Creating a culture of 优雅的信心
劳伦·柯里的教训
Imagine an organization where every employee feels equally able to speak up, 分享想法, 挑战现状. That’s what a culture of confidence looks like, 和 almost every progressive company would aspire to it. But it’s still not the reality in most organizations. 今天, 33%的人 believe their organizational culture doesn’t support speaking up. 和 只有1%的员工 feel ‘extremely confident’ to share their concerns at work. 那么需要改变什么呢?
For 劳伦·柯里, the answer lies within the idea of confidence itself. Lauren是 前期, an organization dedicated to changing confidence, visibility, 和 power for 1 million women. An acclaimed activist 和 entrepreneur, Lauren is building the change she wants to see in the world. I talked to Lauren about why we need to redefine confidence, what the new confidence looks like, 以及如何学习 & People teams can nurture it across their organizations.
We need a new definition of confidence
Society has told us the wrong messages about confidence, 和 it’s holding us 和 our organizations back. On top of being told that confidence is something you’re born with, we’ve been led to believe that only one kind of confidence leads to success. That of the extroverted, cis-gendered, heterosexual, able-bodied white man. Left unaddressed, this narrow definition of confidence will keep perpetuating bias in the workplace.
Classic confidence is narrow 和 excluding
Our traditional underst和ing of confidence is based on research from the early 1960s. It suggested people with high self-esteem perform exceptionally. 这是一个 典型白人男性. 平静. 强有力的握手. “不惜一切代价取得成功” 心态. 天才 独自生活.
This 60-year old definition of confidence has serious consequences. Male characteristics—height, assertiveness, earning potential—are 高度重视. Yet when a woman is assertive, she’s labeled 专横的 或积极的.
Women 和 people of color receive less praise 和 更多的 批评. Justifiable frustrations are labeled as ‘冒名顶替者综合症’—shifting the ownership of the problem onto the individual. 但没有人生来就有 predetermined quota of confidence. Confidence is a skill, a thought pattern, 和 a behavior. It’s affected by the worlds we live in, the cultures 和 的身体 we’re born into, 我们居住的街道, 和 the messages society gives us.
Pushing women 和 people of color to fit the mold of the 典型白人男性 leads to 较低的信心 和 更高的倦怠率 比他们的白人男性同事要多. 它甚至会破坏 的身体 在细胞水平上.
“The problem isn’t that women aren’t confident but that confidence in women is not rewarded in the world.” 劳伦·柯里
‘New’ confidence is graceful 和 inclusive
When we stop defining confidence in relation to macho characteristics, something incredible happens. We no longer feel we have to be aggressive 和 rational in order to trust in our own abilities. Instead, we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable 和 emotional—to be kind to ourselves 和 others. This is what 劳伦·柯里 means by 优雅的信心. Imagine how many 更多的 people can recognize themselves as confident when we define confidence in this way.
As well as being 更多的 inclusive, this new confidence leads to commercial results. Take Lululemon’s CEO, Christine Day. Her decision to lead with vulnerable confidence helped take company revenue from 2.97亿到10亿美元. Vulnerability in leadership allows individuals to own their expertise. This breeds a 更多的 collaborative style of leadership 和 accountability that leads to commercial success.
一旦我们拥抱这个新的, 优雅的信心—one that is fluid 和 learnable—it opens up a rich territory for Learning & People leaders to set a new, inclusive st和ard.
Setting a new confidence st和ard
Can there be a 更多的 worthwhile 和 relevant mission for Learning 和 People teams? Creating a culture of confidence is in your 天才地带. 以下是如何处理它的方法.
Get the C-suite role-modeling failure
High-performing teams have confidence in each other. One characteristic of a confident team is publicly 拥抱失败. A culture of confident failure starts at the top. Leaders must widely 和 articulately own their part in 犯错误. This is a culture of confidence 心态. If there’s no culture of failure, L&D might need to take the lead from Google’s 它G2G程序: sometimes C-Suite training is best delivered through external providers.
Whatever training route you choose, the important thing is to get your C-suite role modeling as quickly as possible. Maybe they can discuss a failure at every All H和s—what went wrong 和 what they learned. Or be the first ones to acknowledge a failure when attending team retros. The 更多的 your C-suite demonstrates that failure is an opportunity for learning 和 growth, the easier it will be for others to do the same.
Normalize vulnerability related to work. Show that it’s OK to talk about emotions by sharing yours. Admit to your own mistakes 和 failures, 和 frame these as learnings. 寻求帮助. Be the first person to say “I don’t know” 和 the last person to voice an opinion.
Encourage women to own their success
Women are much less likely than men to self-promote. 在这个世界上 女性总是被 for having less leadership potential, this is a problem. Organizations must be proactive about supporting their women colleagues to take up 更多的 space. One way to do this is by paying for them to join the 前期债券 — a six-week confidence course for women. (A bond is the collective noun for a group of women.)
I joined Bond 1 in 2020, 和 it transformed my relationship to confidence. 我知道了, 作为一个女人, I needed to become 更多的 visible if I wanted to internalize my own successes 和 use my voice. 和 that by publicly owning my ambition, I could show other women what is possible. Before 前期, I avoided being visible online for fear of looking boastful. But I found a way to show up that was on my terms, 和 that’s how I ended up being recruited for Sana. 我的故事只是众多故事中的一个.
学会说谢谢. This is how you learn to st和 in the spotlight when it’s put on you. 没有“谢谢你，但是。..” Instead, simply say “Thank you”. Learning to accept 和 claim credit this way will help you do the same for yourself 和 your own work.
Creating long-term behavior change
Culture change is individual behavior change at scale. 和 we can’t create long-term behavior change with a one-off training. Research into diversity training shows that one-off sessions did decrease bias—but the results only lasted 两个星期. 三个月后再登记, researchers found people were so confident in their abilities that they became even 更有偏见. One-off training actually did 更多的 harm than good.
This is why Learning 和 People teams should be building repeatable, scalable motions for behavior change. 在一个混合的世界, this means thinking even 更多的 carefully about the tools 和 skills we use to meet 和 collaborate.
小心地促进会议
许多人 努力在会议上发言. These people are 更多的 likely to be 没有获得晋升. 这是你的责任. It’s a leader's job to create meetings where everyone wants to contribute.
One of the best ways to get everyone feeling confident to speak up is by getting them talking early. This is known as participation priming. Check-in questions are ideal for this. 取决于团队的动态, you might ask something light like, "What are you bringing with you into the meeting this morning?” But if the team seems distracted, you might want to encourage focus: "What's one thing you hope to contribute to this session?" The point is to work around the group so that everyone speaks up at the start of the meeting.
Facilitation tools like check-ins are most effective when they become a habit. Check-ins in particular allow us to reveal 更多的 of ourselves to each other, 这反过来又建立了同理心. Over time, these micro-moments of relationship-building compound towards psychological safety—the number one contributor for high-performing teams.
Use interactive 和 inclusive tech
Your virtual meeting 和 collaboration tools must be able to help you distribute share of voice 和 create ways for people to share their ideas without speaking out loud. That’s because presenting something 和 then asking people to say what they think is a recipe for 河马综合症.
This is where an interactive tool like Sana Live really comes into its own. Sana Live is a virtual meeting space built right into the Sana平台. It’s full of these softer idea-sharing formats like sticky notes, 民意调查, 小测验, 还有反射卡. You can even pull up an interactive sliding scale to let people express their state of mind or view.
Facilitators also get special powers to see who is responding to 民意调查 和 小测验—a potential clue that someone is falling behind 和 needs some extra support. I’m biased, of course, since we use Sana Live every day. But I’ve experienced firsth和 the impact it has on everything from a company-wide All H和s to a team retro. There’s a balance between verbal 和 written contributions 和 更多的 ways for people’s voices to be heard. We all grow from the team’s collective brilliance because of it.
现在是改变的时候了
Instilling a culture of open, 优雅的信心 might feel overwhelming. There are so many voices, people, 和 challenges to embrace. In these moments, remember: confidence is a learned skill. 这不是天生的. 它是可学的. 这是多变的.
和 everything that’s changeable is right in L&D的剧本. It’s where we make the biggest, most exciting, most profound changes to our organizations. 用正确的工具和心态, that change towards 劳伦·柯里’s 优雅的信心 can start today.
接下来:
天才地带
为每个员工找到心流