Building Team Confidence

As much as a team relies on their leaders, their leaders too, relies on the team.  It can be argued that the leader needs the team more than the team needs the leader.  In many cases, the team can remain to function without a leader.  However, in most cases, leaders are not leaders without a people to follow them, without a team.  And without a team to do the work, the leader would most likely unable to do the work alone.  Therefore, the team’s ability to do the work with the leader is most important.  And in order to work well, the team must be a confident team.  The leader must be able to build the team’s confidence to be an effective unit.

Building team confidence is like most things, it’s not easy to do and it requires a great amount of investment.  To successfully build team confidence, you will have to invest a substantial amount time, patients and empathy.  And most important of all, it will require consistency.  Here are some areas where you must spend time and effort with your team in order to build their confidence.

• Setup for success – In preparation for work or new projects, you will do well by planning and preparing properly for your team to be successful. Make sure you set challenging goals, but also reasonable goals.  Something that is within their normal abilities to accomplish.  Setting objectives which have high potential for failure will be demoralizing when it’s not accomplished.  Sometimes confidence will be lost before the work ever starts.
  
  
• Provide support – Team success and confidence will be reliant on how much support you provide. In the daily process and challenges, you must make sure you provide your team with all the help they need.  Whether its equipment, additional resources or just simply your cheerleading abilities, you must make sure that they get what they need in order to perform their jobs successfully. 
  
  
• Empathize for Failure – There’s nothing more demoralizing than failure and then being chastise for it. You must allow mistakes to be made and plan to deal with failure appropriately.  Take failures and mistakes as a teaching moment and allow your team to learn from it.  Handling failures appropriately will go a long way in building team confidence.
  
  
• Embrace ideas – A big part of confidence is having your ideas be heard and considered seriously. You’ve already spent a great deal of effort assembling a great team with great minds.  Put it to use.  Allow your team to contribute their ideas.  Negating your team’s ideas will be detrimental to their confidence.  Embracing their ideas will build your team’s confidence rapidly.
  
  
• Experiment – Having your ideas heard is great.  But it is not enough.  When you hear ideas from all your team members, but never use them, that’s a problem.  If your team is giving ideas but they never get their ideas used, they will stop giving you their ideas.  You must take chances and implement ideas given by your team.  It goes a long way in building team confidence but also will allow you to learn through experimentation.

In order to successfully build team confidence, you must be willing to invest great effort and time.  It will also require consistency in your efforts.  Just doing these suggestions every once in a while won’t help you in building team confidence.  It will require consistent practice and consistently applying these suggestions.  You can read more about how to be consistent in my article How To Be Consistent here.  Your success greatly depends on your team’s confidence level.  Building team confidence isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either.  It requires effort and consistency.  But the investment you make into building your team’s confidence will be rewarded with sustainable success. 

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