This article is part of an HDI Series geared towards topics I’ll be discussing with technical support leaders and professionals at the Support World Live Summit in August 2-9, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The topic I’ll be speaking about is “How to Build a Help Desk That Champions Your Culture.” Hope to see you there!
In IMHO #37, we talked about the “Three C’s of a Cultural Champion.” In this article, we’ll talk about how to nurture confident people within your team—the first “C” on the list. As leaders, we shouldn’t just recruit and hire confident individuals. It’s our job to create a place for people to be confident. Creating an environment that nurtures confident people will benefit you in three ways: it strengthens your already confident team members, it develops other individuals to become confident, and it attracts confident candidates to join your team.
Dr. Amy Edmonson, Harvard Business School professor, stated that this place to be confident starts with a level of “psychological safety.” According to Dr. Edmonson, “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.”
So, how do you create psychological safety in your team environment? Here are six ways to do it:
“I am capable”
Provide ways to succeed
Ownership
Means to do well
Create Opportunities
Help them connect
“I am capable”
If your team members can say to themselves, “I am capable,” you’re definitely doing something right. If you’re not quite there, this only means that you need to create a place where they can start believing in themselves. Have an environment where people can speak freely—share their ideas, make suggestions—having a culture of open candor. Developing their willingness and courage to speak-up is key to creating confident people.
Provide ways to succeed
As leaders, it’s part of our responsibility to ensure that our direct reports succeed. The key factor to do this is to not just to simply hand them the “solution” to succeed. It’s important that they pave their own way to that goal. It’s important for them to go through the process to stretch their skills to achieve a goal. It may take a bit longer for them to achieve it, compared to just handing them the solution, but it creates grit and stamina to learn and be challenged. Failing is inevitable in this process. That’s okay. As long as you’re there to provide immediate feedback, so they can make the proper iterative adjustments to reach the goal. As General Stanley McChrystal said, “Great leaders can let you fail, yet not let you be a failure.”
Ownership
Quint Studer, in his latest book, “The Busy Leader’s Handbook,” used a great analogy on ownership. He compared employees that are tenants to a rental property, to employees who are owners/co-owners of the property. The former would not care much about the financials of the landlord—the property value, the tax rate, the mortgage payments—compared to the later who wants to know how much taxes are being paid, if the mortgage payments are being made, etc. Confident people take ownership in projects and initiatives, and the in the organization’s culture itself. Giving them something to call “their own” instills confidence. Knowing that “this project came from their work/idea” would definitely improve confidence.
Means to do well
Having the drive is not the only factor for anyone to do well. An important part of doing well is having the right skill, with the proper level of proficiency, to do the task. To nurture confident people as leaders, we need to provide a means for them to achieve the necessary skills. We can either teach them the skills ourselves, provide resources to get the proper training, or connect them with those who can provide them that knowledge.
Create Opportunities
Ideally, your confident team member would create their own opportunities, but you still carry the role of allowing those opportunities to blossom. You are privy to different initiatives across the organization. That’s a great opportunity for you to find different initiatives that you can assign your direct reports in. You may even have projects assigned to you that have separate tasks or sub-tasks that can be delegated to your team members.
Help them connect
We can only provide so much insight and knowledge to our team members. It’s our job to connect them to the right people in order to accelerate their learning of a certain skill or their journey towards a specific career path. Our knowledge and experiences are limited, but our network of leaders and subject-matter experts in the organization can multiply our effectiveness in nurturing confident people.
Crowdsourcing FTW
How do you develop confident people in your team? How do you create an environment where they can thrive and be successful in their roles? Do you have other ways to nurture confident people?