The confidence game
Why winners win
In life, confidence can be all the difference between success and failure, mastery and misfortune. It's the propellant behind everything from setting out in a new career to approaching strangers, heading in a goal on the soccer field, or taking a stand on principle. That we value it can be seen in the many books touting how to achieve it. In short, it can mark the bounds between a sunny life and one lived in perpetual crouch.
But can confidence--which Harvard Business School Prof. Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls "a sweet spot between arrogance and despair" --be translated from an innate quality into a force organizations can cultivate as a driver of success? And if so, can this be accomplished in a concerted way--not just a frothy, let's-all-pull-together exhortation--that, say, allows a business to handle challenges with aplomb?
Yes, says Kanter, one of today's most prolific management scholars, in a new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & End. Using disparate examples of confidence at work--from the supremacy of the University of Connecticut women's basketball team, which sometimes beat arguably superior talent to win championships, to the turnaround of consumer products giant Gillette Co.--Kanter contends that confidence is the key to achieving success and maintaining it.
Consider, for example, her behind-the-scenes account of events at Continental Airlines when last summer's colossal power blackout struck the Northeast and Midwest. It was a time of chaos and confusion for millions, but Continental seemed especially hard hit: Two of its hubs, in Cleveland and Newark, N.J., lost power. Yet Continental canceled only a relative handful of flights, compared with hundreds grounded by other airlines. In the wake of the outage, Continental was the only major airline running in the New York City area. Its crews flew special flights to accommodate customers and to reposition aircraft. Within minutes of the black-out, Continental employees were mapping out how to keep planes flying and passengers moving through security. With computers down, agents called Houston headquarters on cellphones for passenger information. There was backup power in Newark, and the weather was good. But the power stayed out in Cleveland until the next morning. At both airports, crews managed to load, unload, and push back jets, all without power.
Senior executives, including President Larry Kellner, were at the center of communications that busy day. But those calling them weren't asking permission for what to do. Instead, they were passing along details of what already was in motion. Years of investment in reshaping its corporate culture had produced an institutional confidence that Continental was able to deftly draw upon to surmount a dire situation, says the 61-year-old Kanter. "This was entirely a matter of the system they built," she says from her country home in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. Things worked so well that for the two days after the blackout, Continental's revenues were $4.3 million higher than normal.
Continental shows how organizational confidence--and the faith it inspires in customers--can be the product of tangible, albeit difficult, efforts to foster such qualities as decisiveness and assurance. In fact, Kanter posits, there are three "cornerstones of confidence" for organizations to seize upon. First: accountability, whereby people want to share information, take responsibility, work to high standards, and have nothing to hide. Next: collaboration, in which people respect one another and want to work together, because they've come to know each other in a variety of settings. Goals are shared, and the stars help the low performers. Finally: initiative, whereby people feel that what they do makes a difference, so they offer ideas and suggestions--in short, they seize the initiative.
advertisement
