Gaining more experience won’t make you more confident at work (and what to do instead)
Article Overview/TL;DR
Building confidence at work is a complex topic, especially for underrepresented groups such as women and People of Color. It’s important to recognize that we still live in a world where having the training, skills, and experience is not necessarily enough to feel confident.
Key takeaways:
Confidence is not built in isolation. Our environment, social factors, experiences, and the actions we take all influence how confident we feel. Some of these factors, such as privilege, we can’t control.
To build confidence, understand how you are perceived and understand your environment. Know your limits - if your workplace that has values which don’t align with yours, you may choose to walk away.
Connect with your accomplishments, get support in the form of a mentor, sponsor and a wider community.
Fake it ‘till you make it. Come up with a persona of someone who is very confident and follow their lead in meetings, 1:1s and decision making.
One of the biggest mistakes I see leaders make in their career development is thinking that gaining more skills and experience will make them more confident:
‘Once I _______, I’ll be more confident.’
Know what’s expected of me
Complete this training
Build more skills
Gain more experience in area x
Get a promotion
Get a bigger title
Have any of the thoughts above crossed your mind? They have definitely taken up a lot of space in my mind. And so I did the training, I got the experience, the promotions, and the titles. But none of it gave me the confidence that I wanted and needed. Even after many years in what looked like successful manager positions from the outside, I still thought about pursuing a degree in computer science, only because I believed it would make me a more confident (and better) leader.
In my coaching and mentoring practice, I often speak with leaders who want to increase their confidence. Most of them are women, People of Color, and members of other underrepresented groups in our industry.
Let’s be real - I wish we lived in a world where all that mattered was training, skills, and experience. But we don’t:
Too many hiring managers still don’t proceed with candidates because “they’re not confident enough”.
Exuding confidence is still a main requirement for many leadership and executive positions.
Promotions are often granted based on (perceived) confidence.
While white feminism and #girlboss have brought more white women into higher-level leadership positions, these movements have also left behind many. Even worse, they framed the lack of professional progress as the result of individual failure, entirely negating the complex dynamics behind accomplishments or our lack thereof.
Confidence at work is complicated for many of us
The topic of confidence at work is tricky, especially for those of us who aren’t cis white men (who, historically, workplaces were designed for). In more than one performance review, I received feedback that I should “be more confident”. And it really bothered me.
In studies, “Men were found to be told they needed to develop confidence for specific skills. As for women, the advice was more generic: to ‘become more self-confident’ without concrete guidance around how to do that.” Studies also show that it is inherent inequalities at work, such as lower pay and childcare responsibilities, that heap stress on women.
“Confidence is not just gendered — it’s weaponized against women. When women fail to achieve career goals, leaders are prone to attribute it to a lack of self-confidence. And when women demonstrate high levels of confidence through behaviors, such as being extroverted or assertive, they risk overdoing it and, ironically, being perceived as lacking confidence.” (HBR.org)
“‘Every time we heard talk about inequality [in organizations], you just knew the [idea of] confidence was going to be right behind it,’ says [Rosalind] Gill, professor of cultural and social analysis at City University, [co-author of the book Confidence Culture]. ‘It's almost as if inequalities, and gender inequalities in particular, were being explained away by a confidence deficit among women. It's letting all of these institutions off the hook. And it's also blaming women.’”
I don’t believe in the individualistic ideas behind “Lean in” and #girlboss culture that call on each of us to “internalize the revolution” (“Lean in”, chapter one).
Challenges with confidence or imposter syndrome don’t exist in isolation and are not individual issues that are on us to fix. It’s not you, it’s the workplace that needs to be fixed.
We lack confidence because of the patriarchal, white supremacist societies we live in. We’re still underpaid by 20%, and we’re still not getting promoted at the same rates as our peers; these issues are even worse for BIPoC.
What needs to stop is workplaces demanding that members of marginalized groups in our industry “be more confident”. At the same time, we’re not there yet; and there are ways for you to feel more confident in these imperfect systems we all exist in.
Don’t believe that experience and accomplishments will give you confidence
Training, skills, experience, promotions, titles: They’re valuable! If you think they will be helpful to you in any way, you should do them. But if you want to become more confident, don’t only rely on them.
Let’s be honest - for most of us, the more experienced we get, the more we just understand what we don’t know. It’s a deeply humbling experience, and the opposite of confidence-inducing.
We all know people who have all the confidence - without the training, skills, experience, etc., and we all know people who do have these things and still aren’t confident.
What confidence is built on
Confidence isn’t just a personal issue. It isn’t built in isolation, and doesn’t grow in isolation. It comes from many sources: Our environment and social factors, our experiences, and the actions we take. These are laid out in the graphic below.
Some factors work less as sources of confidence, but negatively impact us when they’re missing: You may not feel more confident when you’re healthy, but not feeling well may impact your confidence negatively.
You don’t need all things at all times to feel confident, and you can also feel confident if you don’t have many of them!
Confidence-building factors often work as detractors: The more of the items below that you start out with, the easier it is to feel confident. And the fewer of them you have, the harder you likely have to work for it.
And we can’t control all of these factors:
You may work in an environment where you’re discriminated against, but don’t currently have the option to quit because you need the income.
None of us choose what privileges we are born with, and many of them influence confidence-building.
Access to education or experience is limited. There’s a long-running sarcastic joke among recruiters that “the best way to get experience is to have experience”.
How to really increase your confidence
Applying this holistic view, here’s the approach I’ve taken with many coaching clients to help them increase their confidence as leaders:
Understand how you’re perceived
It can be valuable to understand what your colleagues think about your work. Performance reviews and feedback can give you valuable information. This can either be useful feedback that you can use to change your approaches, or the realization that you’re in a workplace that has values which don’t align with yours, and is not going to support your confidence building. I have an article series to help you dig into how others think about your work, and how to change their perception:
Know your limits
I’ve worked on this topic with many women, some of them Women of Color. These are just some of the groups that are still discriminated against in society and the tech industry. I review with each client how much they actually want to invest in their confidence, how many of the issues they’re facing are likely related to systemic problems, and how they want to deal with those. Assess your own constraints:
What have you already tried? What’s worked, what hasn’t?
How much are you willing to try out in order to build your confidence?
How much energy and time do you have?
What risks are you willing to take?
Understand how much your environment contributes: If your boss asks you as a woman to “be more confident”, you may choose to work on your confidence - or to look for a new boss and new job. The same may apply if you are being talked over or find out you’re underpaid: You may choose to confront your boss, or choose that this company doesn’t deserve you.
Connect with your accomplishments
Keep a brag doc. Maintain an up-to-date record of your accomplishments, projects, and include positive feedback that you receive. Don’t just keep this so you have notes for when you need to update your CV, but also for a rainy day when you could use a reminder of everything you’ve already accomplished.
Get support
Find a sponsor who advocates for you and mentions your name in rooms that you don’t have access to (yet!).
Get a mentor. If possible, find someone with a similar background and lived experience to yours, to hear about approaches that actually work for you, instead of solutions that worked for someone else.
Get coaching: As a coach, I have your back. We may also look at what your support network looks like and strengthen or broaden it.
Find community. There’s strength in not being alone. Many Slack communities have specific channels for women, LGBTQIA+ folx, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in tech. Some examples: Some places for connecting with other leaders include the eng-managers and LeadDev Slack communities.
Fake it ‘till you make it
I’ve used this approach myself in response to being told I needed to be more confident. “Being more confident” felt really hard when I wasn’t actually feeling it. I remembered my days working at a bank, when putting on a suit every morning felt like slipping into a costume, a role that I played during the day. So I tried a similar approach:
I created a persona: Chad, 35, a hyper-confident engineering executive. Chad shares strong opinions, takes up space in discussions, doesn’t offer to take meeting notes, doesn’t take things personally, delegates a lot, holds his team accountable, and talks about his accomplishments. Chad was a lot of things that I wasn’t.
I asked myself “what would Chad do?”, in meetings, group discussions, 1:1s, or when writing emails.
I ran this experiment for almost a year, and it worked: Slipping into this persona helped me change the way I think and operate as a leader. I never “became” Chad (and I’m grateful for that), but I learned a whole set of new tools and ways of working, and ultimately, it made me more confident.
Get moving!
Get into action mode and experiment. “I want to become more confident” is such a big topic! And there are so many factors at play.
Confidence isn’t built during coaching sessions, in books, or in theory. It’s built through practice and learning.
You build confidence through action: Trying, failing or succeeding, and learning from what (didn’t) work. In coaching, we typically move into experimentation mode: Try some (smaller or bigger) things, see what happens, and learn from it. Not everything will yield positive results, but that’s not the point: Confidence comes from experiencing that you’re able to deal with setbacks and failures.
