Why does confidence matter so much in business?

Confidence is both an internal game and something that is perceived outwardly to influence people and situations, hopefully towards win-win outcomes. Overinflated ego and bravado are not confidence: that is, you can have the outward appearance of confidence and lack any real self-approval, certainty or belief in yourself – and people will see through this quite quickly. On the other hand, you can feel grounded in a clear, quiet confidence – and people will respond to that by placing their confidence in you.

‘Professional’ confidence refers to the confidence we feel in our ability to be effective in our work. This naturally comes with experience and positive feedback from others, and in the times we see our work helping someone in a meaningful way. Yet, much of our daily work may not have that instant feedback loop, and challenges crop up that can knock our confidence (global pandemic, anyone?).

When it comes to business, displaying confidence is a must if others are to place their trust in you… and business doesn’t happen without trust. Professional confidence in not only displayed by our track record, but communicated all day every day – in the ways we talk about our work, engage with others, and in the language choices we make (including body language and online language!).

Not only does your own confident communication allow others to place their trust in you, but consistent confident communication from all your team members in their own domains – be it internally with each other or externally with stakeholders and audiences – will create and magnify trust in the broader team and organisation. By developing your team’s professional confidence, you are developing a ‘team brand’ of trust.

“By developing your team’s professional confidence, you are developing a ‘team brand’ of trust.”

Developing the professional confidence of your team should start early in their careers and continue all the way through. You should address:

• Knowing our strengths & their value to others
• Being able to articulate this value
• Leading from this space… ‘owning it’

When you teach your team members to understand and articulate their contributions and strengths in terms of value to others, you will grow a team of highly influential people.

See below for practical steps to build your team’s professional confidence…

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by innovation and scale-up strategic advisor Eva Chye for If Innovation Could Talk. We discussed:

• innovative measures New Work Consulting has developed to address the divide between a company’s brand and its culture,
• the ways businesses can build trust in the digital age, and
• how individuals build trust through their personal brands.

Here are some highlights from the discussion.

Q: Julissa, you have coined the term ‘Brand Culture’ to describe the connection between an organisation’s brand and its culture. What inspired this innovative focus for your advisory?

I describe Brand Culture as ‘brand expression through your people’. It refers to the ways team members understand and communicate the business vision, brand values and key messages, both internally among themselves and externally with stakeholders.

To build trust in a business, the intersection between the company brand and the company culture requires a clear strategy at board and leadership level, and engagement from the whole staff to understand and address how they see, relate to, communicate and express the brand in their daily work and in their online and offline communications with stakeholders and audiences.

Yet – I see a real gap here:

• Boards are now starting to more deeply address Culture on their agendas, but it is disconnected from Brand, because this is still seen as the realm of the internal organisation (in some cases, just the marketing department).
• Leadership teams experience a lack of clarity and real, on-the-ground meaning when it comes to brand, despite having undertaken ‘branding’ and ‘purpose’ exercises.
• Individual staff members are unable to meaningfully articulate what the brand stands for and what it means to them in their daily work, when asked.
• External stakeholders and audiences experience a disconnect between what the ‘official branding’ tells them and what they experience through their interactions with staff, or through online commentary such as staff and customer reviews and media pieces.

You can see how each of these problem areas point to the necessary connection between the company brand and its culture… but most leaders don’t have a clear pathway and tools to tackle this.

See below for how to bridge the gap and build trust…

The banking and financial services sectors have experienced significant challenges in the past few years: The Royal Commission put ethics squarely in focus and public perception of banks suffered. In addition, an increase in competitive alternatives in banking and financial services coupled with crisis-driven changes in market conditions are challenging the future of traditional institutions.

The ability to build trust remains at the centre of thriving in business, and yet in a competitive and challenged field, trust is much more than being seen to be doing the ‘right thing’.

“Trust is more than a code of ethics and it is more than PR management…”

Trust is more than a code of ethics and it is more than PR management. Culture may be intangible but it IS visible – publicly, online! In this week’s webinar kicking off the FINSIA (Financial Services Institute of Australasia) ‘Future of Finance’ 2021 series, I co-presented with futurist, researcher and author Rocky Scopelliti. Our discussion centred around how the nature of trust changed rapidly with the events of 2020, how technology will be central in building trust going forward, and where people play their part, individually and within organisations.

Coming from the Brand Culture advisory and Personal Branding for professional services perspective, I focused on practical frameworks for assessing and addressing the level of alignment between brand and culture within an organisation, and ways to build internal professional confidence with staff and external brand trust with stakeholders. I demonstrated examples of just how easily an organisation’s culture and leadership style is visible online… and the I walked FINSIA members through 3 frameworks to work with these concepts for themselves and their teams: NWC’s Brand Expression Quadrant, Trust Map, and Personal Branding ‘DECA’ model.

Watch the discussion in this video (my piece starts around 21 minutes in), and then scroll down for a sample model discussed in the video…