Charmain Bogue | Why I Stopped Trying to Sound More Confident Than I Was

Charmain Bogue at her desk


Performed certainty is not leadership. It is a liability in disguise.

There is a version of executive presence that I spent years trying to perform. It involves sounding certain when you are not, projecting calm when you are worried, and delivering answers before you have really thought through the question. I was told, at various points in my career, that this was what leaders were supposed to look like.

I do not believe that anymore. And I think the version of confidence that gets taught in leadership programs does real damage.

The cost of performed certainty

When a leader performs certainty she does not have, she closes off the information she needs most. The people around her read the performance accurately, as a signal that there is no room for the honest read, for the person who has noticed something going wrong, for the question that would slow everything down.

I have coached leaders who presided over genuine organizational failures while looking utterly composed. The composure was not protecting them or anyone else. It was insulating them from the feedback that might have changed the outcome. Every time they projected unearned confidence, they made it slightly harder for someone to tell them the truth.

What I started doing instead

I started saying, out loud and in professional settings, things like: I am not sure yet. I have a direction but I need to pressure test it. I want to hear what I am missing before I commit to this. The first time I did this with a senior group I braced for a drop in credibility. It went the other way. The people in the room visibly relaxed, because they had things to say and had been waiting for permission.

This is what I try to pass on to the executives I coach, especially women, who are often held to an impossible double standard where projected confidence reads as arrogant but admitted uncertainty reads as weak. The double standard is real and it is unfair. It is also worth fighting, because the alternative is a leadership style that produces people who stop telling you things you need to hear.

Confidence is not certainty

The distinction I have come to depends on separating confidence from certainty. Confidence is the conviction that you can work through hard problems, hold the tension of not knowing, and make the call when the call has to be made. Certainty is a performance of knowing the answer before the question has been fully asked.

The leaders I respect most are the ones who are clearly confident and visibly uncertain at the same time. They ask questions that reveal how much they are still thinking. They change their positions when the evidence warrants it. They do not perform composure in the face of real risk. That combination, confidence without false certainty, is harder to build than either one alone. It is also what the people around you are actually hoping to find.

 

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