In May 2024, I spent two weeks walking solo on the Camino in Portugal and Spain.
When I decided to commit to this venture, I saw it as a break from the weighty role of leadership and the associated care for people that is such an intrinsic part of leadership.
Traveling alone would mean I only had to see after myself—no other people’s expectations, needs, or demands. It seemed a welcome reprieve, and in many ways it was. But I also gained some valuable perspectives on leadership during this walk.
Several experiences contributed to one particular insight around confidence before the light bulb actually came on for me. The most significant happened on a sunny afternoon just after I had crossed over into Spain. There were two possible routes to the next town where I was planning to spend the night, and as was my custom on this walk, I chose the pathway closest to the coast.
I hadn’t gone too far before I met two Swiss ladies who had turned back from the coastal route. Their concern was that the boardwalk would end, and they would not be able to reach the village via the coastal route. During our conversation, I admitted to them that I didn’t actually know for certain the path would reach the town. However, I was willing to assume the risk of having to retrace my steps if the pathway ended.
They looked at each other, and one of them said, “I like his confidence. Let’s go with him.”
Admittedly, I was a bit startled. I told them quite clearly that I was willing to assume this risk for myself but not for others—that was one reason I was walking solo. However, if they were willing to take the risk for themselves, they were welcome to walk along.
They did, and we had a great walk along the Spanish Atlantic coast into the picturesque town of A Guarda, Spain.
Confidence, I’ve come to believe, is one of the cornerstones of effective leadership. It provides clear direction, inspires trust, and facilitates making critical decisions promptly. As a result, teams rise to their best possible performance in such environments and are able to handle challenges with resilience and commitment.
As I’ve worked with leaders, I’ve noted at least three different sources of confidence from which leaders draw.
The first and most common is self-confidence. This is a natural trait for many people who find themselves in leadership roles from an early age. It is this self-confidence that draws people to them and opens leadership opportunities. Many personality surveys document this trait as drive, dominance, or autonomy.
These people demonstrate a level of confidence and decisiveness that brings actionable clarity and allows a group of people to join them in a shared vision and mission.
Other people draw their confidence from social approval. Their confidence is strong and impactful when they experience affirmation and approval from people around them. This positive energy becomes a magnet to others and movements are built.
For another group of people, confidence is anchored in knowledge and their personal assurance that the decisions they are making are right. These are usually slower-paced leaders who are far more cautious and more risk averse. They tend to invest extensively in research to ensure they have explored all the possible options.
As you can likely observe, each of these styles has an inherent weakness as well.
When knowledge-based confident people make an error in judgment, they can be very slow to recover their confidence. People with socially inspired confidence struggle to return to confidence after rejection or betrayal by a trusted friend. Leaders naturally gifted with self-confidence tend to be the most resilient but even they have a breaking point.
When the self gets fatigued, wounded, or crushed, the recovery back to confidence can be long and arduous.
What exactly is confidence, and how do we as leaders protect it? For starters, confidence is not the same as certainty. Certainty has a “100 percent aura” to it that is missing from confidence. Confidence usually has an underlying consciousness of risk and uncertainty associated with it.
The confident person knows the direction or decision may be shown to be wrong, but he values decisive clarity over delay for greater certainty. Only once a decision is made can such a confident leader begin to see the results: either being assured the decision was good or confronted with the need for a decisive pivot.
This demonstrates that confidence is actually healthiest when it is saturated with humility. Humility embraces human finitude, welcomes input and counsel, and maintains a growth mindset that continues seeking and embracing new insights and information.
Yet, confidence of the healthy sort keeps us moving decisively even while we are processing new information.
Self-confident leaders are frequently labeled as being arrogant, and that likely is the Achilles’ heel of self-confident people. There is a fine line between self-confidence and arrogance, but at their root, they are polar opposites.
Arrogance is not growth-minded, postures more in the realm of certainties, and lacks a teachable, curious, and inquiring attitude. It cannot hear counterarguments but dismisses them prior to actually hearing and understanding the concern.
All leaders, no matter where their greatest source of confidence lies, must learn to be self-aware of their confidence levels and know how to protect and sustain them for the greatest effectiveness. When a leader’s confidence falters or is shaken, decision making slows, a general fog of confusion often settles over the teams they are lead, and inevitably their businesses and organizations suffer.
In a recent interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos noted that one of the keys to his success leading Amazon and his more recent endeavors was an early awareness of when he was feeling stressed. He noted that invariably there was some decision he was delaying, and that resulted in personal stress. In such situations, nearly any actionable decision was preferable to the failure to decide.
Delayed decisions only serve to cloud one’s decision-making abilities, and the downward spiral begins.
How do you protect your confidence? How aware are you of your confidence level at any given time? It’s worth paying attention to this.
I would note several keys to sustaining and strengthening confidence levels for leaders.
First, you must be aware of the significance of confidence in your role as a leader. If you really want to be a leader, you owe it to your people to cultivate and maintain a healthy level of confidence so they can flourish. You must be aware of your personal source of confidence as well as what level of that confidence you are currently operating on.
Second, you must find ways to develop your competence as a leader. Competence brings tremendous confidence, and appropriately so. Developing competence requires a consistent approach to personal growth. This should include seeking out healthy peer networks and opportunities for continued learning and even locating coaches to help you in specific areas of challenge.
Third, come to terms with the need to make decisions with uncomfortable levels of ambiguity. You will never have enough information and foresight to make many of the complex decisions required of you. Even the best leaders are making informed guesses, but they do so with clarity and then readily admit their mistakes and pivot with equal clarity.
Fourth, accept the fact that you will fail. Failures are a form of expensive education, and you want to have the humility and confidence to engage the failures thoroughly and learn as much from those investments as possible. Don’t waste these opportunities due to arrogance.
Finally, find ways to protect your confidence consistently. Take time away to think, offload your brain and emotions onto a writing pad, and adequately process what’s happening in your leadership roles. This needs to happen at regular intervals—at least weekly for a few hours, quarterly for a full day, and annually for a more extended period of time.
The tyranny of the immediate and urgent will, over time, erode the clarity of your vision. You need to master leadership of yourself in order to remain focused on the greatest priorities for the long-term, greater-good of your organization. Your team deserves it.
