Confidence starts at the top

In almost every briefing for a managing director role I hear the same requirements: strategic vision, the ability to deliver, experience of transformation. What I almost never hear is the word that matters most right now: confidence.

Yet it is neither a question of character nor a matter of sugar-coating. Confidence is work. It emerges when someone at the top names the situation soberly and still shows a way forward.

Research supports this. Leaders with a strong hope orientation find more ways to solve problems, and their own superiors rate them more highly. In change processes, it is the most confident employees who are most likely to come along. WirtschaftsWoche recently summed this up well.

This has little to do with optimism. The optimist assumes things will turn out fine. Confidence means two things: a clear idea of how to reach a goal, and the conviction that you can make a difference yourself.

Good people rarely stay for the salary alone. They stay for the prospects.

I know this from my years as head of HR. In change and integration processes I saw that workforces can cope remarkably well with bad news. It becomes difficult when they feel they can no longer make a difference themselves. And they sense very precisely whether their boss believes in his own strategy.

That is exactly how I assess candidates for top positions today. When someone describes a crisis, I listen less to how assured it sounds. What interests me is: what was the next step? Why that one? And what happened next?

Experience and results are in the CV. Whether someone can take an organisation with them even when the path is not yet clear only becomes apparent in conversation.