Quiet your inner critic and boost your leadership confidence with these 6 effective strategies backed by industry thought leaders and influencers.
As a leader, you have a profound effect on your team. You have direct influence over your team’s morale, development, and success. But here’s an uncomfortable truth: Nobody follows an unconfident leader.
Confident leadership can be a Catch-22: You don’t want to be too confident because that can come off as arrogant and unappealing. Conversely, insecurity, self-doubt, and other emotions tied to Imposter Syndrome can cause you to question your own decision-making and whether or not you’re qualified to be a leader in the first place. This can be just as disadvantageous and detrimental to your career.
6 Effective Strategies to Build Confident Leadership
As all great leaders know, real growth happens outside of your comfort zone. Calibrating your leadership skills, while uncomfortable, is critical to success. With a little awareness and practice, you can fine-tune and fast-track your confidence and lead your team to new heights in no time.
Here are 6 effective strategies to boost your confidence as a leader.
1. Prioritize mastering self-awareness. One of the biggest stumbling blocks keeping good leaders from becoming great is a lack of self-awareness. Being intricately in tune with yourself—your strengths, weaknesses, triggers, success drivers, and more—sets the stage for confident leadership that builds lasting followership, drives continuous organizational improvement, and influences outcomes.
2. Don’t underestimate the power of making small connections. Contrary to popular belief, humility builds more confidence than arrogance ever will. A confident leader leads a team that knows they are well cared for. Connect with your team often to show you prioritize a trust-based relationship. When they share openly and honestly, put down your phone and listen. The bonus? They will feel comfortable enough to give you truthful feedback about your leadership.
3. Don’t resist feedback—seek it out and embrace it. If you want to grow as a leader, ask another successful leader you trust to give you feedback; instead of cringing at the idea of hearing your weaknesses said aloud, take this direct feedback as the invaluable gift that it is—and use it to improve your skills, build your confidence, and achieve peak performance. A year from now, you’ll be amazed at how far you’ve come.
4. Be vulnerable. Brené Brown is a motivational speaker and NYT bestselling author who has turned vulnerability into an art form. In fact, she has conducted a seven-year study on courage and leadership that prove vulnerability is key to being a confident and powerful leader. The findings showed that vulnerability was critical in building trust, improving performance, and promoting your influence as a leader. She says, “By cultivating our courage to be who we are uncensored, compassion to others and to ourselves, and connections with people through both good times and bad, we can begin to recognize our self-worth and live with meaning and satisfaction. We can be us, exactly as we are, and go through life with confidence and joy.”
5. Learn from leaders you admire. Similar to embracing feedback, learning from leaders you admire can be a powerful way to enhance your leadership skills and build your confidence. Lean on their wisdom, experience, and any mistakes they may have made so you don’t have to. Ask how they accomplished a specific goal or about the biggest challenges they faced when leading a team during a recession. Not only will you gain valuable and applicable insights into their journey, but you’ll realize that even the best, most confident leaders surprisingly have imperfect pasts and checkered track records.
6. Trust in your experience. Imposter Syndrome is loosely explained as doubting your own abilities and feeling like a fraud. That’s why during those times when you’re plagued with self-doubt and insecurity, or you feel like you just aren’t cut out for this, you’ll need to lean on facts and data to remind you of your qualifications to quiet your inner critic. If you’ve been in Finance for 15 years, or you are a Subject Matter Expert on SEO, you can rest assured that the proof is already in the pudding and you have the requisite experience and know-how to tackle any challenge, even when fickle emotions attempt to lead you astray.
Get Empowered for Impact
Do you want to be a more confident leader and don’t know where to start? If you want to enhance your leadership skills in the post-pandemic workforce or reach peak performance as an authority in your industry, ExecTrek™ can help.
Discover how to zero in on behaviors that can impact business and propel you forward. From communication and time management to decision-making and image optics, RC3 Partners provides transformational Executive Coaching and Leadership Development to leaders seeking their competitive edge. Contact us today to learn more.
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