I was inspired by Chris Brogan’s post today in which he discusses confidence and conviction. Before you read my comment (below), go check out his post and come back. Here are some highlights:
The guest at the table next to mine asked their server, “What do you think of the halibut special?”
The server replied, “I’m not really sure. What did you have in mind when you came in? You know, people really are much happier when they have something in mind. I think it’s okay. I’ve sold a lot of it. I haven’t personally tried it, but it looks good.”
All I was thinking was, if I were the server, I’d say this:
“It’s a great presentation: crispy top and served over our lime rice. I’ve sold lots of it today.”
[…]
No waffling allowed.
Confidence and conviction are the key to many things in life.
A frequent critic (and someone I admire a lot), Ben Kunz, once said something like this about me (not his exact words): “What I hate most about you is that you always sound like you know exactly what you’re talking about, and that’s dangerous.”
I took this to be a great compliment. Again, I admire Ben a lot. He doesn’t let me rest on my laurels.
I take great pride in my confidence and conviction in matters that are important to me. I use confidence as a leadership trait all the time. And I admit when I’m wrong as often as is necessary to make those two traits worth a damn.
This got me thinking. This is a pretty important topic, especially given Ben’s “dangerous” comment thrown in. It may not seem like it, but confidence and conviction are two of the most important building blocks of professional competence. And in an “industry” (Social Media) drowning in incompetence, the danger isn’t that someone should speak with conviction about what they are competent in. Incompetence posing as competence is the danger, not confidence and conviction. Here is my response to Chris’ post:
Reminds me of rule #3: Know your sh*t. As a waiter, an executive, a cultural anthropologist, a politician, a teacher, a doctor or whatever. Just know your sh*t. A waiter who hasn’t tasted everything on the menu isn’t taking their job seriously.
Knowing exactly what you’re talking about isn’t dangerous. It just means that when you bother to open your mouth, you aren’t just making monkey noises for the sake of getting attention. You speak with purpose about something you know about. I’ve watched you in action, Chris. If the common advice is to listen 80% of the time and talk 20% of it, you have the uncommon trait of pushing the ratio to its limits: You listen about 95% of the time and talk 5% of it, if that. That tells me that when you DO say something, I had better listen. And so far, even what you think is just improv is still seeped in insight. You have good instincts, Chris. It’s why you rarely say something dumb.
Likewise, when you don’t know something, you have no problem saying “I don’t know but let’s find out,” which takes confidence as well, and lays the foundations for conviction when someone asks the question again next time and you actually know the answer.
With all due respect to Ben, the danger isn’t to speak with confidence and conviction about things you know. The danger is to speak with false confidence and a facade of conviction about things you don’t know well enough. Too many people choose the latter as their MO. You don’t. It’s why I read your stuff.
We saw this last year with the Social Media R.O.I. debacle, which few of the self-professed “experts” and “gurus” who blabbed about the “mysterious” acronym bothered to even look up in wikepedia, much less learn about from a business class or an actual management job. Instead of either learning how to define R.O.I. or (god forbid) tie to a P&L, many just made up their own versions. Others dismissed the need for R.O.I. completely. Precious few admitted that R.O.I. was outside of their expertise, which was the right thing to do. The professional thing to do.
Here’s a tip: Community managers don’t necessarily need to be experts in R.O.I. – Case in point: If you’re an expert in customer service on Twitter, or community management, or online reputation management, speak with confidence and conviction about that. The guy responding to negative comments on facebook doesn’t need to be an expert in doing anything but creating content and managing positive and negative comments. The R.O.I. piece, let it go to someone better equipped and trained to deal with it. Leave the stuff you don’t know to people who DO know. Businesses need real expertise, not smoke and mirrors and made-up “expertise.”
As an aside, you will get a lot further in life by learning how to get good at something than pretending to be good at something you suck at.
Don’t lie. Don’t make it up, hoping you won’t get found out. Learn what you can, be honest about what you know and don’t know yet, and make sure that you know what you’re talking about before opening your mouth. In other words, just know your sh*t.
Can I fit this – “As an aside, you will get a lot further in life by learning how to get good at something than pretending to be good at something you suck at.” – on my license plate? And then a cling for my mirror?
I’m learning the ROI stuff and trying to not suck at it, but I hope I’m in a position of expertise to sound like I know what I’m doing.
We’re going to need bigger license plates.
True confidence is borne of knowledge and preparation. When you can distill what’s going on, hear what’s being asked of you and answer the question to the best of your abililty, that’s confidence.
I’d rather hear an honest “I don’t know but I’ll find out” than a manufactured confident-sounding line of BS.
Yep. Better even to anticipate the question and find out what you don’t know before you’re even asked the random question. I worked at a job where this was common. It taught me to prepare for meetings by understanding the tangential mindset of the company President. I was always the most prepared guy in the room, and it paid off. 😉
Olivier
As to the R.O.I. Conundrum, what I’ve found in the sphere where I have had to explain it (which may be at the other end of the spectrum/universe, literally and figuratively) is that for ‘the little people’, the key return on investing time on Social Media is just people.
Facebook states that they’re not a site; that they’re your ‘Social Graph’ (that from a Marketing V.P. at an AMA Luncheon)
So for those whose reach into metrics may be as new as that single tweet they posted in their account aeons ago, I try to simplify it to the point of, as you mentioned recently on a post, simply look at all the great people, customers and like-minded individuals, that you have now found via Social Media
Others whose resources (and investments) may be commensurately larger, may find this to be an over-simplification; but to those who are just venturing in, figuring out what’s a profile and a page, and why, oh why, should we subject them to the torture of Tweeting (I usually recommend to simply connect their pages to Twitter, so they don’t even have to go near it!) defining R.O.I in such ‘base’ terms, apparently makes them feel that they’re not here wasting their time, as you and the audience know, that’s very high up there in the list of rebuttals to ‘Why Social Media’
Two words? “Size Matters”…. right?
F.
amen. Currently 90% of twitterers are the kind who speak with conviction while lacking in competance.
Great insight Olivier. I am about worn out from so called “experts.” I have found way too many that just try to talk over your head and saying nothing in the process.
1000% agree. And regarding Chris’ post, I have no problem with a waiter or someone telling me “I have no idea, I’ve never tried it. What I love is the yadda yadda….” Honest, to the point. That’s confident enough to me. 🙂
I agree that the major problem is “Incompetence posing as competence.” Because that is getting more and more difficult to discern. Not too long ago, with just the quailty of one’s website, you could weed out many pretenders and ingnore them altogether. Now, those with tech savvy can look like experts with slick websites and creative plagarism.
Thanks so much for this post. I do social media for business clients – but I would NEVER call myself an expert. What I do is take my technical and magazine writing background and help them come up with an editorial plan and provide writing and other services if they want/need it.
There are many questions I get that I am not qualified to answer but I have a built up a great network of resources to answer those questions. And through networking, I meet more and more resources who can help with future questions – and possibly get referrals from me.
The biggest problem (and I love this quote) of “incompetence posing as competence” is it is creating unrealistic expectations on the part of the client. I battle this all the time when talking about blogs, seo, etc. I try to get them to understand that these are just tools in a toolbox – not a miracle drug from the gods.
If your business is broke, no technology is an automatic fix. You have to analyze what exactly the problem is FIRST and then come up with the tools needed to fix it.
I actually think this post, and your previous post about “Standing Out” are actually very much related.
How many businesses have you walked into, looked at the employee/greeter/receptionist, and wanted to say, “Okay, stop looking bored for a minute here–what’s the ONE THING your business does better than anyone else?”
In other words, if you/your business can’t give me one, clear, simple reason to spend my money here, then why am I standing here, and why do you even exist?
Seriously, isn’t part of “Knowing Your Sh*t” being able to clearly articulate the #1 Value Proposition for every customer that walks through your door?
This blog just really got me thinking, as always.
It’s all really the same post over and over, just with different words. 😉
LOL, “These words….I’ve heard them somewhere before, but they’re so mesmerizing, hypnotic, I just can’t help myself….”
Or in more classical literature terms:
Polonius: What is the matter?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: What is the matter that you read, sir?
Hamlet: Words. Words. Words!
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“Don’t lie. Don’t make it up, hoping you won’t get found out” A definite pet peeve of mine. Because I will find out. Do your homework!! I do, and I expect others to do it too.
“Just know your sh*t” should be everyone’s motto.
I am insulted when I encounter someone who is full of BS and tries to convince me they know things they do not, as if I’m just an idiot. Stop wasting my time and everyone else’s.
Oops, this is a touchy subject for me. thanks for bringing it up, though!!!
Yah. The longer I deal with that, the less patient I am with it.
“The danger is to speak with false confidence and a facade of conviction about things you don’t know well enough.”
I think we all know somebody like this and the reality is, although you might fool some people, eventually your colleagues will become wise to your blustering. If they’re too polite to call you on it they’ll simply smile and nod in all the right places but never respect you again.
Respect lost is virtually impossible to regain.
“Businesses need real expertise, not smoke and mirrors” – couldn’t have said it better, thanks!
Imagine when the offending arty is your boss though. I see that too. That’s never an easy situation.
Love this, “Leave the stuff you don’t know to people who DO know. Businesses need real expertise, not smoke and mirrors and made-up “expertise.” It’s often hard for people to admit what they don’t know… but, as a previous commenter noted, respect is a hard thing to earn back once its lost.
Successful people/businesses live by the words you’ve so eloquently (eh, hm LOL) stated 🙂
There are so many things I don’t know… Like how to build a website in html or CSS, or play with twitter’s API – basically get under the hood of anything web. I turn to professionals for those types of things. I frequently work with designers whom – I know – will take what I thought was a pretty decent design I came up with and turn it into something 100x better. That’s how it should work. That’s what collaboration is about. It isn’t just a division of labor, it’s a division of expertise. We can’t all be experts in everything. 🙂
When I stepped into my first military command, just days after graduating from officer training, I gathered my NCOs and told them, look, you guys are professionals with years, in some cases decades of experience under your belts. I’ve been in uniform less than 6 months. I know the score. I’m not going to tell you how to do your jobs. I have everything to learn. All I ask is that we respect and trust each other, and that we do our jobs. The rest, we’ll figure out as we go along. It worked. One of them was a problem NCO to begin with, but the others warmed up to me and things moved along smoothly. Imagine if instead, I had walked into that command pretending to be a badass without having earned my stripes in the field. Good thing I was pretty good at it and a fast learner, or I would have been a joke. But I still had to earn the respect of my men AND my superiors by not screwing up.
Social Media “expertise” is no different.
Thanks for the comment. 🙂
Rule #3 is solid, but I’ll bite at your tweet.
What are Rules #1 & #2, sir?
May we have another?
(Kudos for serving, by the way.)
I suspect the order of the rules might be a matter of personal preference. Why not share my own Rules #1 & #2, yeah?
(Fans of the movie “Ronin” will recognize these.)
Rule #1: Whenever there’s doubt, there is no doubt.
This can be applied to all sorts of things. Do I have any doubts about the content as I move my cursor to the publish/tweet button? Does this really align with my vision? Am I going to meet that deadline? My people have done business with these people before, or these people just gave my people a number? Why are we exchanging for cash?
Whenever there’s doubt, there is no doubt. Reach out, ask questions. Get a clearer picture of the end result. See the target through the haze.
“Who told you that?”
Rule #2: I don’t remember.
Okay. So this rule lends itself more to mercenaries and espionage than social media and marketing, but maybe we could spin it…
If you know your sh*t, follow through on your commitments, and consistently help others succeed, it won’t matter who taught you what because what you do with the information is more valuable than the original source of the information.
Hmmm… This was fun. I wonder what I could come up with from the Transporter’s rules…
😀 I love it! Anyone who quotes Ronin on this blog gets a high five.
Oliver,
Love your work. Chris’s blog struck home for me too. Confidence and conviction are pre-requisites for our industry but too often it means we’re scared to say “I don’t know”
Those three words seem to scare more consultants than the other set of three words “I love you”
As I’ve gotten older, saying “I don’t know” has gotten easier. I’d say clients would respect us all more if we said it more often…but then moved mountains to find the answer.
My blog on the subject can be found here :
http://www.hiltonbarbour.com/wordpress/?p=16
Keep up the good work
Great post Olivier. Reminds me of a comment a colleague of mine threw at me when I was a lot younger. He said “The older I get the less I know.” I think its just as important to admit what you don’t know as it is the stuff you do!