People who are confident are viewed more positively than those who are competent. Science is, unfortunately, quite clear on this point.

A 1982 study titled “Audiences’ reactions to self-enhancing, self-denigrating, and accurate self-presentations” by Barry R. Schlenker and Mark R. Leary found that people perceive individuals who are confident in their performance as more competent, regardless of their actual performance. This is true even for those people who say they think their performance will be great, but then have a bad performance! In short, in many cases, people see confidence as competence even when being shown incompetence!

This is a destructive thought pattern. In essence, it means that shy, self-denigrating geniuses are often overshadowed by assertive people without much else to offer.

A Harvard Business Review article titled “To Seem More Competent, Be More Confident” goes on to suggest that confirmation bias is to blame. In short, we tend to believe what people say, and we even look for evidence to confirm those beliefs rather than reject them. To sum it up: “If the expert doesn’t trust in his or her abilities, how can anyone else?”

On the one hand, this makes sense. Who would want a doctor who seemed unsure of the diagnosis? Or their ability to operate successfully on you? On the other hand, it means we leave a lot of good expert advice on the table, and we take advice from people who may be lesser experts.

What I’ve found works well to handle this is a concept called psychological safety, coined by Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School. In effect, it’s creating an environment where everyone feels free to speak up and everyone feels listened to. Google’s “Project Aristotle” examined the effect of psychological safety on teams and found it was the single most important dynamic that set high-performing teams apart from regular teams.

Back in the real world, however, psychological safety is much easier said than done. The truth is that most of us were brought up in authoritarian households and in schools that emphasized the teacher’s status relative to us. It only takes one overbearing person to disrupt the psychological safety of an entire team.

Still, while challenging to implement, I’ve found that the more I model creating psychological safety as a leader, the more it becomes ingrained with everyone else. Perhaps my biggest challenge is always allowing psychological safety myself. There are times when I feel I must take the reins to handle an issue, or else I get aggravated with a group for not doing things the way I would, but these are few and far between and I think hard before doing it.

And yet, as the New Order song puts it: “Every little counts.” I find that every step I take in that direction helps bring more people out of their shell. This is a good application of my Drip Theory, which I will detail in a future post —constantly working on small changes can eventually lead to very large changes.

A good company needs everyone to contribute, not just the naturally bold. We must create a space where everyone is comfortable enough to contribute their opinions and expert advice. That goes far, but still isn’t enough. Some people will always be less assertive than others and we must also make a space for those who might never sound confident but have great ideas.

This is the heart of leadership. Getting the best ideas from your people and nurturing them. Not letting the more assertive, more confident people call all the shots. This is the essence of transformative leadership—elevating the collective intelligence of our teams by ensuring that competence, not confidence, shapes our path forward.

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