Mistakes are the pathway to great ideas and innovation says Nick van Dam, and we perform best if we have enough self-confidence and aren’t afraid of making mistakes
We all make mistakes. Every one of us. If we aren’t making mistakes, then we likely aren’t trying enough new things outside our comfort zone. Mistakes are not failures; they are simply the process of eliminating ways that won’t work in order to come closer to the ways that will.
Together with my colleagues, Dr Jacqueline Brassey from IE University and VU University in Amsterdam and Dr Arjen van Witteloostuijn from VU University in Amsterdam, we wanted to find out how people really feel about making these vital workplace mistakes.
To do this, we collected data from about 1,000 people, and asked them how confident they felt at work. We found that more than 40% of them were worried about making mistakes between 20-40% of the time or more.
When we looked deeper in the differences between men and women, 46% of women worried 20-40% of the time or more compared to 33% of men, indicating of course that women worry more than men. As if that wasn’t bad enough, in perhaps another example of millennial angst, that figure skyrockets to a whopping 60-70% among younger higher educated professionals. We found these figures quite disappointing especially as we know the dangers of not being confident.
Not feeling confident can have a particularly detrimental effect on new staff members. Employees often only perform well in new positions if they have enough self-confidence and aren’t afraid of making mistakes. We actually learn the most from our mistakes after all. If we don’t feel confident, we tend to avoid speaking up, don’t give feedback to senior people, don’t ask for feedback ourselves and won’t even think about a promotion.
In a more extreme case, we might suffer from burnout because we spend so much time worrying. Which by definition is a chronic process of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy caused by a disconnect or an imbalance between key job demands, job resources, and your ability to recover both at work and outside of work. Essentially, we’re not the best version of ourselves. Which is detrimental to productivity and a company’s success.
Feeling confident at work is particularly important now, because of the development of artificial intelligence (AI). Alvin Toffler once said: ‘The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.’
In some instances, relearning could be adapting what you know to a new reality. In terms of work, you will have to adapt some of your skills to the jobs of the future, and you will also have to learn new skills.
Research has shown that everyone will have to upskill over the next 10 years in order to remain employable. After gaining this new knowledge and skills, people will take on different tasks and roles in the years ahead. In order to do this successfully, we have to be the most confident version of ourselves.
In fact, as the shelf life of competencies keeps getting shorter, it is critical to continue to invest in our own development. If you want to remain attractive to employers, you have to stay on top of your game and continue to develop competencies that are in demand.
Organisations also need to embrace ‘lifelong employability’, which stretches traditional notions of learning and development and can inspire workers to adapt, more routinely, to the evolving automated economy. Organisations must equally provide outstanding and ongoing opportunities for learning and development in order to retain their people. This is why, for example, professional services and consulting firms are making significant investments in people development. It is therefore important that companies start responding to this crisis of confidence now, in the interest of long-term employability and for the sake of their employees.
We know that a lack of self-confidence, impairs job performance and limits professional success. But becoming authentically confident does not mean that you will be free of insecurities. Rather, it means that you can become comfortable and effectively manage moments of insecurity. You can learn to do this. There are a set of practices and skills that you can apply. When you develop these skills, your relationships with your fears and unhelpful emotions change. Instead of being held back by them, they become a positive energy helping you achieve what matters to you. That gives you true authentic confidence.
So many successful people credit their sense of self and their confidence to their success, so working on your confidence might be the gateway to that promotion you’re after.
In their new book Advancing Authentic Confidence Through Emotional Flexibility, professors Dr Nick van Dam (Nyenrode Business University and IE Business School), Dr Jacqueline Brassey (IE University and VU University Amsterdam) and Dr Arjen van Witteloostuijn (VU University Amsterdam) state that a lack of self-confidence can have a negative impact on learning ability, work performance and career success. The authors introduce a number of exercises and tools that people can use to develop self-confidence.
Nick van Dam is an internationally recognized thought leader, adviser, researcher, author, and facilitator on corporate learning and leadership development At Nyenrode, Nick is teaching different programs and is holding the Chair Corporate Learning & Leadership Development. He is Academic Director of the International Masterclass L&D Leadership.He is passionate about helping individuals reach their full potential and is inspired by insights from positive- and development psychology, philosophy and the neurosciences. Dr van Dam has more than 30 years of business experience as a former partner, global chief learning officer, HR executive, and client advisor at McKinsey and Deloitte, as well as a business unit director at Siemens. As an advisor he has served more than 100 clients around the world.
