The building blocks of leadership confidence

When I moved into my first leadership role, I assumed that leadership confidence was something you either turned up with or you didn't.

And I didn’t.

But I did build my leadership confidence and effectiveness over time, largely through somewhat painful trial and error.

It was only later, when I learned about the concept of psychological capital, that I could see a way to frame the experiences that had helped me develop, and that continue to help me today.

Psychological capital, or PsyCap, is the name Fred Luthans and his colleagues gave to a set of positive psychological resources that shape how well people perform and cope at work. They define it as a positive psychological state of development made up of four things:

Take the first letter of each and you get the shorthand it tends to be remembered by: HERO.

And it matters: when researchers pooled 51 studies covering more than 12,000 employees, they found that the employees with higher PsyCap had stronger performance and higher job satisfaction, as well as lower levels of stress and anxiety (Avey, Reichard, Luthans, & Mhatre, 2011).

So, the value of building and maintaining these psychological resources is self-evident. And there are two things about the definition that explain why this framework is so useful to a new leader.

First, PsyCap is what researchers call "state-like". It sits between the fixed parts of who you are, like your personality or your intelligence (traits), and the passing feelings of a single morning (moods). As they are state-like, these resources are open to development, so you are not stuck with the level you happen to have now, and neither is anyone on your team (Luthans, Avolio, Avey, & Norman, 2007).

Second, PsyCap works as a package. Hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism each stand on their own, but they share a common thread, a positive angle on your chances of success when you put in the effort, and the combined resource predicts performance and wellbeing better than any single one of them alone (Luthans, Avolio, Avey, & Norman, 2007). In other words, the whole is worth more than the four parts added together.

Here is what each resource is, and one way to build it in yourself.

In this research, hope is not wishful thinking. It has two parts: knowing what you are aiming for (goals), and working out the routes that will get you there, with the sense that you can move along them (pathways) (Snyder, 2002). Leaders who are high in hope don't just fixate on the destination, they keep open a few ways of reaching it, so a blockage becomes a detour rather than a dead end.

A quick practice for building hope is to take one or two goals that really matter to you this quarter and write down more than one way you might reach each of them. If a planned route closes, and they often do, you already have another pathway.

Efficacy (or self-efficacy) is your belief that you can succeed at a specific task in front of you. Its strongest source is mastery: doing the thing and seeing it work (Bandura, 1997). This is why waiting to feel ready for the whole of leadership rarely works. The confidence follows the doing.

So rather than judging yourself against the entire role, you could break it into smaller pieces you can succeed at, and let those wins accumulate. If chairing a leadership meeting feels daunting, start by chairing one agenda item well, then two, and so on. I've written before about how to build confidence this way, and self-efficacy is the engine underneath it.

Resilience is your capacity to keep going, and to adapt, when things go against you. Of the four resources, it is the one that responds most strongly to deliberate development: a pre-registered review of controlled trials found the largest gains here (Lupșa, Vîrgă, Maricuțoiu, & Rusu, 2020).

When something goes wrong, you could separate what you can actually learn and act on from what you can't, and note the strengths and the support that you can draw on to help you. In other words, don't focus negatively on what you could or should have done; focus instead on what you learned and how you can use that learning next time. This is close to the ground I covered on mental toughness, and it is a resource you strengthen by using it.

Optimism here is not blind positivity. It is the habit of explaining setbacks as specific and temporary rather than permanent and personal, while staying honest about the difficulty in front of you. Long-term readers will recognise this as the realistic positivity I keep coming back to.

You could get into the practice of examining a setback in terms of what was specific to that situation (I got tripped up by that real curveball question), rather than by reference to broad, personal generalisations (I always get these things wrong). That keeps you moving forward without pretending the problem isn't there.

These four resources build on each other. Hope gives you pathways, efficacy gets you moving along them, resilience keeps you going when a blocker comes along, and optimism keeps the whole thing pointed forward.

Together they are most of what we actually mean when we talk about leadership confidence. And there is good news in the research for anyone who feels short of them: PsyCap is developable in leaders specifically, and the leaders who build it go on to develop faster (Pitichat, Reichard, Kea-Edwards, Middleton, & Norman, 2018).

So, this is what the research tells us: hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism are four resources you can build, and the confidence you have been waiting to feel is mostly these four working together.

You don't have to arrive in leadership already sure of yourself. You can build what the role asks of you, one resource at a time.

Building these resources is also the groundwork for building them in your team, which is what we'll look at next week.

I'd genuinely like to hear what you think. Please hit reply and let me know: does the idea of psychological capital ring true for where you are as a leader? And what other leadership areas would you like me to cover in the next few weeks? I read and respond to every reply, and your answers shape what I write next.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.