Daily Archives: September 17, 2014

Self-Confidence and Leadership

As Penn State students tackle our Career Fair this week, I am beginning another semester teaching my course on Health Care Leadership. As part of the first assignment in class, I ask students to look over models of health care leadership competencies from the National Center on Healthcare Leadership and the American College of Healthcare Executives and identify what they believe are the three most important competencies for young, healthcare leaders.

One of the most common competencies identified by students in this exercise is “self-confidence”. I always have mixed feelings about that competency.  On the one hand, I think it’s undeniable that having some measure of self-confidence is needed to take on leadership roles.  It takes some measure of self-confidence just to approach an employer at a Career Fair. However, I always reflect on Jim Collins’ discussion of the humility of “Good to Great” leaders, and I recall the Chronicle of Higher Education article on how to “Embrace Your Inner Insecurity”.

That article cites the work of Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and others suggesting that less confident individuals have greater success because they pay attention and respond to negative feedback, work harder to avoid being unprepared, and are perceived to be less arrogant by others.  I’ve heard from more than one employer about interns and new employees who get into deeper waters than they should because they are overconfident about their knowledge or abilities. The overly self-confident can also create an environment where others do not question their ideas, leading to a failure to examine other solutions or pitfalls of the leader’s plan.

I like the term used in the text I use for my class–well-cultivated self-awareness.  What young healthcare leaders need is not self-confidence and the blinders that may come with that, but a balanced awareness. They need to understanding their strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of others.  They need to base their life in solid personal values, not a simplistic belief in their own abilities.  They need to be open to the criticism and ideas of others, having a healthy self-doubt of their own ideas.  And, they need the humility to recognize that their success is inextricably linked to those they lead. In the long-run, I think self-awareness beats self-confidence.