Competence And Confidence Go Hand In Hand

Following up on my last post, I saw this great commentary about the relationship between competence and confidence in a recent Time magazine article. The piece is about Obama's plans for what to focus on first when he takes over as President of the United States. This particular paragraph falls in the middle of a section about the dire straits within the financial market right now, and what the new President will need to do in order to right the ship:

"Just like its banks and its carmakers, America's shattered confidence is in serious need of a bailout. And the thing about competence is that it nourishes fresh confidence. 'Yes, we can' is both an affirmation of optimism and the essential claim of the competent. When the slogan is rooted in a record of accomplishment - when tomorrow's yes-we-can is backed up by yesterday's yes-we-did - confidence and competence begin to feed on each other. This virtuous cycle of possibility isn't the whole of leadership, but it is an important part and perhaps the element most needed in today's sea of troubles."
- David Von Drehle, "Why History Can't Wait", Time magazine, Dec 29/08 - Jan 5/09

I think that's a very key perspective on leadership, and one that I wholly subscribe to. Nothing rattles the confidence of people quite like the fear that their leaders aren't up to the job. George W. Bush's record, especially over the past couple of years, illustrates that point painfully well.

For anyone in a leadership position today, my advice (for whatever it may be worth) is this: Establish a record of saying what you're going to do and then doing what you say. In other words, as the preceding article put it so eloquently, work hard to ensure that tomorrow's yes-we-can rah-rah speech is in fact given some weight by yesterday's yes-we-did track record. That simple feedback mechanism, implemented in the form of weekly updates, All-Hands meetings, newsletters or whatever, will build up so much confidence among those whose fortunes you're in charge of, that you'll soon find that they'll follow you wherever you lead. Failure to do so, on the other hand, as we've all observed so many times in our travels, will lead to situations like we have in the U.S. financial sector at the moment.