Why leaders should treat confidence as risk management
By Chantelle Botha
EARLY in my career, a manager raised something potentially sensitive in a performance review. He told me that my capability wasn’t a problem, my confidence was. At the time I thought he was commenting on personality and struggled not to take it personally. Today I know that he was managing risk.
Low confidence in capable people is one of the most expensive invisible risks inside modern companies.
When leadership treats confidence as a personality trait instead of a performance driver, we invite risk into an already uncertain commercial landscape. In diverse teams especially, people arrive carrying very different life experiences. Some have spent years learning to speak up and advocate for themselves. Others have learned, consciously or unconsciously, that speaking up comes with consequences.
There is so much going on in a person’s inner world that it’s easy to interpret a lack of confidence as a lack of capability. More often than not though, the capability is there, they are just lacking the internal permission to act. This becomes even more pronounced in diverse teams where people from different cultures hold vastly different perspectives.
This is where confidence becomes a risk management issue.
Most managers recognise the behaviour that comes from a lack of inner confidence, but very few address these behaviours directly. This is because confidence sits dangerously close to identity. If feedback is not framed with gentleness and empathy, it can easily feel like an attack on someone’s character rather than an observation about their behaviour.
Giving feedback on a missed deadline or a technical error is straightforward. Telling someone they appear hesitant, unsure of themselves, or reluctant to contribute can feel deeply personal. Leaders fear damaging trust, overstepping boundaries, or appearing insensitive, and so the issue remains unspoken.
In my work with senior leaders, I see this pattern repeatedly. Lately, I have been coaching an executive leader who was told in her last performance review to “be more assertive”. That instruction is about as useful as telling someone to travel to the moon. She left the conversation with no idea how to access the behaviour that her executive team expected from her.
Confidence is not built through encouragement. It is built through identity shifts.
When I first started working with her, we identified where her conditioning comes from and started working on shifting her internal self-image to align with the powerful role she holds. The result is that she has started negotiating as hard for her place at the table as the men who sit around the table with her. She found her voice because someone stood in her corner with her and gave her the support her company wasn’t giving her. But more importantly, she started seeing herself as valuable and worthy of the role she holds.
Aside from investing in an identity coaching journey for every member on your team, here are four leadership behaviours that help unlock confidence in capable people:
- Look beyond behaviour to understand the story behind hesitation or silence.
- Initiate a direct conversation when you notice hesitation or withdrawal. Silence rarely fixes itself.
- Reinforce why you hired them and the capability you see in them.
- Ask what support would help them contribute more confidently.
- Sometimes the most powerful intervention is simply what my manager did years ago: noticing the gap between someone’s capability and their confidence, and addressing it with honesty and care.
Because when capable people start trusting their judgement, companies unlock potential that was already there.
If you suspect confidence may be holding capable people back in your company, let’s talk. Unlocking that potential is the focus of my work with leadership teams.
Chantelle Botha, known globally as The Catalyst, is an Identity Architect who works with leadership teams and women to unlock the confidence of capable people. Through identity-led coaching and facilitation, she helps companies shift the internal beliefs that cause talented employees to hesitate, hold back, or underperform. The result is teams that speak up, take ownership, and contribute at the level they were hired for.
Executives who suspect confidence may be holding their people back can contact:
chantelle@phoenixconfidence.com
www.phoenixconfidence.com
