rowland manthorpe dot com

From Observer Sports Monthly’s interview with the Drog:

And was the now ex-manager correct to diagnose a drop in Drogba’s “confidence”, his potency around the box? “I’ve never had a problem with my confidence. It’s not about my confidence, it’s still high. I know what I can bring to our team. I don’t really agree with what he said. This is his opinion, but everyone has opinions.”

This illustrates neatly the Catch-22 for leaders talking about confidence. Saying “it’s all down to confidence” can be a way of telling your staff that success is right around the corner, and that difficulties now will seem minor once you get on a roll. “Form is temporary, class is permanent”, to use the old cricket adage.

But talk of confidence can also be demotivating. First, because it specifies a problem without obvious solutions. So we need confidence: how do we go about getting it? The leader doesn’t have the answers; no-one does. More often than not, it seems to me, confidence rhetoric is used to justify the current course of action. “Stick with me”, the leader is saying: “keep on doing what we’re doing and it will all be alright in the end”.

This strategy - used most notably at the moment by President Obama - is fine so far as it goes. But it may end up backfiring. Like happiness, confidence is not something that welcomes conscious thought. Thinking about it tends to unravel it: after all, what is it based on, really? As J. S. Mill put it in his autobiography:

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

So I’m not surprised to see Didier sounding a bit defensive about Scolari’s quote. It was poor management. When confidence is low, it’s often best to carry on as if it wasn’t.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This