Confidence is essential for every employee for being recognized by his teammates and supervisors. There are times when an employee does great work but is not appreciated and his contributions are not being recognized.
Results do not always speak for the hard work the employee is doing. The management may not know the reason why the project was such a success. This is the reason why being confident is necessary. Not bragging all the time about your hard work for the success but sometimes it is necessary to confidently speak about your hard work which made the project a huge success.
It is said that confident employees are more engaged, they have great self-reliance and that is just one of the many reasons why creating a team with confident players works for everyone’s advantage.
But, not everyone comes to the office ready strengthened with confidence, or even sometimes one of your most confident employees can suffer from self-doubt in challenging times. But luckily, there are many ways a leader can boost the confidence of the employee. Here are two of those ways;
- Set challenging “GOALS”:
If the goals do not challenge, push or stretch your employees and if they just must work as normally like any other day then it sends a message to your employee that you don’t consider them capable of taking on difficult tasks. Difficult goals send a message to the employee that you have faith in them and that they will get the job done under any circumstances.
Research has found that 15% of people think that their personal goal for that particular year will help them achieve great things and only 13% of people thought that their goals will help them maximize their actual potential. The research also showed that most psychologically motivating goals are those where there is a rough chance of 50 percent success.
Most of the goals are easy but smart and realistic goals are those which are difficult to achieve and have a 50% chance of success. So, take a step back and ask yourself what kinds of goals you are giving to your team. Test the difficulty level of the goals by asking your employees what new skills they will require to learn to achieve a goal. If they do not need to learn something new, try increasing the difficulty level of the goal by 30%. Also, ask your employees if they think they can achieve a goal easily. If they say that they know they are able to do it before they even start working, try making the goal 20% harder. Keep altering the goal until you get it right.
- Give more “POSITIVE” feedback:
Research says that 71% of the managers say that they know most of their employees can achieve excellence but only 18% of the employees say that their managers do a good job by communicating their positive feedback.
One of the problems in this is that managers tend to discuss what went wrong in the project rather than talking about the good things or positive things about the project. One of the reasons behind this is that they usually get credit for being great problem solvers, but they get almost little or zero credit for being great praise givers. And, obviously, for being recognized as a great problem solver, you need to have a problem first, something negative, which needs fixing.
Managers usually communicate more about a problem than they do about something positive. As good employees listen to something negative, it affects their confidence level as well as their performance.
It is necessary to pull yourself out of this cycle by tracking the interaction of the employees for a couple of days. If the negative interactions are more than the positive ones, then do not be depressed. Just start looking for moments in which you can give positive reinforcement, which is different from praise. Positive reinforcement is a teaching tool that allows employees to learn when they do something right by getting verbally rewarded. This triggers a reaction of an employee saying that the reward felt good and he thinks that he will work the same way again.
A lot of people have the talent, skill and right attitude to be great performers but somewhere they lack confidence. Get into potentially building confidence through positive feedbacks and challenging goals.
Combined by Faber Priyal & Faber Mayuri
