Not having the confidence or the skills to do you job well

What happens when someone in your team doesn’t have the ability to do their job adequately or have the confidence to speak up about it?

When someone you work with has low confidence and their abilities aren’t that great you may find that it is difficult to trust them to do their work adequately. This also creates trust issues with other team members and can lead to frustration. And even worse that person’s coping mechanisms may start to fail and they find it very difficult to become motivated. Mistakes are made and often hidden and it becomes a snowball effect.

For them it’s like trying to walk through treacle and keep getting stuck.

As a leader this can create other issues for you around team trust, and may even lead to organisational health and safety concerns.

As a leader having an awareness of what is going on with your team members in essential. Work out how do you build up confidence in them so they feel OK to speak up and ask for help. If you know what is needed, are there specific areas of development you can recommend?

Some other suggestions could be:

• Help them to identify gaps in their abilities. Once identified an action plan can be created to fill these.
• If it’s personal issues reducing their confidence and in turn diminishing their abilities check if they need some external support (counselling, etc)
• Learn how to give feedback well that is targeted at specific behaviour or outcomes and not on personality – and then give the feedback.

Many years ago I worked in a team with an underperforming team member. Our leader didn’t address this issue and that lead to frustration in general from everyone on the team. It created trust issues with what this person was capable of doing and no-one else wanted to work with them. The person’s confidence was eroded and they weren’t able to or felt they couldn’t speak up.

Left too late and it can be difficult to change anything. For this person it meant leaving the organisation following a bout of stress leave. It was a very sad outcome for something that could have been handled much better. 

My questions are

• Are you frustrated with someone in your team who needs a confidence injection to reach the potential they are capable of?
• Are there people you work with currently who are at risk?
• What can you do to build up someone’s abilities? 

Read my book 'The XX Project' to find out more about stepping into senior roles.