The struggle to exude confidence at work is real, but sometimes the quest for confidence slides into arrogance. Rachel shares her own hard-earned lessons with four tips to help you project confidence without being a jerk.
HGTV, but not so much in real life.) As you move work along, build check-in points into your process. Let people watch as you make the sausage, and give your peers, your leader, your stakeholders a chance to influence the flavor before it’s fully cooked.
It does take confidence to pull back the curtain on an unfinished product. But it will better the outcome every time.
4. Say the bold thing
Arrogance encourages you to say what someone wants to hear. It will make you a hero just for today. Confidence allows you to say what they need to hear, and it will make you the hero in the long-term, where it really counts.
Arrogance encourages you to say what someone wants to hear; confidence allows you to say what they need to hear.
Fueled by feedback from my leader, I started finding moments of courage to push back on what my business client, George, believed was best.
George was a salesman. His own climb up the corporate ladder was driven by his excellence in sales, and so he believed finding and growing great sales talent was the key to his business’s success. In our early days, as long as I showed George a plan designed to do just that, he’d praise my genius.
But in time I came to realize this was a short-sighted play. We had great sales talent. The problem wasn’t finding more, but rather, finding ways to enhance collaboration between sales and client management. A stronger partnership between the teams would enhance the customer experience, in turn delivering bigger business results.
The first time I suggested this to George, there was no smile. But I’d done my research. I’d compared us with other companies doing the same, and ultimately, I won his support.
My recommendation delivered success in the long-run. But it took me time to find the confidence to say the thing he wasn’t ready to hear.
2008 was a painful year for me. And yet it delivered some of the most important lessons I’ve learned along the way about confidence. And as I pass these along to you, I realize there might be a fifth bonus insight: it takes a lot to share your own journey of failure (mine) in service of someone else’s success (yours). I choose to hope that’s a reflection of the confidence I’ve gained along the way.