Self-Confidence – How to build it, manage failure and succeed as a manager?
This central episode addresses self-confidence, a fundamental theme not only for personal construction, but also for the effectiveness and alignment of the manager.
Drawing on the idea that “Nothing great is accomplished without a minimum of self-confidence,” this episode explores the origin of this assurance, its role in leadership and the essential management of “excesses of quality.”
The Foundations of Confidence: Professional Life, Education and Failure
The discussion reveals that self-confidence, often fluctuating and initially low, can be solidly built through the professional sphere. Passionate work and positive feedback are a means of acquiring a professional identity that serves as a foundation of assurance.
The episode also questions the role of education and grading, which often generate stress and anxiety and do not always succeed in reinforcing confidence. Encouragement, targeted at the child’s “real gems” and points of comfort, is judged more effective than frustrating grading.
A crucial point is developed: the right to make mistakes. French culture, which dreads failure, must be transformed.
Companies that favor experimentation implicitly accept error, thereby stimulating creativity.
For a failure to be constructive, it must be analyzed and dissected factually (just like successes), allowing the individual to bounce back intelligently and avoid repeating the same mistake.
This honest debriefing is essential for learning and for building assurance.
The Mentor and the Trap of the Unattainable
The figure of the mentor is analyzed. Although the manager’s exemplarity is a powerful and transmissible guide, placing a mentor on too high a pedestal can be a blockage and a source of discouragement.
If the leader is too far ahead of their teams, they generate rejection – the teacher’s pet syndrome – because their performance becomes unattainable.
A leader must be an encouraging guide, capable of setting an example, and above all of saying “I was wrong,” which makes them fallible and attainable.
The Manager’s Assurance and Delegation
The episode criticizes the practice of promoting the best technicians into management, placing them in a discomfort where they lose their confidence.
For a manager’s takeover of a role to succeed, genuine upstream reflection is needed, formal delegation, and ensuring that the candidate has:
- Sufficient knowledge of the field to be managed.
- Transferable skills (for example, from management experiences outside the professional setting).
- Minimum motivation and assurance for the role.
A confident manager is better able to delegate easily and help their collaborators grow in skill and engagement.
Follow-up, through close onboarding pathways, is essential to ensure that the person feels secure and confident in their new position.
The Dangers of Excess Confidence (Getting Carried Away by Confidence)
Finally, the speakers address the risk of excess confidence (“getting carried away by confidence”).
When assurance becomes too strong, the leader risks no longer listening to anyone, becoming a know-it-all and disturbing the team. For managers, it is crucial to avoid too much encouragement or positivity and to find the right dosage.
The ability to question oneself is one of the best ways to measure a healthy assurance.
Listen to this episode to understand how to:
- Build lasting confidence by leveraging your professional successes.
- Establish a company culture that sees failure as learning.
- Develop aligned leadership, capable of being a guide without being unattainable.
- Better recruit and support managers as they take on their roles.
Traces Le Podcast
- Resilience, adaptation and robustness.
- The life project
- The principles guaranteeing flexibility
- Reducing the gap between saying and doing
- Engagement
- The concomitance of the individual and the collective
- Nothing great is accomplished without a minimum of self-confidence
- Reducing power struggles and power dynamics
- The law of the objective
- Putting an end to deficiency management for good
- Double accommodation
- The state of vigilance
- The choice of fundamentals
- Authentic vision
- Equi management: Toward a new ecology of the Manager
- The genesis of the Traces project
- Welcome to “Traces”