If you've got a team member who lacks confidence, it could be impacting their performance, their career progression, and how they feel about work. confidence issues are widespread, with 79% of women saying they lack confidence at work, and it impacts people's ability to perform and progress. 46% of women say managing a negative mindset stops them making the impact they want at work, and 37% identified a lack of confidence and self belief in their own ability as an obstacle to career progression. So how do you help people in your team build their confidence and unlock their potential?

In this episode, I'm going to share six practical steps you can take to help a team member feel more confident in their role, as well as three traps to avoid to make sure you're not labelling someone as unconfident when that may not actually be the issue. Together, we'll look at how the type of feedback you give makes a real difference, how you might be impacting the confidence of your team, how you can use Coaching Questions to support their self awareness and self belief, ways to make them feel valued, and how modelling and encouraging a growth mindset can help create an environment where confidence grows.

This is the influence and impact podcast for women leaders, helping you confidently navigate the ups and downs of leadership and feel less alone on your journey as a leader. My name is Carla Miller. I've been coaching leaders for the past 15 years. And I'm here to remind you of the value that you bring to your organisation to help you believe in yourself and to share practical tools and insights from myself and my brilliant guests will help you succeed in your career. Now, a couple of things to think about before we jump into those six practical steps you can take. The first is to get granular. So if you think one of your team lacks confidence, you need to be able to be really specific about that so that you can provide targeted, relevant feedback.

Confidence is a broad term, and someone may be confident in one area of their work, and not in another. Many people lack confidence when it comes to public speaking, for example, or when presenting to senior stakeholders, but may otherwise feel confident. And all too often women are told to be more confident without any specifics. And that often does more harm than good. It's also worth knowing that someone can be confident in their abilities, but still experienced self doubt worry or anxiety around work.

I know plenty of Chief Execs who are confident in their abilities, but still have some impostor feelings. Now, the second thing you want to be aware of, is having some self awareness. So just check that you're not displaying behaviours that will cause your team members to feel or appear unconfident. So make sure you're not, for example, delegating tasks to them that they don't have the authority to do, or making changes to everything that they do, because you'd like it done exactly the way you would have done it. Or making sure that you're not being defensive, when they give you feedback, or getting super stressed out about details or being so vague, they don't really know what you're asking them to do. These are all behaviours, it's quite easy to fall into them, but they can really impact the ability of your team to perform and their confidence, as well. And then the final thing I want you to think about is that confidence looks different for different people.

Confidence in an extrovert is very different from the quiet confidence of someone who's more introverted. So don't mistake introversion or wanting to reflect before answering the question as a lack of confidence. Right. So now we've done those checks to make sure it is actually a confidence issue and that we're not causing it. These are the six really practical steps that you can take to help build up someone's confidence.

Step one, make sure that your feedback to them, particularly your positive feedback is really specific. So vague compliments, don't build confidence. If someone says, Oh, you did a great job there. It's very easy to dismiss that. If you're not feeling very confident, because you think well, they say that to everyone. They don't really mean it. They don't know about x and acts. While specific feedback is easier to take on board. It's more believable because it's got that extra level of detail to it. So instead of saying great job in that challenging meeting, If, instead you could be specific, for example, I thought the way you handled that conversation was excellent, you were calm, and they felt listened to, you demonstrated good judgement, which is really important in your role. So that's an example of giving feedback that specific and will really help people. Make sure that you're also sharing how you see them adding value to the team, or what they're good at to the impact of the work that they're doing. And let them build up confidence in certain areas of their role. And that leads us nicely on to step two, which is to take a coaching approach, and help them identify their natural strengths or what Gay Hendricks calls their zone of genius.

Often, when things come easily to us, we really undervalue them, and underestimate our own ability and think, Well, surely everyone can do that. Because it's so easy. It's so obvious. So it's really helpful to know that good to know that for yourself as well, I imagine. And to help them to think about what what do they enjoy doing most? Where do they get that sense of flow in their role, which parts of their role do they feel confident in, and which parts of their role do they feel less confident in,it's also a real gift to show them how you see them. And I remember being given that gift by a director fairly early on in my career, I really lacked confidence, despite being given great roles, I still didn't really believe that I deserve them. And my director at the time basically made it really clear that she could see my potential that I was doing a great job, and that she considered me to be a bit of a star. And that made a massive difference to me having someone believe in me and somebody I really respected. Seeing me like that, it was quite hard to dismiss how she saw me because I did really respect her so you can give that gift to somebody else.

So you can share where you think their natural strengths are, as well. Now, step number three is support them to expand their comfort zone. So you can work with them to identify where their current comfort zone is, and find out what it is that concerns them about certain tasks, or situations. And then taking a coaching approach, you can problem solve together, how they can go about building up confidence in different areas, you can ask questions like what would make you feel a little bit more confident in that situation, or what would feel like a stretch and expanding your comfort zone without being totally terrifying. In coaching, we often get people to take consistent small steps, we don't want you to go from being four out of 10 in something to being 10 out of 10.

Overnight, that's unlikely to be sustainable change. Instead, we want to move you up to a five and then the six and then the seven, and so on. So you can do that. And then they can also see the progress that they're making. And you can celebrate their wins, but also celebrate their efforts. So if you know it's taken a lot from someone to step outside of their comfort zone, and speak up in a meeting, for example, or make that cold call that they really don't want to make, then you can celebrate that in them as well, that then gives them the reward and the feedback that makes it easier for them to do it again. And as you will know from your own experience, there are many things which seem really hard at first or really scary at first. And then once you get used to them, then they just become every day.

That's just a reminder, it's a not a work example, but my son was diagnosed with type one diabetes last year. And the just the idea of it and having to give injections was totally freaking me out. And then it was confirmed as diabetes like we knew. And then the next day, I had to start giving him injections. And last night, I was really worried about it. But once I'd done the first one or two, I was like, Okay, this is fine. And now it's just a totally everyday part of our lives. And you know, that's obviously quite a big deal. There are lots of things in the workplace that seem really scary the first time you did them, and now they're just part of your everyday life, aren't they you're not intimidated by them because that practice has expanded your comfort zone.

Okay, step number four, make them feel valued. And that will look different for everyone. And one of the things I like to do is to specifically ask people, What makes you feel valued, and what makes you feel less valued or undervalued. And you get a real range of different answers. So it might be about paying attention to them, it might be about giving them opportunities, it might be about saying thank you, or giving positive feedback more often, or talking to them about their career development, or investing in some training or coaching. For them, the important thing is, if they feel valued, it makes them feel more confident of their place within the organisation, it makes them feel more confident in their relationship with you, which will be a key part of building their confidence.

Step five, if the issue is around confidence in terms of having difficult conversations, speaking up in meetings, experiencing self doubt, and impostor feelings or setting really, really high expectations for themselves. So they're super critical of themselves, even when you're pleased with the work that they've done, then they would find it really helpful to go on my Be Bolder course, the open course is for women. And we cover exactly that speaking up in meetings, holding difficult conversations around boundaries and feedback. We even talk about receiving feedback, which can be fairly uncomfortable for people, whether it's positive or negative. We talk about mindset and dealing with that inner critic that makes you doubt yourself all the time. And also about impostor feelings and all those really, really high expectations, we set ourselves like expecting ourselves to be perfect or thinking we need to be 100% sure to speak up. So that's my Be Bolder course, we run it twice a year. And the next one is coming up in March. So you can send people on that.

And then Step six is around modelling a growth mindset. Now is a concept you may well have heard of, it comes from Dr. Carol Dweck. And the idea is that in certain different areas of our life, we might have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. Now, a fixed mindset believes you have a fixed amount of ability at something. And so when you don't do it well straightaway, or when you get feedback about how you could be better, that feels personal, because it's about who you are, and your limited ability, a growth mindset is exactly the opposite. And it's a wonderful thing to adopt, where you believe that you can always grow your ability. So instead of thinking, I'm terrible at budgets, I'm terrible at maths, instead you think, Well, I can get better I can improve, the more I do this, the better I will get. And actually making mistakes, rather than making you feel bad about yourself is great, because it's just more information that helps you get better next time.

So you can model a growth mindset to them. Because growth mindset really, really helps with confidence. And there's two ways you can do this one is in terms of ability, so helping them to realise that if they feel like they don't have much ability in a particular area, that that's not something they're stuck with. That's something that can change. And a good way of helping them to realise that is to tell stories about your own life, and tell stories about how earlier in your career, or even relatively recently, you thought you weren't good at something. But actually, when you did it more when you practice, when you went on a course when you got some feedback, whatever you want to say, you grew, you got better at it. And that really built your confidence. And then the second piece is around making mistakes. So can you model a growth mindset when it comes to making mistakes? When you make mistakes? Are you able to put your hand up and say, I made a mistake there. I've learned from it. This is what I'm going to do differently without a huge amount of shame or beating yourself up. But just really modelling it as a positive thing, that you're learning that you're taking on board feedback that you're open to growing. If you can show that you're not terrified of making mistakes, then that will help them feel like it's not the end of the world. If they make mistakes.

We're not talking about embracing doing things in a half assed fashion. We're talking about recognising where things could be better and looking to constantly grow and improve and celebrate what has done well. One of the things I like to do after a meeting is think like what went well? what didn't go so well. And what have I learned? What can I do differently next time. And that might be a model that you could use with them. So if they're beating themselves up after a meeting, get them to think about oh, it wasn't all off or was it? What did go well, there? And okay, so you weren't happy with how x went? But what would you like to do differently next time? What have you learnt from that and how do you think it will help you knowing that going into your next meeting, so instead of fueling what as coaches, we often call the inner critic, instead, you're helping build up their confidence bank after a meeting. Okay, so a quick recap for you there.

First of all, make sure that you're being really specific in terms of where you feel like they are doing well. So give really specific feedback, not fake compliments.

Secondly, take a coaching approach and help them identify their natural strengths or their zone of genius.

Thirdly, support them to expand their comfort zone and using Coaching Questions problem solve together some of the areas outside of their comfort zone.

Fourthly make them feel valued. That will look different for everyone to find out what makes them feel valued fifthly if you think it will help them, send them on my Be Bolder course, it's coming up in March, and sixth model a growth mindset when it comes to both ability and making mistakes.

Hopefully, this has given you some really practical tips that you can go and put into action. Do let me know how you get on. You can always connect with me on LinkedIn and have a chat there. You can also connect with me or send a message or go to my website to find out more about how you can work with me. And for those interested in Be Bolder the website address is Carla miller.co.uk. That's our new website, forward slash Be Bolder with no space in between B and Bolder. I'd love to see you or some of your team members on the course. Take care, and I'll be back next week.