4 ms·

Sure about that ? :) Jokes aside, exuding confidence is different from being confident and orthogonal from the truthiness of you statement/position. Being a l

by mildbow 11y ago

Sure about that ? :) Jokes aside, exuding confidence is different from being confident and orthogonal from the truthiness of you statement/position. Being a leader means that you can exude confidence regardless of how confident you are on the data or it's source. Why? Because, at the end of the day your team needs to trust you to make the correct decision and the first thing they will measure (knowingly or unknowingly) is whether you trust yourself. If you keep being proven wrong your team will stop trusting you. But, that will start happening a lot sooner if you don't look like you trust yourself. tldr: being doubtful and exuding doubt in yourself are completely different things. If you are in a leadership position doing the latter is poison to your team.

deciplex 11y ago
I have worked for people who were overly (sometimes unjustly) confident in themselves and also for one person who was basically a dispassionate, consensus-building Bayesian optimizer. A confident person might be able to get more people on his side initially, but he will have to consistently deliver successes after that point, and once the facade cracks more than a few times, he is screwed. This is true even if, depending on the industry or the problem space, a high expectation of consistent success is irrational on the part of the people following him. On the other hand by making people a part of the decision-making process and laying bare the framework by which action is conceived and then taken, while it may be harder (sometimes very much harder) to get people to go along, they will also tolerate setbacks along the way much better. I think it is also probably much easier for people to act in a way that is consistent with the goals of the team, since they will know and be closer to what those goals actually are in the first place. I guess what I'm getting at is, "confidence" I take to be a type of information-hiding activity. This can be made to work and is sometimes even the optimal choice, but it does require more social skill and risk on the part of the confident person.
- mildbow 11y ago
  Lots of things here so my response is going to be a little jumbled :) Yeah, regression to mean definitely a thing. It can topple justifiably confident people and/or prop up frauds. In my experience, decision by committee has never worked when times are tough. When times are tough you just need to be able to trust your leadership to know what they are doing and not micro manage them (and not have them micro-manage you). When times aren't tough, then anything will work :) Really, there is no such thing as full-disclosure of information or decision-making. But, you should have full-disclosure of goals so everyone is pushing in the same direction. Your CEO will have info you don't have. Second-guessing him when times are tough will just lead to poison. And anyway, even in decision by committee you'll have people who exude confidence being able to sell their ideas better etcs. They will just do so with no accountability. I'm not sure people tolerate setbacks any better in the long-term regardless of whether they were part of the decision or not. Humans are revisionists. I've definitely heard comments in the line of "He's the CEO, why is he asking us?" and "I said that would happen. " when things are going bad. I think of "confidence" as complexity-hiding rather than information-hiding. Basically, it's saying "you can trust me to do my job. Worry about yours." At the end of the day, working in any team is going to be based on how much you can trust everyone else to do their jobs. If you can't, time to move on.

by mildbow 11y ago

deciplex 11y ago

I have worked for people who were overly (sometimes unjustly) confident in themselves and also for one person who was basically a dispassionate, consensus-building Bayesian optimizer. A confident person might be able to get more people on his side initially, but he will have to consistently deliver successes after that point, and once the facade cracks more than a few times, he is screwed. This is true even if, depending on the industry or the problem space, a high expectation of consistent success is irrational on the part of the people following him. On the other hand by making people a part of the decision-making process and laying bare the framework by which action is conceived and then taken, while it may be harder (sometimes very much harder) to get people to go along, they will also tolerate setbacks along the way much better. I think it is also probably much easier for people to act in a way that is consistent with the goals of the team, since they will know and be closer to what those goals actually are in the first place. I guess what I'm getting at is, "confidence" I take to be a type of information-hiding activity. This can be made to work and is sometimes even the optimal choice, but it does require more social skill and risk on the part of the confident person.

mildbow 11y ago
Lots of things here so my response is going to be a little jumbled :) Yeah, regression to mean definitely a thing. It can topple justifiably confident people and/or prop up frauds. In my experience, decision by committee has never worked when times are tough. When times are tough you just need to be able to trust your leadership to know what they are doing and not micro manage them (and not have them micro-manage you). When times aren't tough, then anything will work :) Really, there is no such thing as full-disclosure of information or decision-making. But, you should have full-disclosure of goals so everyone is pushing in the same direction. Your CEO will have info you don't have. Second-guessing him when times are tough will just lead to poison. And anyway, even in decision by committee you'll have people who exude confidence being able to sell their ideas better etcs. They will just do so with no accountability. I'm not sure people tolerate setbacks any better in the long-term regardless of whether they were part of the decision or not. Humans are revisionists. I've definitely heard comments in the line of "He's the CEO, why is he asking us?" and "I said that would happen. " when things are going bad. I think of "confidence" as complexity-hiding rather than information-hiding. Basically, it's saying "you can trust me to do my job. Worry about yours." At the end of the day, working in any team is going to be based on how much you can trust everyone else to do their jobs. If you can't, time to move on.