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The problem is that most managers seem to prefer to hire and work with people who have high levels of confidence. Why is this? Personally, I have no idea. Al

by lsc 16y ago

The problem is that most managers seem to prefer to hire and work with people who have high levels of confidence. Why is this? Personally, I have no idea. All other things being equal, I prefer hiring people with lower apparent levels of confidence. Aside from, in my opinion, simply being more pleasant and easier to get along with day to day, they tend to stick around longer at any given salary level. Confidence commands quite a bit of a pay increase in nearly all job roles, and in the roles I hire for, confidence doesn't really help you do the job, so people with less apparent confidence are quite often bargains. Besides, I'm pretty good at faking confidence, so in the rare instances where that skill is demanded, I can just do it myself.

donw 16y ago
They can be, although in my experience, you can't put low-confidence people in roles that require a lot of self-direction. Low-confidence people are less likely to branch out and learn new techniques, as they prefer to play it safe with what they already know. I've had problems before with a programmer who was terrified to do testing, because he didn't have the confidence that he could learn something new. He was otherwise a bright guy, but his lack of confidence severely hurt both himself, the team, and the company.
- lsc 16y ago
  Eh, I think it just requires a different management style. You need to be much lighter on the stick with someone who is less confident, and to use verbal praise as the carrot (along with periodic raises) The easy mistake is to blow up when something bad happens. Generally speaking, people who seem to lack confidence have a difficult time dealing with that sort of thing, so you see them becoming risk-averse in ways that are damaging to the company. But, if you can avoid blowing up, my experience has been that they can take reasonable risks as well as anyone else. Confident people, I think, usually require a more confrontational management style. Sometimes you /need/ to blow up to get them to do what the company needs rather than what they want to do (which is something I'm not particularly good at)
  - donw 16y ago
    I can honestly say that I have never needed to 'blow up' at one of my employees. Ever. If I had an employee that was totally unwilling to listen to direction, they would be an ex-employee very quickly. I'm not a dictator or a micromanager -- I do my best to hire smart people and let them do their jobs. But sometimes, someone needs to take charge and make a decision. If someone's ego can't cope with that, they are bad for the business, and need to go. If you have to bite someone's head off to get them to do their job, that's not confidence -- that's arrogance. Two very different things.
    - lsc 16y ago
      I've never gotten a clear explanation of the difference between confidence and arrogance, I mean, except as just a matter of degree. People tell me "well, that explains a lot about you" which, I'm sure, it does. but nobody seems to have an answer to the question that makes even a little sense. As for "blowing up" what I mean is that you need to adjust the, ah "volume" or "intensity" of your feelings upwards, vs. managing a person who isn't very confident, in which case you want to seem very low key, especially when the shit hits the proverbial fan; as I was mentioning in a previous post, if your emotions seem too intense when there is a failure, you can inadvertently train your less-confident people to avoid risk more than you like. I'm trying to say that more confident people will often ignore the less intense criticisms. they are more likely to assume everything is OK unless you make it very clear that it is not. If you try to be low key about it, a more confident person generally gets quite irritated, calling you "passive aggressive" (even if you are direct in a soft voice... it is the soft voice or soft framing, I think, that they find irritating.) and, well, getting quite irritated. My experience has been that an error on the side of too much emotional force usually has better results than an error on the side of not enough emotional force with the more confident sort of person. The interesting thing, I think, is that you can almost say the exact same words to the two groups of people. Being direct is almost always a good thing. But with the two different groups, you need to frame it and communicate it very differently. Having an appropriate amount of emotional force behind your words is key, and that appropriate amount of emotional force varies quite a lot depending on what sort of person you are attempting to communicate with. I'm approaching this problem from the perspective of someone who is naturally not all that aggressive, who has learned how to fake it, to some extent. (and yeah, to tie this back to the article, one of the things I taught myself was to sit in a very relaxed and expansive way that takes up a lot of space. I got the idea because I read a lot of feminist literature as a youth, and that is one of the behaviours a particular author found irritating in men. "wow," I thought "I sit like a woman." because yeah, I tended to sit very compactly, to take up little space. So as I got older and tried to fake this confidence, I started to sit more, uh, expansively. To consciously take up more space than I needed to. It feels pretty natural now. The really funny thing about this is that other people are aware of it too. try putting your feet up on the table or otherwise visibly relax and take up more space while talking with a male who is of greater status. You will often notice them doing the same thing, sometimes to a ridiculous extent.) so yeah, you are probably better at modulating your emotional force on the top end than I am, just 'cause that's not my natural state- that is something I learned. But my experience has been that even overdoing the emotional force by quite a bit usually results in more positive outcomes, when dealing with a confident person, than underdoing the emotional force, and looking like a wimp. Really, though, I think the key to this emotional confidence is having that willingness to experiment, and to screw up. I have yelled at people (and yeah, it's almost always the wrong thing to do.) I've made people cry without really meaning to. I mean, it's not something I regularly do, and it's something I'll try not to do again, but for me it was part of this learning process.
philwelch 16y ago
There's no tactful way to say this, so I'll just say it directly: what you're saying isn't very far from "I only hire people who aren't confident and assertive enough to demand the salary that they're worth". It might not be that bad (you might be afraid that a prospective employee who was more confident than you would negotiate out of you a higher salary than he was worth) but it's an ethical hazard to think in that way.
- lsc 16y ago
  Yeah, you could put it that way. Personally, I prefer "I can't pay very much, so people who think they can earn more go elsewhere" I mean, hell, I'm only paying myself about $30K a year, and I'm located in Silicon Valley. You can get new people for that, but you can't keep experienced folks for that kind of money. Not here. I'm very conscious of perceived fairness, and try to pay people accordingly, so I'm not worried about a confident employee negotiating a higher that warranted salary. I mean, I acknowledge that they are worth more, and I'm not offended when they shop around their resume... but my budget is what it is. I also tend to go for inexperienced people for the same reason. Do you think that's unethical? I mean, I've told everyone who has worked for me that I will expect them to leave for more money at some point (unless my business grows fast enough to suddenly pay everyone 'experienced person' rates... but so far the experience of people who worked for me has grown quite a bit faster than my company's ability to pay, so people leave, and I give good recommendations.) You are right that you should try to ignore attributes that are not relevant to the job at hand (including, in this case, confidence) and my own personal prejudices in the matter, I agree, make me look like an asshole who doesn't like dealing with other assholes (which, to be fair, I am.)
  - philwelch 16y ago
    If you're completely upfront about that situation it sounds pretty good--to the point where I wouldn't mind working for you myself to gain experience. I suspect a confident person will, worst case, just tell you they're not interested from the outset. Not hiring confident people implies that you're less than upfront about the situation (edit: absent the other explanation you've given--right now I don't find that ethically questionable at all anymore).

by lsc 16y ago

donw 16y ago

They can be, although in my experience, you can't put low-confidence people in roles that require a lot of self-direction. Low-confidence people are less likely to branch out and learn new techniques, as they prefer to play it safe with what they already know. I've had problems before with a programmer who was terrified to do testing, because he didn't have the confidence that he could learn something new. He was otherwise a bright guy, but his lack of confidence severely hurt both himself, the team, and the company.

lsc 16y ago
Eh, I think it just requires a different management style. You need to be much lighter on the stick with someone who is less confident, and to use verbal praise as the carrot (along with periodic raises) The easy mistake is to blow up when something bad happens. Generally speaking, people who seem to lack confidence have a difficult time dealing with that sort of thing, so you see them becoming risk-averse in ways that are damaging to the company. But, if you can avoid blowing up, my experience has been that they can take reasonable risks as well as anyone else. Confident people, I think, usually require a more confrontational management style. Sometimes you /need/ to blow up to get them to do what the company needs rather than what they want to do (which is something I'm not particularly good at)
- donw 16y ago
  I can honestly say that I have never needed to 'blow up' at one of my employees. Ever. If I had an employee that was totally unwilling to listen to direction, they would be an ex-employee very quickly. I'm not a dictator or a micromanager -- I do my best to hire smart people and let them do their jobs. But sometimes, someone needs to take charge and make a decision. If someone's ego can't cope with that, they are bad for the business, and need to go. If you have to bite someone's head off to get them to do their job, that's not confidence -- that's arrogance. Two very different things.
  - lsc 16y ago
    I've never gotten a clear explanation of the difference between confidence and arrogance, I mean, except as just a matter of degree. People tell me "well, that explains a lot about you" which, I'm sure, it does. but nobody seems to have an answer to the question that makes even a little sense. As for "blowing up" what I mean is that you need to adjust the, ah "volume" or "intensity" of your feelings upwards, vs. managing a person who isn't very confident, in which case you want to seem very low key, especially when the shit hits the proverbial fan; as I was mentioning in a previous post, if your emotions seem too intense when there is a failure, you can inadvertently train your less-confident people to avoid risk more than you like. I'm trying to say that more confident people will often ignore the less intense criticisms. they are more likely to assume everything is OK unless you make it very clear that it is not. If you try to be low key about it, a more confident person generally gets quite irritated, calling you "passive aggressive" (even if you are direct in a soft voice... it is the soft voice or soft framing, I think, that they find irritating.) and, well, getting quite irritated. My experience has been that an error on the side of too much emotional force usually has better results than an error on the side of not enough emotional force with the more confident sort of person. The interesting thing, I think, is that you can almost say the exact same words to the two groups of people. Being direct is almost always a good thing. But with the two different groups, you need to frame it and communicate it very differently. Having an appropriate amount of emotional force behind your words is key, and that appropriate amount of emotional force varies quite a lot depending on what sort of person you are attempting to communicate with. I'm approaching this problem from the perspective of someone who is naturally not all that aggressive, who has learned how to fake it, to some extent. (and yeah, to tie this back to the article, one of the things I taught myself was to sit in a very relaxed and expansive way that takes up a lot of space. I got the idea because I read a lot of feminist literature as a youth, and that is one of the behaviours a particular author found irritating in men. "wow," I thought "I sit like a woman." because yeah, I tended to sit very compactly, to take up little space. So as I got older and tried to fake this confidence, I started to sit more, uh, expansively. To consciously take up more space than I needed to. It feels pretty natural now. The really funny thing about this is that other people are aware of it too. try putting your feet up on the table or otherwise visibly relax and take up more space while talking with a male who is of greater status. You will often notice them doing the same thing, sometimes to a ridiculous extent.) so yeah, you are probably better at modulating your emotional force on the top end than I am, just 'cause that's not my natural state- that is something I learned. But my experience has been that even overdoing the emotional force by quite a bit usually results in more positive outcomes, when dealing with a confident person, than underdoing the emotional force, and looking like a wimp. Really, though, I think the key to this emotional confidence is having that willingness to experiment, and to screw up. I have yelled at people (and yeah, it's almost always the wrong thing to do.) I've made people cry without really meaning to. I mean, it's not something I regularly do, and it's something I'll try not to do again, but for me it was part of this learning process.

philwelch 16y ago

There's no tactful way to say this, so I'll just say it directly: what you're saying isn't very far from "I only hire people who aren't confident and assertive enough to demand the salary that they're worth". It might not be that bad (you might be afraid that a prospective employee who was more confident than you would negotiate out of you a higher salary than he was worth) but it's an ethical hazard to think in that way.

lsc 16y ago
Yeah, you could put it that way. Personally, I prefer "I can't pay very much, so people who think they can earn more go elsewhere" I mean, hell, I'm only paying myself about $30K a year, and I'm located in Silicon Valley. You can get new people for that, but you can't keep experienced folks for that kind of money. Not here. I'm very conscious of perceived fairness, and try to pay people accordingly, so I'm not worried about a confident employee negotiating a higher that warranted salary. I mean, I acknowledge that they are worth more, and I'm not offended when they shop around their resume... but my budget is what it is. I also tend to go for inexperienced people for the same reason. Do you think that's unethical? I mean, I've told everyone who has worked for me that I will expect them to leave for more money at some point (unless my business grows fast enough to suddenly pay everyone 'experienced person' rates... but so far the experience of people who worked for me has grown quite a bit faster than my company's ability to pay, so people leave, and I give good recommendations.) You are right that you should try to ignore attributes that are not relevant to the job at hand (including, in this case, confidence) and my own personal prejudices in the matter, I agree, make me look like an asshole who doesn't like dealing with other assholes (which, to be fair, I am.)
- philwelch 16y ago
  If you're completely upfront about that situation it sounds pretty good--to the point where I wouldn't mind working for you myself to gain experience. I suspect a confident person will, worst case, just tell you they're not interested from the outset. Not hiring confident people implies that you're less than upfront about the situation (edit: absent the other explanation you've given--right now I don't find that ethically questionable at all anymore).