Growing confidence

When everything feels a bit uncertain, staff and clients want you to give them some confidence.

This is a key part of your role if you're going to take advantage of my advice that things are looking up for agencies. You have to earn the confidence of the next level of clients, and ensure your team has the confidence to step up a level.

Poor leaders try to create confidence by just being upbeat and telling everyone it'll all be fine. That may appear to work on the surface, but inside (and perhaps in private conversations) people will doubt it.

Great leaders grow confidence in the people around them, like a gardener grows plants — through careful nurture and attention to all the conditions it needs to thrive.

In your agency that confidence will grow from:

• Trusting you as the leader to 'tell it how it is'

• Seeing the possible future you are all working towards

• Knowing what is expected of them

• Knowing and trusting the processes the agency runs on, and uses to deliver client work

• Trusting each other's skills, commitments, and support

• Feeling a steady rhythm of progress — a cycle of thinking, trying, learning and improving — that builds momentum towards the possible future

When the outside world feels unsteady, and when you're asking your agency to step up, it's even more important for you as a leader to focus on ensuring these things are in place, and being actively nurtured, in order to grow confidence.

If you develop this confidence within your agency, those on the outside such as clients and potential recruits will be able to feel it and see it in the way your team behave.

So begin by growing that confidence within.