Does a Lack of Confidence Get in Your Way?

Jenny Cole: 1:02

Hello and welcome back to Positively Leading. This podcast provides practical tips and tricks for those middle-leaders in schools, particularly those who are new and aspiring leaders, in their leadership journey. One of the things that I know through the work that I do, both in leadership development but also in my coaching, is that confidence can be a real issue, particularly for women, and so we're going to dive deep today into confidence in two ways. One, we're going to look at the confidence paradox and then we're going to look at the confidence gap and what we can do about that. In fact, we might even have a second episode where I give you some very straightforward strategies for how to deal with both, but first I thought we'd look at what it is that the research says and some of the facts behind whether or not confidence is truly just a problem for women. So the work that I'm going to be sharing with you today comes from two places One from the book why Do so Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? And secondly, from the book the Confidence Code, and I will put links to those in the show notes. Thomas can't pronounce his surname, can't think of it off the top of my head either who wrote why Do so Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders also has a sensational TED talk that I will link to at the bottom, and the Confidence Code by Kayne Shipley is a super little book that I recommend everybody has. There is now a version for girls, so if you work in a secondary school or even in a primary school, or whether you have girls of your own, it's a great little book.

Jenny Cole: 2:44

We're going to talk about the confidence conundrum first, and it's a well-known challenge because we often hear about or we think that leaders need both confidence and competence, and that would be a pretty fair assumption. However, in the book why Do so Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders, thomas shows us how confidence is rewarded more for men. So the more confident a man appears, the more competent we assume he is. However, the more confident and more outspoken and more forward that a woman is. The opposite is actually true. Their confidence actually de-values what we think about their competence, and we add things like the more warm and likeable a man is, the more confident he is, whereas the more confident a woman is, the less we see her as warm and likeable. So let's have a little look at the confidence gap and explore how societal expectations and stereotypes contribute to women underestimating their abilities, and this is what happens. The research pretty clear that men will elevate their capabilities. In fact, I read a really funny statistic the other day that said 60% of men believe that they could fly a plane if, in emergency, they needed to. I would consider that a great overestimation of most men's abilities, whereas women tend to underestimate their capabilities and their abilities for a variety of reasons.

Jenny Cole: 4:22

Researchers explored this kind of phenomenon and some of the things that contribute to it are this there's those societal expectations and stereotypes. So from an early age, women are groomed to be modest, to not be too loud, to collaborate and to share but not to overshare and not to put themselves forward. Girls are socialized to be modest, whereas boys are socialized to assert themselves, and this upbringing can contribute to women underestimating their abilities. I thought that it was happening a whole lot less. Definitely boomers, boomer women, very clever women, were told to not outshine people, not to step above their station. I'm Gen X and I certainly got that message through my boomer parents, which is don't get above your station. Also, that real societal role around. It's not a women's job to do this and that that's changing a little bit. However, I think there's some other things that are coming into the fact that girls and women are just confident as they need to be. The other thing that research shows is an attribution bias, so women are far more likely to attribute their success to external factors such as luck or as the team, and they will say, oh, it wasn't me, it was a joint effort. Or they will thank their mentors or the people around them that worked for them, whereas men are more likely to accept that there was something about what it is that they did that led to their success. The problem with that is, if you externalize, it can impact on your self-confidence, with women downplaying their competence as well as their confidence.

Jenny Cole: 6:14

Women are more prone to a fear of failure and perfectionism the couple of things that go into play with this. We've got a part of our brain that is bigger than men's, the singular gyrus gyrate. Sorry if I've said that incorrectly, but it's the part of the brain where we assess worry and assess risk, and so this is the part of the brain that does all of those. What am I going to eat tonight? Will everything be all right? If I don't do that, what's going to happen to XYZ? We're constantly worrying about both people and processes and that makes us a little bit fear and risk averse. So we take less risks than men, and I'm not talking just about women. Sometimes this is very appropriate to other people in marginalized groups. So we've got a real pressure to meet high standards. So girls are very much socialized to get good scores, to do well, to produce neat, lovely work, whereas boys we tend to accept that things are going to be a little bit messy and that they're going to take risks and so forth. This is where I talked about the socialization.

Jenny Cole: 7:24

While I think that we've broken the barrier of feeling like we need to dim our shine and be modest and stand behind our man, I think we're actually creating girls who are hugely perfectionistic, who will not take a risk and put things out into the world for fear of failure. That's one of the things that Kay and Shipley talk about a lot in the confidence code is that we've engineered failure. Out of most of what the girls do and I don't know if it's their term, but it's fail-fast and often. And now Amy Edmondsson has put out a fabulous book about the importance of failure in the growth and development process but our confidence won't let us fail and instead, in order to overcome that fear of not being enough and not being good enough. We women will often be perfectionistic.

Jenny Cole: 8:16

There's a workplace culture that plays a significant part in shaping confidence levels. I always assumed that education, particularly primary and special education, were very female dominated industries, and I was surrounded, as an early career teacher and leader, with fantastic, bright, forward thinking women teaching around me, and I was stunned when I got to my first principles conference to find that I was literally the only woman in the room. I was youngest by a long way. There was a senior psychologist who was female, but I was the only principal in the room who was female, and that just blew my mind. Where were all of these clever women? Now, we've moved a long way in the 25 years. However, there's still a lot in workplace culture that really doesn't allow women, people from diverse backgrounds and marginalized communities to shine.

Jenny Cole: 9:21

Impostor syndrome is another one, and I don't care whether you think it exists or not. There's a bit of a debate about that at the moment, but it's that feeling that somebody's gonna come and tap you on the shoulder and say, sorry, we chose the wrong person. Or look, we've given it some more thought and you're not good enough. All the who do? I think I am. I'm just a little teacher and here I am sitting in the big chair and what would I know? We don't want to be exposed or fear of being a fraud, and so it kind of feeds into each other.

Jenny Cole: 9:52

Does confidence make the imposter syndrome or does the imposter syndrome feed into confidence? That really doesn't matter, but it's a thing which is the voices in ahead, the narrative, the stories that we tell ourselves. We second guess ourselves, we don't back ourselves the same way that men do. And you've heard all of the research around. Men will apply for a job if they think that one day they might be able to do the selection criteria, whereas women Think that they have to not only achieve every single element on the selection criteria but to have nailed it at a high level. And so the confidence and the confidence kind of go hand in hand here and the imposter syndrome sticks its claws in. And all of a sudden you've got women in particular who aren't applying for jobs because they don't feel like they're ready. And lastly, the research is talking about the fact that women receive substantially less constructive feedback and more emotive feedback, whereas men are given very clear, precise feedback and recognition in ways that they can grow and develop. So women are given feedback like oh you're so lovely, you've been a breath of fresh air and everyone in the team loves you. Well, while that is really nice to hear, it's not growth and development feedback, whereas we give men very much more specific feedback on things that they can take action on. So these are the things that might lead to the confidence gap. Our hormones don't help. As a woman, we have estrogen, which is all about tending and befriending. We feel like it's our role or our job to nurture and to care for others, whereas men have far more testosterone, which is the risk taking hormone, and it gives them that drive to move forward. Their factors they're limiting factors, but they're there and they are real.

Jenny Cole: 11:52

One of the things that Kay and Shipley say the definition they give is confidence is that thing that turns your thoughts into action. So you might have a thought when you apply for that job, or a thought that says wouldn't it be great to take on that project? I wonder what strategic development I need to be involved in. Confidence is that thing that turns that thought into an action. So we've all done things where we've blamed forward, got a little bit frightened and moved back again. Confidence is really hard to define, really hard to measure, but we know it when we see it. It's that thing that lets us start and keep going. And, in fact, what we know about confidence is, once you do start, you keep going, and in the next episode I'm going to share with you the five, possibly six, things that are super important when you want to build your confidence.

Jenny Cole: 12:42

But I just want to talk about a research study by Zachariah. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what they were investigating, but first of all, they took a big group of people and divided them into male and female, and they gave them a challenge where they had to rotate a three-dimensional shape in space and answer some questions, and in the first cohort, men did significantly better than women. They did really well, and the researchers went yeah, okay, See, told you, men are better at rotating three-dimensional figures in space. But the researchers went back and were looking through the data and what they realized was that there were large gaps in the answers for the women. There were lots of unanswered questions, and so they hypothesized that if a woman wasn't confident in their answer, they left it out. So they took another cohort of people, gave them exactly the same task to rotate these three-dimensional shapes in space.

Jenny Cole: 13:46

Except this time they said we don't care whether or not you get the right answer, we just want some answers because we're looking at how to understand what people are thinking. And so they primed the group not to care too much about right answers but just to make an effort. And when that happened, no longer did men outperform women on that test. Quite often the women did as well or even better than their male counterparts, which led the researchers to think that confidence was a choice that women were making not to try. When things were felt too hard or too difficult, or if they were worried about getting things wrong, women were taking an active choice not to try. So with that hypothesis in mind, they got a third group of people and they said we don't care what your answers are, give it your best shot, write it down. And then they asked the participants to rate the confidence that their answer was correct. So the first time they did this experiment, men did better than women. The second time, where women were told just to try, they did as well or better. Now, when women were asked how confident are you that your answer is correct? Their results plummeted, and this is a really good example of firstly making a choice not to try and then, when questioned, we worry that we're not right and second guess ourselves and make mistakes or, in fact, try even less or cover up for the fact that we don't know. We don't back ourselves and our confidence the way men do.

Jenny Cole: 15:33

A lot of women that I coach and that I have in my leadership development courses bring me examples that are almost textbook, and so the classic is people who don't apply for positions and they don't have to be senior positions, but they don't apply for team leader positions because they think that they're not ready, and I hear this all the time. I'm just doing more research so that I'm ready. I'm just going to do more courses so that I'm ready. You don't become ready by reading. It's like you don't become a good cook by reading cookbooks or flicking through Facebook recipes. You become a good cook by doing and practicing and having a few failures along the way. I had a woman in my launching into leadership course, which is my signature course for new and aspiring leaders who really want to start their leadership journey or are just beginning it and just need to launch into it. It's a beginning course and I had a woman who had her master's in educational leadership and I said, with your respect, what are you doing here? And she said, oh, I just don't know enough yet. And I said I suspect you know all that you need to know. What you need to do is to take action.

Jenny Cole: 16:54

I'm going to record another podcast about perfectionism because it just it needs one all of its own, but I'm sure you, or people that you know, are crippled by perfectionism and that need to get things right and perfect before you can put it out into the world.

Jenny Cole: 17:13

So the confidence gap and the confidence conundrum it's true, it's real, it happens. So some of us it's just a non thing. A lack of confidence and a lack of self belief is not universal, but for those people for whom it is an issue, it can be crippling and it can stop you putting yourself forward, but it can also stop you enjoying the words that you're probably very good at doing. I look forward to talking to you next time about the steps that you can take and the tips and tricks that you need to be aware of in order to build your leadership confidence or your confidence more generally. If you liked this episode, please rate and review. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a joy to have you here with me. My name is Jenny Cole and I will see you in the next episode.

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