Self-esteem: is yours above average?

Following my experiences with pop-psychology tests for confidence and self-esteem, I was interested to see Lucy Kellaway’s Monday morning column in the FT (subscription required) discussing ‘The links between self-belief, incompetence and success’.

Focusing on the relationship between these attributes in large companies, she quotes a recent study which bears out the truth in Garrison Keillor’s well-known close to his weekly update from Lake Woebegon, where all are ‘above average’:

most of us believe ourselves to be far better than we are. It quotes a study showing that 32 per cent of engineers in one large company and 42 per cent in another put their performance in the top 5 per cent.

She correctly points out:

If we all think we are brilliant and deserve to get promoted, most of us will end up feeling bitter and disillusioned. It argues that inflated self-opinion at the top is particularly dangerous as it leads to terrible decisions that can be very expensive.

Based on her own interviews with top managers and CEO’s she found that most who make it to the top of large corporations need sublime self-confidence since:

Almost all top jobs are impossible to do well and almost all end in public failure and humiliation – no matter how bright the person is. Which means that a clever, realistic person who knows precisely how others see them and who is well aware of their own faults (the sort of person who might make a nice friend) would never want the top job. And if by some fluke, they ever reached the corner office they would dither and wring their hands before being carried out in a straitjacket.

I find this an accurate observation, proven time and again by those I’ve met at the helm of large enterprises, who bear the risks she identifies (witness what many call the blind confidence of a Carly Fiorina or a Scott McNealy).

However, for independent businesspeople, like most of the members of the National Speakers Association, self-confidence and self-esteem are a requirement to be ‘at the top’ of your own game. The marketplace – your customers – will ruthlessly identify any incompetence. Success requires self-belief.

Welcome to Lake Woebegon, where all the public speakers are above average.

Self-esteem: is yours above average?

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