Beyond Self-Doubt: Leading Teams to Peak Performance

Over the last eight years, I’ve had the privilege of listening to and witnessing groups and teams from businesses express how they’re really feeling about themselves and their capabilities. Teams who need to break through to the next level of performance, individuals who want to achieve something but don’t know how, and groups who are looking to improve their skills in all types of areas but feel stuck. Some of these people and teams are already high-performing, but they want the next level.

Many themes emerged from these conversations, but one theme has stood out. Almost all of us, think we’re not as good as other people see us – there is a performance, capability and confidence gap that exists between our own self-perception and the perception of our colleagues around us. 

In this blog, I explore this issue and consider how leaders can get the best from their teams, including three steps leaders can take to ignite the potential in their employees.

First, a bit about my personal motivation and deep curiosity here. Eight years ago, I was in the privileged position of working with an executive coach. He changed my view of my agency, and I discovered that our ability to achieve what we want is largely an ‘inner game,’ and we can break free of any limitations. You may have experienced this too. This experience had such a profound and life-changing effect on me that I decided to set up a business around it. Fast forward to today and we’re made this our purpose at Energised Engagement working with teams, leaders and organisations. The impact of unlocking this potential can be huge and transformative, and this is why we deeply care. 

The Science Behind This Capability Phenomenon

There are a few things at play as to why we humans observe ourselves as less capable than other people see us. When I say, ‘see ourselves as less capable,’ I mean, I might rate myself as a 4 out of 10 at public speaking, but people around me rate me an 8. This gap would inevitably hold my potential, impact and performance back. What causes this? 

Research around this phenomenon attributes it to several causes related to how our brains are wired and several cognitive and psychological biases. Negativity bias causes us to fixate on past mistakes rather than strengths, making us undervalue our abilities. Impostor syndrome makes us doubt our achievements and attribute success to luck, even when others recognise our competence. The spotlight effect leads us to overestimate how much others notice our flaws, increasing self-doubt. Lastly, the Dunning-Kruger effect means that highly skilled individuals often underestimate their competence because they assume what they know is obvious to everyone. These combined factors create a psychological blind spot, making it difficult to see ourselves as capable as others see us.

How Do We Get Around This, and What Can Leaders Do to Unlock the Full Potential of Their Team Members?

Leadership carries the responsibility of aiming to get the most out of every single one of your employees. There is no single magic strategy to doing this. But whether you are leading a team of 8 or 800, you don’t have to do this alone. You can call on help. Here are three steps that unlock this potential - working on development in groups or teams with the support of a group coach or facilitator:

Step 1: Creating Psychological Safety

Unlocking behavioural change and inner confidence in others simply doesn’t happen without psychological safety. This is the state where we can have the most authentic of conversations - unfiltered, sometimes direct, but always with the utmost positive intent - where people are happy to express themselves. In a group or team, this shows up as a willingness to really express what you’re thinking - unfiltered and without fear of recrimination.

To be able to create this, leaders need to build this environment. A top tip for leaders is to start to role-model psychological safety by opening up and role-modelling vulnerability. If you have it within your power, proper team development or group development for team members where you can create deep psychological safety, is a huge first step.

This means shifting away from focusing on the relentless drive of getting things done, and stopping, slowing down, and reflecting on how we are as a team or individual.  This open reflective space allows massive shifts to take place for people. If you’re a leader who is able to lean into the challenge of opening up, then you have the ability to do this.

Step 2: Stories and Genuine Feedback

Once you have created trust where people are willing to share what they’re really thinking, then you can move to understanding people’s narratives and the inner stories behind how they’re approaching challenges. This can happen 1:1, but it is even more powerful in groups or teams because there’s an amplification effect.

The best way of doing this is through an appreciative lens—recognising the strengths the person has already demonstrated is shown to lead to greater results, and hearing this from multiple group or team members is even more powerful. This starts to close the gap and create forward movement. With skill, there are also ways of bringing in real stretch feedback. 

Step 3: Committing to Experimentation

Following feedback, hearing how someone wants to take the next steps is crucial, but positioning this in a way that frames it as experimentation is even more beneficial. ‘Experiments’ imply we can try something, and it doesn’t need to go perfectly for it to be useful. A simple question – ‘what are you going to now experiment with?’ moves us in this direction. Much of the time, the experiment helps us close the perception gap, and this is where the magic happens - once we see we can do something, then our belief starts to shift. This is how we close the gap and start seeing how truly great we are.

The Opportunity and Summary

Most of the work we do at Energised Engagement is with pharmaceutical, FMCG, or other consumer businesses – helping their leaders, teams and departments unleash their potential.  These organisations have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of employees. Imagine a scenario where we can tap into unlocking the potential in people - so much so that their confidence increases by 40 or 50%, or even more, or that teams or even whole organisations can shift their behaviours to become significantly more effective. What effect would that have on your business?

A participant in one of our cohorts recently commented that the series of conversations he had was like “Myers Briggs and Insights Profiling on steroids.” But what was it about those conversations that helped – it was the effect of psychological safety, stories and genuine feedback, and experimentation.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this read and it’s stimulated some ideas. Do get in touch to start on conversation on how your leadership can best support your people and teams.