Managing Leadership^®

One of the efforts in our discussion of the past few days - about dumbness and overconfidence - is not just to develop a framework for understanding and managing other people, but to turn the lens on ourselves. We want to figure out a way to assess our own ability and progress as managers. But we also want to ascertain where we can look for advice, and how to evaluate it.

This is where things get a little dicey. The problem is that clarity sells. If I place a book in front of you with a title telling you in no uncertain terms that it contains the 10 secrets to management virtuosity, you will likely feel drawn to that certain trumpet call. You will buy it, you will want to believe that it will give you what you need to succeed, you will feel a pull to adopt the unshakable certainty of the author, and in order to preserve that new-found sense of assured self-confidence you will begin to deny, unexamined, the veracity of any conflicting evidence.

It’s just perfect. Moreover, it’s by an expert - an expert! It inspires your confidence, and quietly initiates an internal emotional evolution from unanchored uncertainty to blind faith.

But we all know that blind faith, in this context, requires that we suspend belief and shut down critical examination. We should also know that such behaviors are unlikely to serve you well as a manager.

As much as we wish to deny our propensity to do this, the truth is, most of us do it. But certain trumpets, in these contexts, are siren calls, drawing us blindly to ruin on the shoals.

It is important that we recognize confidence for what it really is: it is only confidence - not an indicator of anything else at all; including of any veracity in the object of that confidence. Indeed, the more it is emphasized with respect to those objects, the less likely there is a positive correlation between them.

But the caution here is not only that we avoid being drawn to such false confidence, but that we avoid being drawn to false displays of it, ourselves. Learning to banish our insecurities is not the key to growing as a manager - learning to use them is. This isn’t zen; it’s just the peculiar logic of life.

And there’s the irony: While you, plagued by uncertainty in your own ability, are holding that book by the author promising to give you immovable confidence in yourself, it’s not at all unlikely that the better manager of the two is you, not the “expert.”

Monday we’ll look at why. See you then!

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Here is a list of all the posts in this popular series:

1. Radiating Imbecility
2. Rays of hope
3. Pulsating inconsistency
4. Radiating confidence
5. Blind faith
6. Mirror, mirror . . .
7. Socratic genius
8. Socratic ignorance
9. Socratic method
10. First principles
11. The Socratic attitude
12. Why we do what we do
13. Recon by fire

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