Think about watching a sports match between two teams, where one team is more confident than the other.  The members of the more confident team know that they have a good chance of winning. As a result, everyone on the team makes good decisions, and the players work together seamlessly. Meanwhile, the other team’s confidence is shaky. Players doubt their abilities, they hesitate, and they don’t commit fully to any particular course of action. When this happens, it’s likely that the more confident team will win.

The same principles apply in the workplace – when you have people on your team who have low self-confidence, this can hold them back from reaching their full potential. This is why it’s important that we do what we can to boost the confidence of those around us, especially if we’re leading a team.

Recognizing Low Self-Confidence

People who lack self-confidence rarely thrive. They see more risks than opportunities, they don’t perform particularly well in new situations, and they often have low self-esteem. What’s more, they rarely trust their own judgment, and they may see any successes that they do achieve as resulting from luck, rather than from their own efforts.

By contrast, people who have high self-confidence are more productive and more effective, and can raise the morale of the entire group. They’re also more comfortable taking risks, which can have benefits for their own careers, as well as for their teams.

Confidence can make or break people’s ability to achieve their life goals. So how can you help boost the self-confidence of the people around you?

Help Them Develop Knowledge and Skills

Chances are that there are several skills you rely on to do your job well. When you use these skills successfully, what happens? You feel confident! These are the skills that you’ve worked on over the years, and you’re comfortable that you can use them to accomplish the task at hand.

The same is true for the people on your team. The stronger their skills are, the more confident they’re going to feel.

So a good way to increase the self-confidence of people in your team is by encouraging learning, and by providing plenty of opportunities for additional training. The more knowledge and skills that people have to do their job, the more confident they’re going to feel, especially when they approach challenging projects.

Set Clear Goals, and Help Them Achieve it

Many people get confidence from completing tasks and projects successfully. But that confidence only comes if people know what it is that they’re supposed to do.

This is why it is so important to set clear goals for every member of your team. Goals define success, and give people an objective to shoot for. Without them, they’re working aimlessly.

So make sure that the people on your team know what goals they’re supposed to be working toward, and help them to achieve these goals. Then, when they succeed, celebrate their achievements!

Encourage Autonomy

If you want your team to tackle tasks with confidence, it’s important that you allow them the autonomy to make their own decisions. When your people have the power to decide what needs to be done, they start to take ownership of their work. It truly becomes their responsibility, and when they succeed, their confidence can soar.

Whenever you can, delegate tasks, and give your people the power to make their own decisions.

Be aware, however, that people who have low self-confidence may resist this at first: after all, they may doubt that they’ll make the right decisions. To fight these doubts, encourage them to take on small, achievable projects. Then, if they rely on you too much for help or guidance, encourage them to be more independent.

Celebrate Success

It’s important that all of us celebrate the success we’ve achieved, because recognition of success builds self-confidence.

Whenever your people accomplish a goal or hit a key target, then celebrate with them! Reward them (member-only article) with a party at the office, or even do something small like bringing in cookies or cake. At the very least, congratulate them on their success, and let them know how much you appreciate their hard work.

It’s also important to keep your team excited about what they’re doing. Celebrating success helps with this, but keeping motivation high long-term is key to building a team with high confidence levels.

Encourage Positive Thinking

Many people who lack self-confidence focus on negative thoughts. They may think things like, “I can’t do that!” or “I’m not smart enough.” These negative thoughts cause people to spiral down further, reinforcing their belief that they’ll never be good enough to succeed. Of course, this just makes things worse!

Encourage people to think positively. One technique is to show them how to “flip their thoughts” – every time they catch themselves thinking a negative thought, teach them to think its rational opposite.

For instance, if they think “I’m not smart enough to finish this project,” instead they should think “I know I have the knowledge and skills to finish this project. If I do need help, I can always ask for it.”

Balancing Self-Confidence and Over-Confidence

When people become more self-confident there’s always the risk they can become over-confident, or even arrogant. There’s no doubt that there is a fine line here, but once it’s crossed, these people can start to impact the morale and productivity of the group in a negative way. What’s worse is when people get careless, because they over-estimate their own ability to improvise in difficult situations.

If this happens to a person on your team, start by gently bringing the situation to her attention. Chances are that she might not have realized that she’s crossed the line into arrogance. Meet with her in private, be specific about what she’s saying or doing, and explain why her behavior could be construed as arrogance.

Key Points

If you work with people who have low self-confidence, there are several ways that you can help.

First, encourage them to develop additional knowledge and skills. Help them set clear goals, and sit down with them to identify specific situations that cause their confidence to plummet.

If you’re leading a team, give your people as much power as you can to make their own decisions, and celebrate the success they achieve along the way. But remember that too much self-confidence can be just as damaging to your team as low self-confidence, so help them find the right balance.

So, you are waiting for a promotion you dreamed about. You think that your technical expertise and your ability to reach performance goals consistently, makes a good candidate to become a manager.

Any management promotion can be a challenge, but it’s especially hard on people with strong technical skills, but who have little or no management experience.

We’ll explore how to make the transition, and what you can do to excel in your new role. We’ll also include links to several other resources that can help you strengthen the skills you need for success.

Management Challenges

Technical experts are often promoted because they have recognized knowledge and skills in their field. Whether it’s IT, finance, sales, or marketing, they know their jobs very well. After all, that’s what got them noticed!

The problem is that organizations often promote people based on these technical skills, not on their management skills. And many organizations offer very little support to new managers.

You first need to recognize that your technical knowledge may not help much in your new management role. Why? Because instead of just focusing on your own skills and successes, you now have to focus on the skills and successes of your team. Your mindset has to change.

This is where many technical managers make their biggest mistakes. Instead of paying attention to the “people aspect” of their new role, they continue to do what they’ve always done: work on their own projects and technical skills. But if you ignore your team and their needs, you’re going to alienate them quickly.

Skills You Need

The good news is that you can succeed – and succeed spectacularly – in your management role. To do so, however, you must learn a new set of skills, including:

Delegation - As a manager, you must know how to delegate tasks to your team effectively. This will keep you from spending time doing things that should no longer be your responsibility.

Briefing - You need to keep your team up to date on their progress, what you expect from them, and what will happen in the future.

Motivation - Your team is now your responsibility. This means that you must keep them motivated and moving forward. Our article Herzberg’s Motivators and Hygiene Factors will teach you how to discover what truly motivates your people.

Communication - In your previous role, good communication might have been helpful, but not vital. But now, as a manager, the ability to communicate well is essential to your success.

Discipline - At some point, you’ll probably have to discipline someone on your team. Whether a team member is breaking rules, under-performing, or upsetting others, it’s up to you to restore peace. Knowing how to discipline effectively (members only) and diplomatically is key to keeping your team’s trust and respect.

Recruitment - If your team is changing or expanding, then you’ll have to hire new people, but finding the right people can be difficult. Our Recruiting Skills Bite-Sized Training session will help you get better results with your recruitment efforts (members only).

Tips for Making the Transition to Manager

Personal Analisys - Make a list of what you must improve to be a better manager for your team. Many managers let others assess their skills, and then wait until their performance review to discover what skills they lack. Don’t make this mistake – spend time now identifying your weaknesses, so that you can start improving on them immediately.

Stay away from technical work – Resist the temptation to get involved with technical projects that aren’t your responsibility. Yes, you probably enjoy this type of work and want to feel successful doing something you know well, but this is now your team’s responsibility. Spending too much time doing technical work will only hold you back as a manager. Sure, it’s good to pitch in when you can, but make sure that you do the managing part of your role first.

Meet with every team member – Make it a priority to meet with everyone on your team personally. Find out what interests and motivates them, and check that they have everything they need to be happy and successful in their role. This shows that you’re taking an interest in them, and it helps you get to know the people you’re managing.

Learn one skill at a time – Acquiring a whole new set of skills for your new management position can be overwhelming. Don’t try to learn everything at once. Focus on one skill at a time, so that you can learn each skill well.

Do you get excited about everything you need to do? Or do you sometimes need a bit of help to get started, never mind getting the task done?

Maybe you’re continuing to ignore those overflowing filing cabinets, instead of taking some time out to reorganize them. Or, you’re avoiding that difficult conversation with a person who is always late, choosing instead to tolerate the tardiness. Perhaps you keep rearranging your priorities, so that the tasks you hate stay at the bottom of the list.

The longer you delay doing something, the more stress and pressure you’re likely to feel. After a while, you may even start to lose confidence in your ability to complete the task at all.

Many of us sometimes need help getting motivated. And it can be very frustrating when we know we have to do something, but we just can’t get around to making a start. So how can we motivate ourselves to do these things?

Motivation Basics

There are essentially two types of motivation:

Intrinsic motivation – This is when you are motivated by internal factors to meet your own personal needs. Most hobbies and leisure activities are based on intrinsic motivation. We do them because we enjoy them, not because we have to.

Extrinsic motivation - This is when you are motivated by external factors that are given or controlled by others, for example, by salary or by praise. Our jobs are usually based on extrinsic motivation, although there will be some intrinsic motivation involved if you enjoy aspects of what you do.

Most situations at work involve both types of motivation. If we do a job we enjoy, some of the work we do will be intrinsically motivating. Realistically though, we probably wouldn’t go to work if we weren’t being paid! Enjoying your job is intrinsically motivating, while being paid a good salary to do it is extrinsically motivating.

Even if we do a job we enjoy, problems can crop up where we need to do something that we don’t inherently like – such as filing, speaking with staff about performance issues, completing reports, and so on. We have to do undesirable tasks as part of our job, so we have to find a way to motivate ourselves to complete them. That’s where self-motivation is necessary.

To motivate yourself, you must examine and understand your needs, so that you know what you find valuable and rewarding. Then, by changing your environment and perspective, you can find the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to complete those undesirable tasks. So, rather than relying on other factors to make a task more rewarding, you make it more rewarding yourself.

Self-Motivation Strategies

Just as there are two types of motivation, there are two main strategies for motivating yourself:

You make the task more intrinsically satisfying.

You provide your own extrinsic rewards.

Using a combination of both is often the most effective way to motivate yourself. So, you have to find further intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to get those undesirable tasks done. Here are some tactics that you can use motivate yourself:

Change your attitude and approach to undesirable tasks – For example, the task of reorganizing your filing cabinet may not be motivating in itself. But being seen as a competent and organized person might provide intrinsic motivation for you. By thinking of filing in this way, for example, you can connect completing the task with meeting your needs.

Think about why you do what you do - Sometimes you may start to think that your job is pointless, so why bother to do things? A great way to increase self-motivation is to list all of the positive outcomes of your job. If you’re on the cleaning staff in a hospital, ultimately your job keeps patients safe from germs and disease. If you sell office equipment, you’re helping people to work more efficiently.

Set goals - By setting goals you’ll know exactly what you need to do to achieve what you want in life. Then, by looking at this “bigger picture”, you’ll be able to see how those undesirable tasks can help you reach your goals, and you’ll be able to see “what’s in it for you” to complete these tasks.

Break your tasks down into smaller pieces – Organizing the entire filing cabinet may be too large a task to do all at once. Start alphabetically, or with the first section of files. Then, when you complete the first group, you can use your success with the smaller tasks to motivate you to finish.

Build in accountability – Tell you colleagues or manager about your task. It can help to motivate you if you know that someone else is expecting you to complete the task.

Don’t procrastinate – When low motivation and procrastination occur together, it can be doubly hard to get things done. See our article on beating procrastination for more on dealing with this.

Reward yourself – Make an agreement with yourself to give yourself a reward when you complete a task. For example, buy yourself a specialty coffee for completing smaller tasks, or send yourself to the spa for a massage when you finish a major one.

Scare yourself with the negative consequences of not doing it – If not doing the task is going to get you in trouble with your boss, focus on this, and scare yourself into doing it!

Swap tasks with a colleague – Maybe you can trade your undesirable task with someone else who doesn’t mind doing it, and you can do something for that person in return. Use each other’s needs, interests and talents to work more efficiently.

Surround yourself with positive thoughts and people – Positive thinking is very powerful. Just telling yourself that you can do something is often all you need to get started. And when you’re around other positive people, they’ll support and encourage you to keep trying.

Create an accomplishment log – Use this to record all of the times when you were able to motivate yourself to complete a task or keep moving forward. The log can inspire you the next time you need some extra motivation.

Coaching is the term used to describe the process of helping a person to improve his performance.

 The coaching needs time and it is a permanent process. An interpersonal challenge always exists in the aspect of correcting performance shortcomings. Many interpersonal skills are needed in a coach to be successful.

 A good coach must:

1. -Observe the behavior in the work and describe the situations in which not wished behavior takes place.

2.-Be capable of giving feedback to the employee in such a way that it is clearly understood and recognized.

3. – Rise questions to obtain all the excellent facts about the problem of performance of the person.

4. – Listen and understand the side of the history that the employee is presenting to him.

Correcting performance shortcomings is a skill that it improves with the experience. The commitment with the development of the employee is a pre requisite…

It is important, look at relationships as a business asset and competitive advantage. At times, it may seem that fighting, arguing, or screaming is faster and more effective than management coaching. Don’t be fooled. These tactics only lead to stress, fatigue, and diminished motivation for everyone. High performance, win-win partnerships, on the other hand, help the organization flourish and bring you personal satisfaction.

Mistake One – Don’t express your self

Too many people assume that the best way to build strong relationships is to keep quiet, keep your head down and eyes closed. The worst thing you can do when you have a concern or even sense a problem is to let it fester.

Recommendation: Ask, talk, and engage people in the spirit of inquiry and understanding. You don’t need to wait until you have an ironclad case.

Mistake Two – Delay

Some managers see coaching opportunities but procrastinate. They say to them, “I will make a move at the right moment when I am not so busy.” We rationalized that there will be an ideal time to talk. As a result, we do more damage as we wait for this magical moment to appear.

Recommendation: Keep people in perspective, and budget time to talk with them. Explore situations and find solutions to common problems.

Mistake three – Dominate

When some supervisors do open up dialogue, they are unable to control the floodgates. The conversation whips into a firestorm of accusations, venting, and anger, and lecture. The vast majority of managers inadvertently dominate coaching discussions by simply talking 75% of the time or more. We sometimes mistakenly feel that we have more to say, more expertise, and wisdom.

Recommendation: Plan ahead. Rehearse your thoughts in your mind. Don’t go on for more than about 30 seconds on any one point. Generally, when you spend more than 55% of the time talking, you are overstepping the boundaries.

Mistake four- Prescribe

Many of us take pride in our expertise. As supervisors, we feel that we have a lot to offer, and that we know what is best. We forget that management coaching is really supposed to help define the situation and facilitate an agreement or solution so that others can feel ownership. Once we begin selling our pre-formed ideas, our ability to brainstorm and participate diminishes.

Recommendation: Ask questions. Inquire before you advocate. Try to guide rather than dictate. Find out what the other person knows and what solutions they have in mind.

Mistake five- Denial

Too many leaders do not create two-way relationships. It is easier to see the faults and needs of others than to identify them in ourselves. This phenomena is called a “self-serving bias.” Encourage and seek out feedback from others. If you model a willingness to develop and improve, others around you will also.

Recommendation: Try to identify your contributions to the issues and concerns. Be open, up-front, and candid. Don’t get defensive if others see your own shortcomings. Thank them for their openness and willingness to speak up.

• He knows that his worst enemy is the pride and the self-sufficiency.
• It understands that to live extinguishing fires does not allow to generate the conditions to avoid them.
• He avoids to create rules that could not be applied.
• He constructs an ambience of work where the people want to be.
• It understands that the fear, it is not a tool to persuade the people.
• He insures himself of making people more productive.