will make others hesitate to follow, even if the direction is good. If you are overconfident, then you may appear arrogant, or seen more as a sayer than a doer, which can be off-putting to others.

This is not to say that high or low confidence is good or bad nor is having higher or lower competence inherently good or bad. The trick is to calibrate and correctly assess your confidence to match your competence so you can know if you need to grow in an area, or if you should be helping to lead others to grow in that area.

It is also important to realize that you could be highly competent in one area, but low in another. As an example, I am fairly skilled at scheduling, but I am not as confident in my ability to host larger school community events. As we work through this, I’ll explore more on what to do in both situations.

To help better visualize what we are talking about, it may be helpful to use a graph such as this one.

As you can see we have four situations that can occur and these are represented by the quadrants with the names in the graphic. Two of these, Overconfident and Underconfident represent situations when we are not calibrated in our self assessment, while Developing and Effective are when we are aligned.

As we increase in one dimension, we often take a while to increase in the other dimension. This is because we need feedback in order to help us to recalibrate. Also, confidence and certainty are not the same. I can be incredibly confident that I do not know enough about a subject and defer to those that do.

Overconfidence

Confidence can grow faster than competence, and when it does we need to be attuned to the feedback that we receive and be sure to learn lessons from what that feedback is telling us. It is very easy to think that results justify our confidence. We need to ensure that when we analyze our feedback, we understand why and how it happened to eliminate things like luck as the contributing factor. We also need to be able to recognize which actions led to our success so we can replicate them. This can be difficult to do without honest reflection and can lead to overconfidence if we do not.

As an example, there have been times I was fairly certain of myself and a course of action that backfired on me monumentally. This is okay and will happen from time to time! It did, however, temper my next attempt at something similar because I tried to take that feedback and learn from it rather than try to brush it off or blame it on factors beyond my control. Or, if those factors were beyond my control, I learned to account for those a little better in the future. When this occurs, it is usually a matter of recalibrating to match confidence with actual ability. This will help move us back into the learning or developing zone.

Underconfidence

When confidence is lower than your competence, you can sell yourself short and unintentionally weaken influence as a leader. When you are not confident, others may equate that lack of confidence with a lack of competence. As a result your voice can become diminished. Some of this self-doubt can come from previous attempts that failed. But maybe, you have learned from these and have yet to make the next more successful attempt. In that case, you may simply lack the positive feedback to show that you are on the right track.

You also remove yourself as a go-to resource for others when your confidence is low and you have the skills to help others. This hurts both you as a leader and others in that they are not able to benefit from your skills. Again, this is not meant to be critical of confidence or competence, it is meant to be a call to try and ensure that both are calibrated towards one another.

There are many, like myself, who are uncomfortable being thought of by others as being particularly skilled or an expert in something. This is often described as imposter syndrome, where we feel that we are going to be discovered as not living up to the high opinions of others. However, growth depends as much on recognizing our strengths as it does our gaps. This is difficult to do if we do not recognize and believe in ourselves.

Developing

So what about when we are calibrated? When both competence and confidence are low, our next move is to create a plan to grow in that task, or partner with someone who scores high in that area to learn from them. This is part of the learning process that is critical for any leader if they want to grow in their role. Take small steps, experiment, test the waters and try new things to help you build your skill set either overall or in a particular area. Build in feedback loops so you can try to stay in the developing zone.

It is important to note that being in this stage is not a failure. It is ridiculous to think that leaders would begin their journey by being confident and effective in all areas right away. We all start in this zone in some areas, and we will continue to find ourselves in this zone in some areas, especially as things change and new elements get incorporated into our schools. Accurately knowing what you do and do not know is far from failure, it’s actually a critical component of good leadership.

Effective

When competence and confidence are high, it then becomes the responsibility of leaders to start helping others to develop and use that skillset for the good of others. Good leaders make more leaders, and this works best when you have the skillset and belief that you can inspire others to follow.

It is also important to recognize that just because we are in this zone, it does not mean we will stay there. In many ways, it is so easy to slip into overconfidence here and so it is equally as critical that we maintain calibration. Also, just as with Developing, we can continue to make gains in this area to keep pushing ourselves towards growth if we build a plan to grow.

There is nothing wrong with recognizing you need to grow, it is healthy and good for us. Similarly, we are all overconfident or underconfident at times. We will move in and out of all throughout our leadership journey. What matters is that we use the feedback that we get to continually calibrate our confidence to our competence. Remember, the goal isn’t maximum confidence, it’s accurate confidence. This lets us know when it’s important to lead, when to learn, or when to help others to grow.

~ Owen

omatchim@gmail.com