One of us went to a Women in Business luncheon last week and had the chance to hear Maureen Smith, CFO of the Green Bay Packers, speak.
She told some of her story, and it is not exactly the carefully constructed career path you might expect from someone who eventually became the CFO of an NFL team. There were kids and career changes, some really hard years, and plenty of figuring it out along the way. She eventually found her way into accounting, earned her CPA and built a career that took her through consulting, healthcare, Major League Soccer and, eventually… Lambeau Field.
But it was something she said about confidence that stuck with us. She doesn’t think in terms of confidence. She thinks about belief.
Confidence is something we tend to measure. Are we confident enough to speak up in this meeting? Confident enough to apply for the job? Confident enough to lead the team? And then, apparently, there’s a line somewhere where confidence becomes overconfidence. We’re supposed to be confident, but not too confident.
Smith’s point was that she doesn’t think you can over-believe.
You can believe you deserve to be in the room without believing you’re the smartest person in it. You can believe you’re capable of doing something you’ve never done before. You can believe you’ll figure it out even when, at this particular moment, you very much do not have it figured out. And we liked that distinction. Because if the prerequisite for doing hard things was feeling completely confident that we could do them, we’re not sure how many hard things would ever get done.
It’s worth thinking about in hiring, too. Confidence is easy to notice in an interview. The person who answers without hesitation, tells their story well and seems completely sure they can do the job can be pretty compelling. But confidence and capability aren’t the same thing. Neither are confidence and potential. Sometimes the person worth betting on is the one who doesn’t have every answer yet, but believes they can learn, figure it out, and do the hard thing in front of them.
Smith paired belief with two other traits: curiosity and humility.
Her approach to curiosity was refreshingly practical. If she’s sitting in a meeting and doesn’t know something, she’ll ask. She’d rather risk looking uninformed for a minute and get the answer than sit there pretending she understands and try to figure it out later (spoiler alert: curiosity requires being willing to look a little stupid sometimes). And then there’s humility. Not making yourself smaller. Not pretending you aren’t good at things you are good at. Just knowing who you are. Knowing where you came from. Knowing what you know and what you don’t.
The more we thought about those three things together, the more we liked them. Believe you belong there. Be curious enough to admit what you don’t know. Be humble enough to remember that you don’t know everything. There are going to be rooms where we don’t feel particularly confident. Roles we take on that we’re not entirely sure we’re ready for. Questions we’re afraid everyone else already knows the answer to. Things that are harder than we expected them to be.
We don’t have to feel confident about all of them. But we can believe we’ll figure them out.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team