A Key to Better Leadership: Confident Humility
“ The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it. ”―J. M. Barrie
A collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management, is a quick, effective tool that you can learn and use in under 15 minutes and have the potential to significantly impact your success.
The Objective:
Enhance your performance by cultivating curiosity and remaining in a learning mode throughout your career.
Nano Instrument:
Confidence and humility are frequently viewed as diametrically opposed. However, if you think about the leaders, you admire the most, chances are they have both qualities.
Confident humility is the ability to admit your ignorance and weaknesses while remaining confident in your expertise and strengths, confidence without humility breeds arrogance and humility without confidence breeds crippling doubt. Confident humility enables you to have faith in yourself while questioning your strategies.
“ Believe you can and you’re halfway there. ”―Theodore Roosevelt
The was the first major sports league to close when the pandemic began in the spring of 2020. “I don’t know how we’re going to get games running again,” Commissioner Adam Silver told his team, “But we believe in our ability to figure it out.”
He invited his team to rethink their assumptions and experiment with many different alternatives by telling them he was confident in their abilities but uncertain about their strategies. They were the first league to reopen that summer, and they ran a massive bubble without a single COVID-19 infection.
“ The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he’s dead. ”―Bette Davis
Steps to Take:
Create a learning culture (as opposed to a performance culture where the emphasis is solely on results) by admitting your ignorance, challenging best practices, and rewarding people who try new ideas even if they fail. Evidence suggests that those who work in learning cultures innovate more and make fewer mistakes.
Allow yourself to reap the benefits of doubt; doubts can motivate you to work harder and smarter by putting you in the mindset of a beginner. When you challenge your knowledge and strategies, you become more motivated to seek out new insights, which can broaden and deepen your learning.
Determine a source of conflicting information or an opposing viewpoint According to research, even acknowledging a single reason why we might be wrong can be enough to reduce overconfidence.
Read more at www.anoma.io
