Why Confident Leaders Build Stronger Organizations

This article is a summary of Episode 34 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. 

Today we're talking about confidence and specifically how to embody confidence as a leader in a social impact organization. There's a lot to unpack here actually, but let's start with how we came to think about this.

We’re big fans of David C. Baker. He’s a consultant for agency leaders. Over his years of working with different agency owners, he noticed that agency owners who were more confident significantly overperformed their peers. He went on to actually break down how to create competence and confidence as an agency owner through an equation. His equation is: 

Confidence = Opportunities
𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋𑁋
              Capacity

This basically means that if there's more work than can be handled, it's going to give confidence. And if there's less work than needed, it is going to erode your confidence — which we can absolutely confirm. 

That's an equation that we could try and figure out how to size for the social impact sector if we think about something like fundraising opportunities compared to capacity for impact. But that's not actually where we want to go today. We want to go a little bit more abstract and obscure and just talk about confidence in general and how that plays into leadership in the social impact space and why confidence is important. We’ll get into our own struggles and journeys with confidence over the years. And then also a little bit about when being overconfident can actually become a problem.

Reflections on Confidence

At Cosmic, we’ve had huge struggles with confidence, not even just in the professional setting, but in the personal setting as well. The very common one that most people struggle with is confidence in any kind of public speaking situation. 

We’ve had to present really high stakes presentations to really high stakes people many, many, many times. And over the last 15 years, we’ve built a good amount of confidence and generally feel pretty comfortable. But, to be honest, this is something that we still struggle with — especially when we’re in a situation where something new is happening, — like when there's a new approach to a part of the process, or starting to sell a new service or new offering. This is where it comes into play the most, which is logical. If it's something that there isn't as much experience with, then there's not going to be as much confidence in it.

There are times where leaders feel completely unequipped to lead a particular project. The level of specialized knowledge in order to get the job done can be so niche that the question becomes: 

And that's just one small example where confidence takes a hit. Or if a decision is made where the results aren't what they need to be, confidence takes a hit. Struggles with confidence often have to do with relationships or even how a person looks. Those struggles absolutely exist.

A Fake It Till You Make It Moment

In the early days of Cosmic, there was a friend and a partner who introduced us to a client and the client needed a video produced, shot, filmed, and packaged and everything. At the time we had been falling in love with video and film work, which as a studio, we hadn’t done professionally. We had some cameras and some gear, not a ton — a very minimal setup. Our friend at the time was working for our client and mentioned that the organization needed a video. In a meeting he told the client, “These guys can do that for you.” And the client turned and said, “Oh, you guys do video production?” And our response was, “Yeah, we could do that.”

So it was this moment of just really having to take a leap of faith and having to essentially fake it till you make it.

Turning Discomfort into Confidence

There's some amount of that that is just entrepreneurial, is about building a business. It’s about growing as an organization. If you're always in your comfort zone, you're not growing by definition. 

And there's obviously a way to take that so far that you're essentially being a fraud. We talk a lot about imposter syndrome in modern culture and there is a lot of imposter syndrome and then there are actual just imposters too. And so where is the line there? It's not necessarily clear. But there is a need sometimes to embrace a space of growth and even a space of stretching where you actually are — as a leader or as an organization — and it's not going to be comfortable.

How do you build confidence around getting through this? That starts to get more into the term like resilience — okay, well we've gone through hard things before and we've made it out. Even though this is hard right now or we're taking a big leap of faith, we know that we're going to get through this. And so there's an interesting balance between confidence, resilience, and growth. 

The Value of Confidence

Confidence begs the question of: What are we confident in? Is it confidence in inherent value as a person or as a leader? Are we confident that the destination is the right destination? Are we confident in my skillset? There's an element of where you place your confidence and where you embody that confidence.

To tie it back to embodying confidence as a leader, let’s raise the question: Should leaders be confident? Let's go out on a limb and say they should. And the reason for that is building confidence is a good skill to have and to do it authentically means that you are stretching and growing as a person.

And also if you are going to lead, you need to be confident in your leadership. And if you want people to follow and to support and to be part of that — if you're not confident and you come across as being wishy-washy or indecisive or whatever flavor of non-confidence that you have — our sense and our experience, frankly, has been that lacking confidence is not a constructive way to be as a leader.

Different Flavors of Confidence

Being a confident leader does not necessarily mean being an asshole.

We can sometimes conflate those two concepts — that confident leaders are assholes and maybe they are, sometimes. But you can be confident and humble, you can be confident and a quiet leader. There are different flavors of confidence.

When Confidence Goes Too Far

Let's talk about when confidence goes too far and kind of the pitfalls of being overly confident. The classic example of someone who's confident but also kind of an asshole can work. That's probably not what anyone should aim for. And sometimes people are actually being an asshole because they're not confident. In our experience — especially the world's smartest people or the leading expert in any given field — sure they have some level of confidence, but they actually also usually have a contradictory trait, which is being extremely humble, if not second guessing themselves a lot. Another way of saying this is — the longer that you do something in any given niche or field, the more you realize how little you actually know about that work.

This comes up a lot in doing branding work and marketing work. Over the past 15 years, there are days and times where it's like: God, there's just so much to learn here still. And the thing that seemed so certain a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, doesn't seem right anymore. And maybe that's because the world is changing. Maybe that's because perspective is changing. But that is actually a more confident essence than someone who just assumes they're right all the time - someone who might seem confident on the surface. But if you start to peel the layers back, you realize it's actually coming from a place of lack of confidence or other deeper emotional issues that they might have.

Transferable Skills Build Confidence

Not everyone in the social impact space has been in it their whole career. They may have been in academia or tech or other sectors. They may have been in different sectors of the social impact space. And the through line has to do with skills.

If you have confidence in a certain set of skills. Skills in research and in team building and in strategy and in fundraising are going to serve you and be transferable no matter where your path goes. The fun can be in exploring and finding where you’re going to wind up. But the confidence to do so comes from a confidence in skillset and confidence that those skills could transfer to these different areas.

We’ve experienced that in building up a set of skills more broadly around creativity and branding. The skill that's been built the most over time,is understanding how to apply passion for creativity and design specifically in a way that could create business outcomes. That could tie into strategy. That could serve and move organizations forward and not just be an art project.

But honestly, it may have come from a lack of confidence and having to build that and overdelivering to make sure to not let people down. There's no desire to have an expectation set in a conversation and then not come through on that for a client, a partner or the team.

Organizational Confidence vs. Personal Confidence

As a leader, confidence in your team and your organization and your ability to meet your mission is also at stake here. At least that's what we’ve experienced.

For example, throughout the pandemic period, Cosmic was making a transition from being a very brick and mortar studio where there was a big table we all sat around. And a lot of networking and work came in through referrals and people understanding that we exist because of our location. We had to make a really big transition into being a remote first global agency, which we’ve done. It’s something we’re very proud of. But it was a really bumpy road.

And a realization came just this year — there was a set of limiting beliefs for the agency around how successful we were ever going to be able to be. Because we recalibrated the vision and expectations for what could be achieved based on some of the challenges that we went through in that period.

Recalibrating Expectations

As an example — looking at just particular revenue goals or even thinking about growing the team to a certain degree. We’ve tried things over the years and failed. And after a certain amount of attempts and failures, there's kind of a logical conclusion — It's a limiting belief based in fact and reality versus personality deficiencies. But you can't actually separate those things as cleanly as you might separate them in your brain.

We reset expectations for what Cosmic could accomplish. And frankly, that bar was put way too low. Maybe it was a mix of some burnout. Maybe it was because our founder and creative director was going through a time in life where there's a lot of focus on family and raising kids and wanting to make sure to be there for that. And there's only so much energy and attention that can be given to the world. 

So, some of the energy and attention was taken away from Cosmic and given to personal life and family. But it was actually a lack of confidence or a kind of calcification of limiting beliefs that was happening subconsciously because of trials and tribulations.

Letting Go of Self

Having a kid accelerates the perspective that it’s not about you. Any parent out there probably can relate to this — where there's this celestial shift in the way that you see the world. And there's sometimes over-indexing on personal impact on the organization. And it's a really liberating feeling to think, It's not about me and I’m just one player with one particular role. 

There's something very confidence building about that perspective. You have a role in this. You have a place. But it's just one of many. And that can feel really powerful. That perspective creates confidence — especially when pitching a new program or a new concept or a new vision because there's an option to divorce from the conversation and really embrace this idea that this has nothing to do with any individual at all.

It's a shedding of fear, which plays into the ability to be confident and embody confidence and show confidence. And when the mission can be seen as completely divorced from individual contributions to it, that washes away some of the fear and helps leaders show up with more confidence.

When Confidence Can be a Negative

Let's talk about one way this can go too far.

The Charismatic Leader Problem

We all understand the power of charisma. And a lot of people are trying to work towards that. But a lot of what we’ve experienced and observed is that charismatic leaders seem to just be born this way. And they can be extremely powerful and extremely effective in rapidly moving an organization forward — whether they're the founder of the organization or a new board member or CEO or executive director who maybe wasn't the founder.

These people can seemingly move mountains. And that might translate to fundraising or partnerships or networking. These people are often also very highly networked because people who are charismatic attract a lot of other people. But if that charismatic leader is taking on too much of the burden of the organization and too much of the ability for that organization to survive and thrive — based on that one charismatic leader — that can be a problem. We’ve seen it happen multiple times where a charismatic leader is essentially carrying the organization and then that leader retires or moves on or gets in a fight with the board chair or whatever it is — and then all of a sudden their presence is gone and the whole house of cards just kind of crumbles down.

Being in that kind of an organization while it's happening is very exciting. And there are downfalls. What often happens when a charismatic leader leaves the organization is that there is a period of dip, and understandably so, because they are so charismatically powerful.

Building Organizational Competence

The solution to investing too much in the confidence of a given leader is that — as much as we want leaders to build healthy confidence — we also need to build organizational confidence and competence. So if you have a charismatic leader or an effective leader, you just have to make sure that you can build out the support structure and operations can be built out to support that leader. And also, you have to build out the organization in a way that the leader is not carrying too much of the burden or leaving a big hole if they do leave.

Build a Strong Foundation

So the other thing that's important in terms of how leaders build confidence and competence at more of an organizational level — and this will only strengthen a leader's ability to be competent — is to be really strong on some of the foundational things that we talk about a lot. Things like owning a niche, having a strong brand, having effective marketing and communications and fundraising, because all of that is going to better position your organization against other similar organizations in your space or competing organizations in your space in a way that will give you confidence because it's earned. It's earned confidence and it’s earned competence.

And as Cosmic has been built — and we’ve watched nonprofit organizations and social enterprises build — one thing that is clear is that with or without a charismatic or confident leader, the organizations that are the most effective and by extension the most competent and confident are the ones that have done that hard work and have meaningful answers to those questions. If you don't have that strong foundation, then it just becomes harder to build that confidence because you're not really building it on a strong foundation.

Confidence Breeds Confidence

When you start to develop excellence and competence in those areas, it's a snowball effect. So it's really important for organizations that are small or starting up or getting going to nail all these fundamental pieces early on. That's going to help attract talent. That's going to help attract funding and board members and all of the necessary ingredients for a high performing social impact organization.

There's actually a term to describe that, which is called the Matthew Effect — which is a term we weren’t familiar with until just recently — but it confirms that exact observation, which is that confidence breeds competence and competence leads to more confidence. And we’ve seen that at Cosmic and watched it in others as well.

The Path Forward

To wrap it up, there's a claim we want to make: Working to build confidence as a leader — if you do it with the right intentions and you do it healthily in a way where you're not also an asshole, in a way that you're not overextending that confidence as a crutch for the rest of the organization — is a worthwhile goal. It's a worthwhile endeavor, and the ways that you do that are also synergistically just going to help you be a more effective leader in general.

We should all be striving for this in a healthy way.