Is Confidence bad because it comes from Privilege?
A LinkedIn conversation pointed me to a Harvard Business Review article on How to Spot an Incompetent Leader (https://hbr.org/2020/03/how-to-spot-an-incompetent-leader). It promoted the idea of using hiring assessments to determine if someone is actually competent or potentially overconfident, bordering on arrogant.
While I understand the desire to streamline the hiring process for large organizations, I’m not generally one for simplistic assessments. And this was definitely one of those.
By answering all no, one is determined to have zero probability of being an incompetent leader. Conversely, one is likely an incompetent leader if they answer all yes. I guess the idea is that narcissists are proud of their extreme beliefs in themselves (“I always, I never”). The assessment feels too transparent and potentially bias-leading to be useful as a hiring tool. Better for patting ourselves on the back.
Humans are too complex to assess through 9 yes/no answers. Isn’t that why we’re getting rid of the SATs for college admissions? (Not that I fully agree with that move either.) But I digress.
Judging people as competent if they APPEAR confident
The appearance of confidence through body language and other non-verbal communication is our first step, and an important one, in our assessment of someone’s competence. If anyone can think of an effective and competent leader who does NOT appear confident, please let me know. I don’t think they exist.
The problem comes when we stop our assessment at that superficial appearance and don’t check for deeper indicators of confidence. This says more about our desire for a quick yes/no answer and possibly lack of skills to tell the difference, than it does about the appearance of confidence being a bad indicator of someone’s competence. In fact, appearing confident is an important one of many indicators that someone will be a good leader.
Is Confidence linked to Privilege?
Coming back to the discussion around the article, it also highlighted people’s belief that confidence is linked to privilege. This is a problematic way of thinking. It implies that confidence comes from what people get (fixed mindset), rather than what they work towards (growth mindset).
In my experience in mental health, confidence is linked to more to our skills and ability to manage our self-limiting beliefs, rather than to our privilege.
Privilege is subjective and often based on our perception of scarcity. What I think is scarce feels like privilege to me.
At the same time, I discount my own privileges that other people see as scarce because I am not explicitly aware of them or I have come to take them for granted.
I recognize our tendency to compare ourselves to others and notice what they have that we don’t. Even more so in this day and age of social media. At the same time, it has become a thing to be ashamed of our privilege and to view confidence as an indicator of something undeserved and sullied.
Yet, we also say “don’t judge a book by its cover”. We don’t know what the book went through to get where it is!
Being born to privilege doesn't reflect the major factor of how much one develops the skills to take advantage of what privilege one is born with. Which appears to be the way most "underprivileged" people thrive.
How NOT to limit our own success
Focusing on what we don’t have control over (other people’s privilege) is a highly effective way to limit our own success. It makes us feel miserable and hopeless about our current status. It distracts us from paying attention to what we CAN do to improve our situation. Why would we want to do that??
We can develop the skills to retrain our brains to focus on what we DO have control over: taking advantage of our privilege to develop more of it and use it for good!