How to Build Unshakeable Self Confidence As A Leader

In this episode, I'm going to show you how to quickly overcome a problem that most leaders are too embarrassed to admit that they're struggling with and that's lack of confidence.

I know because I faced this challenge when I first moved into management and I was too embarrassed to admit it to my team and to anyone.

Before we get into that, though, I just wanna quickly introduce myself to those of you who are new to the channel. My name is Doug Howard, and I'm a leadership coach and consultant specifically for engineering managers and engineering companies. What I do is I teach engineering managers, how to leverage people skills, to create efficiencies, build relationships, and basically increase your impact on your team as well as throughout your organization.

I give away my best tips here on this YouTube channel. So make sure you hit that subscribe button.

My Struggle with Building Confidence as a Leader

Now, getting back to my story when I was struggling with this. I was put in an engineering manager position because I was a top performing individual contributor.

When I moved into the management position, I couldn't be the person that struggled in this role. I didn't want to admit that I didn't have all the answers and that I didn't know how to solve the problems. I really didn't have anyone to talk to about this. But when the problem started piling up, the pressure continued building up and it continued chipping away at my confidence. It started to affect my productivity in my role and my overall effectiveness in my role.

I was struggling with things like communication. I was overthinking what to say and how to say it to my team. I didn't want to get people upset, I didn't want to hurt their feelings. I didn't want to say things the wrong way. And I felt like I had a knack for unintentionally saying things in a way that was, being misinterpreted by other people. So I was constantly overthinking my emails and my face-to-face communication with my boss and my peers and the people that reported to me.

I would second guess all of my decisions too, because when you're an individual contributor, it's a lot more black and white? When you make a decision, it's pretty clear as far as what the impact of that decision is on the project or the system that you're designing.

But when you're a manager, you know, it's a little bit gray, you know, you don't know how these decisions are going to impact everyone on your team or what are the consequences going to be that are downstream because there's a lot more influence on your decisions it influences and touches a lot more things. So I was constantly second guessing my decisions and, and very hesitant to pull the trigger on making big moves that effected people on my team.

Basically I kind of fell into this trap where I was wasting a lot of times spinning my wheels on the same problems over and over again. It felt like I was stuck in quicksand. The reason I compare it to quicksand is because just like quicksand, it's nearly impossible to escape this trap without help from someone else who was not caught in the quicksand. You need someone else to pull you out of it.

But here's the catch. When you're a manager, you probably feel uncomfortable with showing this level of vulnerability to your team, to your boss, and pretty, pretty much to anyone because you don't want to be viewed as incapable of doing the job.

You worked really hard to get promoted into this leadership position. Whether it's at a new company where you interviewed and you told them about how you could do all these things and that you have all this experience and all these skills and leadership. Or if you've got promoted from, within at your company and, you worked really hard to earn that reputation as being qualified for this role. You worked really hard to build this reputation, get in this spot, get viewed as a leader, and now you don't want to go backwards by admitting that you can't do this or admitting that you're struggling with confidence.

Common Reasons Why Managers Lack Confidence

That's at least where I was at and I know this is a common tale for a lot of managers that I talk to and that I coach and that I work with in a training capacity. How do you break this cycle? Right? You're struggling with confidence as a manager, but at the same time, you know, you don't want to show that you're not confident because the last thing you want to do is look like an un-confident leader, whether that's to your team or to your boss. So, you know, how do you break this cycle?

That's what we're going to spend a lot of time here in this video talking about, but before we do. I want to point out that everyone's situation is different and here are some of the most common reasons why engineering managers struggle with confidence.

Perfectionism and Imposter Syndrome

The first reason is as engineers, we have extremely high standards. Engineering is obviously a discipline that requires a lot of precision and attention to detail and the more detail oriented you are and the more accurate and precise you are and your way of thinking and your way of doing work and carrying things out. That pays off as an engineer.

So that's what gets you success in this industry upfront, but as a leader that could have some unintended consequences for you because you might be setting standards that are too high for yourself. When you set standards that are too high for yourself, It makes you perceive that you're failing a lot more often than you really are in reality.

You're constantly striving to meet these highest standards, which can quickly erode your confidence when you feel like you're failing over and over again. But remember there's real failure and then there's perceived failure and it could be caused by your high standards for yourself.

The next most common reason why engineering managers struggle with confidence is imposter syndrome. This is something that impacts all positions, anyone, not just leaders, but specifically for engineering leaders. You get that feeling like you don't deserve your position or because you're not doing well in the role or because you're not excelling at everything like you used to back when you were an individual contributor, you start feeling like a fraud and you start feeling like you're not qualified to be doing this job and this really undermines your confidence.

Now notice as I'm going through these things. A lot of these things are very cyclical where it starts with one little thing that's chipping away at your confidence, but then it quickly compounds and it builds a negative momentum on you at the same time. This is what makes it really dangerous because once your confidence isn't working in your favor, that really hinders your ability to be effective in your role.

Communication Challenges and Constant Change

But another thing that erodes confidence for engineering managers is being an environment where there's constant change. Engineering maybe not all industries, but, I think software, I think structural engineering, these fields are very dynamic with rapid advancements in technology, even over the last 10 years.

It's just getting faster and faster. As an engineering manager, or if you're in a leader position, you're going to feel this constant pressure to keep up with the latest developments, the latest tool, the latest technologies, because otherwise you're going to be falling behind against your competition or falling behind against the other peers that are leaders in your company. The people that you're competing with to rise to the next level in your leadership role. Or the other departments and the teams that you're competing with to hit your goals. This constant pressure to keep up with technology is definitely something that makes it challenging to maintain that confidence.

Communication challenges is also a big one that really contributes to lack of confidence. When you're an individual contributor, you're used to having technical communication with technical people and it's a lot more direct style of communication when you're an engineer. You're dealing with objective facts, very binary thinking. It's true or false it's if this, then that. So, we really are able to just speak directly to the point. You don't need to like sugarcoat things you don't need to have a song and dance that goes with your delivering messages to people when you're dealing with an engineering teams.

But now that you're in a leadership role, it's a little bit different, you know, you need to think about how is this message going to be perceived by the other person. You also need to effectively communicate with team members and other stakeholders who are not technical minded, and you need to learn how to translate. Basically have to speak different languages. You have to speak the tech talk, but you have to also have to speak non-tech talk. So other people understand whether you're pitching ideas, whether you're giving them updates, whether you're explaining why you can't do something the way they want it to be done. When you struggle with that type of communication, it's really going to lead to some confidence issues, it's going to make you feel like you're incapable of being effective in your role again.

Lack of Training and Feedback on Leadership Skills

A few more reasons why engineering managers struggle with confidence. A big one is that leadership transition, going from an individual contributor to a leader.

A lot of engineers move into this role without getting any formal type of leadership training. You struggle with making that shift in responsibilities and expectations. You're used to being productive by doing, and you're used to controlling this, just the projects that you work on, and that's how you measured your own productivity, your overall effectiveness.

But now when you're in a leadership position, it's a little bit more subjective to measure what success is. At the top level, your success is based on optimizing the performance of each person on your team and optimizing the collective performance of your team as well. There are some clear metrics to measure that, but at the same time, how do you measure things like how far this person has come this year in a objective way.

So when you can't see that constant success where you're constantly knocking things off the list, you're constantly completing tangible initiatives. That's going to chip away your confidence because you're going to feel like you're always moving, but not getting anything done. And that's again, because your goals as a leader are going to be a lot more subjective then your goals were back when you were an individual contributor engineer.

The last one, and this is probably the biggest one that can really chip away at your confidence as a leader is lack of feedback. When you're an engineer, you're going to get feedback basically because your work is either successful or not. If you're designing a beam, it either passes or fails. The engineer above you is going to review that and give you that constant feedback on red marks or whatever, pushing that work back to you. So you're used to getting a lot of feedback on how well you're doing, when you're an engineer going all the way up from school, through working in a company.

Now that you're in a leadership position, there's a good chance you're not getting that type of feedback from a mentor or from your boss as well as how are you doing as a leader? You're not getting that constructive feedback. The absence of that constructive feedback can make it really difficult for you to assess your own performance. When there's no one helping you assess that performance, it's going to contribute to a lot of self doubt. It's going to basically make you assume the worst. Again, because you're not getting that feedback. You're used to being told when you're doing stuff right or wrong.

Now the reason I started the episode with talking about this is because it's really important for you as an engineering leader, to recognize these challenges. It's really important for you to proactively seek support, seek mentorship, and invest in ongoing professional development to build and maintain a confidence in your leadership style and in your leadership skills.

If you're not getting that mentorship, a great place to start is by subscribing to this YouTube channel, because I cover all different angles of leadership training for engineering managers.

My point is, if you're not getting this from your boss currently, you should start that conversation with them, explain to them that you want to get more feedback from them on a regular basis. You want to know how you're doing as a leader and that, would really help you be more effective in your role.

Today, a lot of managers, they want to give you autonomy and they want to give you that space. They don't want to micromanage you. They don't want to criticize you, just like you don't want to criticize your team. So if you're not bringing it to them, they're going to assume you're good. Assume okay, he's got it. Or she's good. She's got it. But, don't let them assume that go, go bring it to them. If you feel like you're struggling with some of these areas, bring it up to your boss and ask for constructive feedback on that.

Building Your Confidence | 8 Step Framework

Now that we have all that context decide on what are some of the things that contribute to lack of confidence for engineering leaders, I want to go through an eight step framework that you can use for building up your confidence.

This is something I do with my clients that I work with as engineering managers. I also offer training programs that incorporate this framework into it. I know that this works so even if you're skeptical while you're listening to it, I challenge you to try it out for a week.

Step 1 - Define What Type of Leader You Want to Be

Step one is define what type of leader you want to be. When we don't have something that is objective to compare ourselves to, then we're going to automatically feel like we're not living up to this imaginary target because there isn't one. So we want to start by defining, what is the type of leader you want to be?

What I mean by that is what are the attributes you want to have as a leader? Do you want to be confident? Do you want to be a great communicator? Do you want to have high emotional intelligence? Do you want to be very persuasive? Do you want to be a technical expert? There's a lot of different ways and there's no right or wrong way to be a leader. There's different types of leaders. There's hands-on leaders. There's hands-off leaders.

So, what you want to do is just think about what type of leader do you want to be? What are all the attributes that you want to have as a leader and be as specific as possible? I knew that I was, the leader that I wanted to have very strong relationships with everyone on my team because I knew that that was very important to me and to them. I knew that I could go a lot further and having a bigger impact on my team if I focused on building the relationship with them versus being the all-knowing technical expert.

Really think about what are the attributes that you want. This is so important because you need to know what success looks like. We're basically creating the target for you to hit as a leader, versus this imaginary broad ambiguous word leadership, which could mean anything and it can mean all these things all at once. We want to just take a step back and reign it in and decide what type of leader do you want to be. So really think about this.

If you're struggling to figure out what type of leader you want to be, pay attention to the leaders around you. Pay attention to leaders from history, it could be presidents or CEOs, people like Steve jobs or people like that. Think about what leaders you admire and why did you admire them? What are the attributes that they possess that you admire the most or that you wish you possessed?

So really take a step back and define what is the type of leader you want to be? What are all those attributes?

Step 2 - Identify What Leadership Skills You Need to Develop

Now that we've defined what type of leader you want to be. Step two is define what skills you need to possess in order to be this type of leader. So this means what are the skills that you need to have that you don't have yet, as well as what are the skills that you need to have that maybe you already do have?

So you want to just literally create a list and you can create this side by side. You have a table that a column that lists all the attributes you need to have as a leader. Now we're going to list what are the skills that you need to meet all of those attributes. Do you need to be organized? Do you need to know how to motivate people? Do you need to be a good listener? Do you need to be good at public speaking? Really think what are the type of skills that you need to actually have each of those attributes that it takes.

What we're doing here is we're, we're slowly building a roadmap to define what actually goes into being the type of leader you want to be so that we can figure out what does it take for you to feel successful and feel confident in this role.

Again, everything here, we're engineers. So if we can't visualize it on your own, we're going to struggle with that and we're not going to feel confident. So we're creating a picture here of what type of leader we want to be step-by-step.

Step 3 - How Can You Demonstrate Each Skill?

Now that we've defined what all these skills are. Now we can move on to step three, which is defining how you can demonstrate each of these skills on a daily basis in your leadership role.

So, for example, if one of the skills you identified as active listening, Think about how can you demonstrate that throughout a typical work week for you? How can you demonstrate good, active listening with your team through one-on-one meetings or in group meetings?

For example, I'm someone that talks a lot and I active listening is one of the things that's very important to me as a leader. For me, when I was building up my confidence, I realized I needed to be someone that listened first and talked second or talked less. I realized that to demonstrate that I had to let my team talk before I spoke in meetings and I had to open the floor to my direct reports that talk before I just started the meeting, talking with them on one-on-one settings. The same goes for your boss, how can you demonstrate that you have good, active listening skills to your boss? Obviously another way to do this would be reciting back to them some of the things they say to you to show that you're listening. So I'm just showing you one example here with active listening, but whatever the skills are that you identified, now think, how can you demonstrate what each of these skills look like throughout your work week?

Now flashing forward to when you've developed these skills. So I don't want you to think about, well, I can't do that yet because I'm not capable because we're going to get to that in the next few steps. But right now, just to find, how can you demonstrate each of those skills once you've developed them?

Step 4 - How Can You Develop and Strengthen These Skills?

As you can see where I'm going with this step four is we want to figure out how can you develop the skills that you don't have as well as how can you improve the skills that you already do have?

So the skills that you do have, those are probably strengths of yours or their developed skills. Either way we want to take those and lift those up.

So take a look at those, you know, what are some resources you can use two lift those skills up. It could be books, training, practice opportunities. It could be a course that you take. Maybe there's situations that you can handle differently, situations that come up on a regular basis at your work, but just think, how can you develop the skills you currently do have? How can you take those further and how can you start developing the skills that you don't have for each of the leadership qualities that you want to have? You should define at least two or three skills that you can build to demonstrate these qualities and then figure out how you can practice developing these skills.

Step 5 - Build an Action Plan for Developing Identified Skills

Step five is going to be pretty obvious. Now it's time to build an action plan for developing these skills. I'm not going to just throw a blanket statement out there, like, okay, wave a wand and go, go build all these skills. We want to take a look at all the skills that you've identified and we want to prioritize which skill will have the biggest, immediate, positive impact on you.

Whether that's helping you save time, whether that's solving problems on a regular basis, whether that's helping increase your impact on your team, or maybe it's helping build your relationship with your boss. You want to look at all these skills and then think which one or two or three of these skills will have the biggest, immediate positive impact on me as a leader or on my team, through me as a leader. What you want to do then is prioritize your time on developing that skill or those two or three skills first. Then work your way down the list, and there's a psychology behind this.

We want to make sure you're getting an immediate positive result on something. We don't want to pick something that's going to take, a year or two to develop. We want to pick something, that's got a higher ROI. It's something you can start practicing and developing right away, whether it's through taking a course or reading a book, but it's something you can get positive results on right away.

If you're not sure where to begin. I think a great skill to learn would be how to have difficult conversations, because that is something that a lot of managers struggle with, but it is a learnable skill.

If that's a skill that you want to learn how to improve on, I'm going to include a link to an episode I have called How To Have Difficult Conversations At Work. So you can check that out.

But just to recap that step five, you want to prioritize which area you should be working on first based on which skill will have the highest immediate ROI for you.

Step 6 - Create Positive Affirmation for Each Skill

Step six is going to be a little bit different than what you might expect. What do you want to do is you want to say a positive affirmation for each one of these skills each morning.

Hear me out, just to explain like, why you want to do this. We all have the same thought cycle. What I mean by that is we all circulate through the same five or 10 thoughts over and over each day. Your thoughts are going to be different than mine, but just kind of think about it. There's these reoccurring thoughts that come up each day over and over. If you're struggling with confidence, a lot of these thoughts are going to be related to why you're failing or why you're not a good leader or why you're incapable of doing something that you're struggling with or why you're never going to be able to break free from this cycle. Some of these examples would be, I'm not a good listener, you might tell yourself that.

When you go through these thoughts over and over again, your subconscious believes these thoughts and it creates limiting belief for you. So your brain just keeps kind of replaying these thoughts over and over again. When these thoughts are front of mind, your subconscious believes these thoughts and it holds you back and it makes you believe that you can't overcome these things. But you can take control over your thoughts with positive affirmations. What you do is you basically just, when you have these negative thoughts, you intentionally replace that space with the positive thoughts.

I'm just going to use active listening, cause that's the easiest one to, to give a black and white example. If you're thinking I'm not a good listener, I'll never be a good listener. Replace that thought with I am a great listener and I'm going to always be improving on my listening each day. That would be your positive affirmation. You'd want to say that at the beginning of each morning, if that's something that you want to improve on.

If you're someone that wants to improve your emotional intelligence, you know, you want to make a positive affirmation about that. I am constantly working on improving my emotional intelligence each day as a leader. The reason you're doing this is you're building that confidence in believing you can do it by saying this each day. You want to use a present tense statement when you're saying these positive affirmations. I am a good listener. Not, I want to be, you're not, I will be it's, I am a good listener and I'm working on that continuously. When you say these present tense statements, you're basically tricking your subconscious into believing that you already have these abilities. That's why it's so important to use present tense statements.

Some other examples of this would be, saying I am a confident leader. I am calm under pressure. I am a great communicator. I am comfortable with giving presentations in front of groups. Whatever these things are you want to work on, say, I am this and you can expand these statements to make them more detailed and lengthy. I am a confident leader who handles myself while under pressure, for example, but you know, it's all about personalizing these for you.

What are these skills that you've identified and these characteristics that you've identified in steps one through three. You want to create positive affirmation statements around those? Write them down when you think of them the first time, and then just quickly read those each morning. When you're eating breakfast, when you're drinking coffee or before you start responding to emails at your desk, just quickly read them to yourself and getting in the habit of saying these things each day.

Also throughout the day, if you notice one of those negative thoughts come up replace that negative thought with thinking one of these positive affirmations to replace it. Again, you're tricking your brain. Confidence is a mindset. Confidence is something that you can take control of. By telling yourself you are these things you want to be, trick your subconscious positively into believing these things about yourself, which is going to have a positive quicksand effect or a positive snowball effect on your confidence.

Step 7 - Mentally Visualize Yourself Being Successful

Step seven is visualize yourself being successful. Again, this is all about tricking your subconscious. Your brain can't tell the difference between what you visualize in your head mentally versus reality.

To your brain, it's all the same, especially when you visualize something that's really detailed where you're engaging your senses. When you're thinking about what does it feel like? What are the things I'm seeing? What are the sounds I'm hearing? What are the sensations going on in this mental image? I talk about this a lot in my memory training programs that I do, but your brain cannot tell the difference between a detailed mental image that you think of in your head versus reality. The reason that this is important is because when you visualize yourself being successful, your brain again is going to believe you're successful, which boosts your confidence.

I know this as a former college athlete and professional athletes do this all the time. They use this technique. All the time to help them get ready for games. Obviously there's physical practice, but they also do mental practice. They visualize how they're going to perform before the game. They mentally run through each play. They picture themselves making the shot or making the tackle or hitting the ball. Whatever sport they're playing, whatever success looks like to them, they visualize themselves having that success in as much detail as possible. They picture the stadium. They picture the field. They picture the person they're playing against. They picture all these things because their brain then believes they're going to be that successful in reality.

Again, you're tricking your subconscious. These are brain hacks. So what you want to do as a leader is visualize yourself effectively demonstrating all the skills and the characteristics and qualities you've identified in steps one through three. You want to visualize yourself, demonstrating these things each day? It only takes a minute, you just close your eyes. You'll get better at it, the more you practice it. It might feel a little uncomfortable at first, but you can just take 30 seconds to visualize yourself having an effective one-on-one with your team. Or visualize yourself, negotiating something with your boss or influencing a cross-functional team. Or influencing someone on a cross-functional team that you don't have authority over. Picture yourself doing these things with success each day, because then your brain is going to believe that you're great at doing these things.

Another quick tip on this, when you're going into a situation that typically stresses you out, let's say like having a negative conversation with your direct report, or maybe you're going into a stressful meeting with your boss. Or maybe you're going to go give a presentation. When you're going into a situation, that's going to stress you out, take a few minutes before that situation to mentally visualize yourself, handling that situation perfectly. So first just think about what's the outcome you want. What does success look like in this situation? What does delivering the speech perfectly look like? What does having that difficult conversation with your direct report, what is the perfect scenario for that? Is it them taking the news well?

First start with the ending. What is the best case outcome you want? Then, just mentally visualize you going through all the steps that it takes to do this thing successfully. So picture yourself saying the right things, doing the right things, staying calm, under pressure reacting to the situation, calmly, whatever it is.

There's a million different scenarios here. But you want to mentally visualize yourself being successful and handling it the perfect possible way. Again, we're tricking your brain here to get you ready for this to make you believe that you're great at handling the situation.

But the other thing that's going on here is this gives you a chance to be prepared for the unexpected because when you're playing this scenario out, you're going to see, okay, wait, this person might react to this way to the situation. Okay. If they react this way, here's how I'll handle that. This is a great way to kind of sniff out all the, if this, then that's going into these situations too. By doing this, now you're not going into a scary situation. Your brain is prepared for that situation. So again, these are brain hacks to get yourself more confident and comfortable with situations that normally stress you out.

Step 8 - Reflect on Your Leadership Skills Each Day

This brings us to the eighth and final step, which is reflect on your leadership every day. What I mean by this is at the end of each day. You want to mentally replay your day and rate yourself on each of the core skills and characteristics that you identified as the ideal type of leader you want to be.

So you want to ask yourself questions like, what did you learn today? How did you demonstrate those skills and characteristics today? Did you demonstrate them? Were there opportunities that you could have demonstrated these skills and characteristics, but didn't. If there were situations like that, give some thought to how would you handle that situation differently next time?

Another great question to ask yourself is how could you do better tomorrow? What's something that you can do differently tomorrow? Asking yourself questions like this, basically what you're doing here is you're keeping your leadership skills front of mind. Again, with your subconscious here, keeping your leadership skills front of mind is going to help your brain. Figure out ways to continue improving in these areas all the time, because your brain is a problem solving machine. You just need to be asking yourself the right questions.

Recapping All 8 Steps for Building Your Confidence as a Leader

Now to quickly recap all eight steps.

Step one is define what type of leader you want to be. Be as crystal clear as possible. What are the characteristics and qualities you need?

Step two is define what skills you need to possess to be this type of leader.

Step three is define how you can demonstrate each of these skills on a daily basis.

Step four is how to develop the skills that you don't have as well as how to improve the skills that you currently do have.

Step five is build an action plan for developing all of these skills but also prioritizing which one is going to have the biggest impact on you immediately. And then making that one, your top priority.

Step six is create a positive affirmation for each one of these skills and characteristics and qualities, and say them to yourself each morning, as well as any time that you have a negative thought. You want to cancel that out with one of these positive affirmations. This is tricking your subconscious into building up your confidence.

Step seven is mentally visualize yourself being successful at these skills and at these qualities and these traits every day.

Step eight is reflect on your leadership every day through journaling and asking yourself questions like what did I learn today? How could I be better tomorrow?

Now I want you to try out this framework for a week and take note of how your confidence improves from day one to day seven.

If you're looking for more ways to level up your leadership skills, you should check out my episode called How To Use Brain Hacks To Become A Better Leader.

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