Transcript
Omar Zenhom (0:00)
Foreign.
Ryan Reynolds (0:09)
Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA show. Power up your day and your business with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to go ahead and email me over@omar00mba.net Today's question is from Brad and Brad asks. Hey Omar, love the podcast. Been a listener for some time. Got an interesting question for you. I have a small team of five people and besides me and another team member, I would say the others lack a lot of confidence. They're very unsure of themselves and I feel like we're moving slowly because of it. How do I give my team confidence? What can I do to help them believe in themselves and pick up the pace? Thanks for your help, Brad. Love this question, Brad. Because it's real. There are going to be varied levels of confidence across your team. Some people are going to be really skilled but still lack confidence. And because of that, they are taking a bit longer than others. They're unsure, they're asking questions they know the answer to. They might suffer from analysis paralysis and take a little longer than needed to get things done. So in today's episode, I'm gonna share with you what I recommend when it comes to building your team members confidence. Things you can do every single day so you can see progress and not only help your business, but help these individuals on your team become the best versions of themselves. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Confidence is a funny thing. Some people just have it, they say, and some don't. Well, I'm here to tell you that that's a bun baloney. You get confidence from something people that just have it. They probably got it because they received it growing up. Their parents maybe supported them. They told them things that really helped them build their confidence. They gave them experiences to allow to cultivate that confidence. They had circumstances and environments and a lot of factors that influence their level of confidence. As they are an adult today, the environment, the people they're around all influence the level of confidence they have today. And some people just didn't get that or didn't get enough of that. This is totally normal. But guess what? It's never too late to build your confidence. It's never too late to change the stories that you tell yourself, the things that you believe about yourself. Because that's ultimately where confidence comes from, is believing in yourself. Now, when it comes to helping your team build confidence, you're going to combine two things that are going to work hand in hand. Evidence based confidence and non evidence based confidence. I'll explain. Do not worry. Evidence based confidence is basically giving your team members opportunities to do things so that you can show them evidence that they can do things. This helps build confidence. So for example, you give them a task that they can do today, maybe a sprint, maybe some small task with a clear outcome, like I need you to make 10 sales calls today, or I want you to craft and send out an email newsletter that gets a minimum open rate of xyz. The point here is, is that you want to give them tasks to build their confidence so that they go ahead and do it, they get a result, and then you point to and say, see, you can do this, you are good in the beginning. You want to make these tasks real softball tasks, really easy tasks that you know with full confidence that they can do it well, then you can level it up as the days go on. Remember this is just day one. Now this is evidence based confidence where they can't deny that you're right, that they did something, it was good, it got the result, and you're just reinforcing that so they can believe, based on evidence based that they are competent at their job, that they are a good fit, that they are a contributor to the team, that they're appreciated, that they are a winner. Now, non evidence based confidence is just basically like a parent telling their child, you can do anything you want, you are capable, you are smart, I know you can do this, you're a winner. When parents say this to children, they have no evidence that they are really smart, that they can actually do it, that they are actually a winner. I know this sounds kind of mean, but there is no evidence to that. But as human beings, we believe what we hear consistently. For example, if you turned on the news every single day and you heard on the news the economy is bad, the economy's bad, the economy is bad. Just by nature, you're going to start believing the economy is bad because you're just hearing it over and over, regardless if it's rooted in truth or not, you're still going to believe it. So if I tell you something about yourself over and over, like, you're really funny, you make me laugh, you got a great sense of humor, you're the life of the party. If I said this over and over to you day after day, you're going to start believing I'm a funny person. So how does this apply to your team members? Well, sometimes you got to give them non evidence based confidence in little ways on a regular basis every single day. It's like washing your hands. You got to do it over and over and over, right throughout the day, throughout the days, throughout the weeks, throughout the months in order for you to be a clean person. Right. So you just have to have the repetition. Something as simple as if they make a comment or suggestion in meeting and say that's a good idea. That's an interesting suggestion. Thanks for contributing. We needed to hear that. It's positive reinforcement, but it's also something that they will hear over and over and start believing. Building somebody else's confidence through these two measures takes time. It takes a lot of time. But the good news is is that it gets better every day. That means they become more and more confident through these two methods. If you do it consistently every day, that means today they're going to be more confident than they were yesterday and next week they're going to be more confident than they are this week. And next month they're even more confident than last month. Now the beauty of this is that they're going to absolutely love working for you because they feel like they're getting better. The best jobs, the best care careers, the best positions I've ever been involved in are the ones where I felt I was growing. And I'm sure if you reflect and think about it in your own life, you probably agree you feel like this place is making me better.
