Confidence is an important aspect of leadership for medical suppliers. While you might be someone who tends to step back from the spotlight, your team won’t follow a wishy-washy leader and you’ll have difficulty inspiring top performance.
However, being too confident often results in rash risks that may come off arrogant and frustrate direct reports or shareholders. The most successful leaders know that while confidence is important, you need to embrace uncertainty as well.
With evolving business practices in the healthcare industry, leading with uncertainty doesn’t mean a lack of confidence, but rather allows you to search for a middle ground and examine a range of possible options to make the most informed decisions. Uncertainty allows you to communicate more effectively, listen to key stakeholders, and avoid the bad judgment that is often caused by overconfidence.
What’s your healthcare leadership style? Let’s dive deeper into the differences between leading with uncertainty instead of overconfidence.
The Consequences of Overconfidence in Healthcare Leadership
Only 18% of enterprises believe that their leaders are “very effective” at meeting business goals. Making the wrong decisions in a healthcare leadership position can be the difference between growing your bottom line or losing a valuable deal that jeopardizes your quarterly earnings.
What does it mean to be an overconfident leader? Consider these behavioral traits that negatively affect your performance:
- Mistrust: Your peers won’t trust your decisions or authority
- Arrogance: Overconfidence often leads to you resisting change and feedback
- Weak relationships: Your direct reports may feel underappreciated by your communication or decision-making skills
- Integrity: You are unlikely to honor commitments
Additionally, leaders that lead with sales confidence are often blind to innovation and are misaligned with the company, leading to a weak sale or marketing strategy.
Confidence Traits that Positively Affect Leadership
However, as long as you don’t cross the threshold into overconfidence, confident leaders are still successful in leading teams for your brand’s vision. For example, confident leaders have the following positive traits:
- Dominating projects and marketing themselves
- Having the courage and willingness to make bold changes
- Increased levels of energy and inspiration
- Ability to positively represent your company to customers
Healthcare Leadership Self-Check for Overconfidence
So, how do you know if your leadership style is confident or overconfident? Consider asking yourself the following questions:
- Does your organization trust you?
- Do you ask others for feedback and make an effort to implement it?
- Do you care about others’ issues?
- Are you balancing other perspectives?
- Are you a role model?
How to Use Uncertainty to Your Advantage in Healthcare Leadership
77% of employees believe that leadership trust is a key motivating factor. How can you instill a motivating work culture through effective healthcare leadership?
Uncertainty.
Uncertainty isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s the ability to be self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and practice servant leadership to drive a successful healthcare organization. While you don’t know all the answers, you are willing to ask the right questions to make an informed decision.
Consider the following steps when implementing uncertainty in your healthcare leadership style:
1.Identify What You’re Uncertain About
Where is your uncertainty stemming from? What specific part is causing concern? Your uncertainty is often associated with an upcoming event, decision, or action. Depending on your brainstorming style, consider writing down your thoughts in a notepad and creating an actionable list to help you make an action plan.
2.Select Actions that Will Propel You Forward
Once you have your thoughts laid out, you’ll want to develop a strategic action plan. Your action plan shouldn’t be just built on your assumptions, but instead, use real-time data and other perspectives to determine how your decision will affect your healthcare organization’s objectives. Don’t be afraid to hold meetings with other key stakeholders to dive into the scope of the project more deeply before making the call.
You’ll also want to consider who or what your decision impacts and any long-term implications. It’s wise to think about the timeline, resources, budget, and even a testing strategy to ensure your decision drives the best results.
3.Measure and Repeat the Process
If you’ve implemented your action plan, you’ll want to measure the success of your decision and the impact you made on the project or company growth. Do you feel confident in your decision? Did your decision propel the company or your team? You can drive real results by holding follow-up meetings to breakdown the success of the project or analyze metrics that showcase positive growth.
Elevate Your Healthcare Leadership Strategies
To drive innovation and growth, your medical supply brand needs both confident and uncertain leadership. While it’s important to be a confident leader that can inspire your company, you also need to lead with uncertainty to ensure you’re not taking unnecessary risks.
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