You’ll Never Have All the Facts

think we see this in organizations.

The earned confidence is whether it's yourself or the confidence that a leader is extolling.

There's a couple of dimensions to this.

So earned confidence is when that person or yourself has gone through experiences, you've used judgment, You've come out the other side of a decision-making situation and you've shown to yourself or to others that you can deal with the situation.

Apparent confidence is where, and this is where we see this all the time, more often than earned confidence.

Apparent confidence is when typically someone who is making a decision no matter where they are in the hierarchy of any organization.

When they feel like they have to move towards action, they have to make a decision, they have to act so that the organizational members start engaging in activity towards accomplishing whatever the objective is.

Oftentimes, what happens is that the leader doesn't really understand what the situation is for a number of reasons that I can go into.

And they present themselves as being confident because they know that confidence is something that people desire.

In an organization, when things are uncertain and ambiguous, this is not me saying, it's not my creative, this is what's been documented through scientific studies, that people need that kind of emotional stability that this apparent confidence will provide them, even though that the leader themselves doesn't fully understand what the situation is.

And so there's, you know, that can lead to catastrophic kind of situations.

I mean, in an organization, I'm not talking about life and death, you know, in a business or normal, whether it's government or nonprofit or whatever.

Yeah, so...

The

ability to detect apparent confidence is another issue.

And I think that is based on how well those who are working in the environment where the leader or the manager is exhibiting this apparent confidence to how well those individuals understand the situation themselves.

So you can imagine... that in very complex situations like say even a radical new geopolitical situation in the world most people do not understand what's going on in the details of these negotiations or what the issues are so forth so you can imagine someone who extols confidence you know, would help people feel confident themselves.

They may continue going about their daily lives in an organization.

They would continue working in the tasks that they're trained in.

But apparent confidence is, you know, potentially very unstable.

It may have the appearance of action and activity, which may make people want to do the work that they do calm them down, etc.

The plan.

But it can also result in really bad decisions or really bad outcomes, which is more often the case in a variety of different organizational contexts.

So Anyway, I hope that gives a bit of a sense of the difference.

Definitely, it feels like that.