While dropping off my son at school i found myself reading this article pinned to the classroom door. As well as being of special interest as a parent, it also struck a cord with regard to running a business. The question: is your self esteem killing your business?

Click on the image to read the article (it takes an interesting prospective). The gist is that kids who have been constantly praised at every turn in their development, end up with an inflated self-esteem and are in turn more likely to “fail” in life because they overestimate their own abilities and are not equipped to handle failure.

Instead, we should be promoting courage; a willingness to fight when the odds are low and the strength to accept sacrifice for a good cause.

self-esteem

Children Need Courage Rather Than Self-Confidence – By JOHN ROSEMOND

According to the article:

“The research strongly suggests that self-confident people are either (a) hesitant to take on challenges unless they believe they are going to succeed and (b) so sure of succeeding that they foolishly expose themselves and high risk situations (aka being General Custer)“

So, can success in business follow the same parallel?

Virtually all the successful people i know have a high dose of courage, rather than buckets of  self-esteem.

Here’s how to tell whether your business is driven by self-esteem (or courage).

  1. Do you motivate your team by continual praise? – It’s true some team members need a hand around the shoulder and some need a kick-up the behind to succeed but realistic level feedback is always more useful than blind praise. I personally, get far more motivation out of being told something is not working and being challenged to find a different way to succeed, rather than beng told i’m doing well and trying hard. Blind praise is motivation without any nutritional value.
  2. Do you have a culture where failure is encouraged? Virtually any great business success has come from an accidental discovery (i’m not going to list them all but remember the Post-It note was a failed glue experiment). I want to work with people and in a culture where we are all encouraged to test things, learn from them and apply them to the next experiment. I get very ansi if i’m not crossing off a bunch of failed tests from my list. As soon as people are frightened to fail the business will start to die.
  3. Do you listen for feedback without the intent to reply? Being told by a customer what I’ve just spent a month working on is completely useless is hard to swallow. Having the ability to really listen and absorb and use feedback is sometimes ego sapping. Again, i’ll go back to the people I really respect as successes and they’re all sponges wanting hear and absorb all comments. This includes feedback from customers, employees, press or what ever. I try and answer or at least read every customer comment and response coming into the company.

So above all remember what happened to him…