Quiet confidence: making an impression from the sidelines

Most sporting fans only have eyes for the competitor or team during a match or a game, but it’s always worth keeping an eye on what’s going on the sidelines. Although unable to exert a direct influence on the action, it’s fascinating to see how the best coaches can influence from the afar – and not simply by shouting loudly.

I’m referring to quiet competence. While those who possess it can often feel like they are cloaked in invisibility against a noisy background, I can assure you that it’s possible to be noticed without having to match the loudest voice in the room.

For the quietly confident, diligence, preparation and organisation are superpowers which will allow you to project yourself from the sidelines and cut through the noise. Preparation brings confidence and leverage in any scenario – be that in one-to-one, in the context of a bigger meeting or standing up front addressing an audience.

If you know your stuff, you naturally have the confidence to speak about it. As a direct consequence, this confidence provides leverage, allowing you to pick the moment when your words will carry the most weight.

I work with many people who fall into this quietly confident category. Part of the process of unlocking their potential is to get them to see that their demeanour provides a basis for confidence. Unfortunately, due to the culture of many workplaces, where the noisiest take up the oxygen in the room, many of those I speak to are coming from a position of diminished confidence.

But this lack of confidence is based on exactly the type of scenario I presented earlier – feeling the pressure to contribute, because others are making so much noise. The point I always push is to flip the scenario and see through the shortcomings of the blunderbuss who is busy speaking while saying not very much. See them as speaking loudly to cover their lack of confidence in their knowledge.

Let them get on with it, while maintaining presence, confident that when the time is right you will show your hand. In the meantime, watch the room. Influential figures often act through nuance, signalling agreement or frustration with body language, a question or a shift of tone, rather than outright interruption or challenge. Spotting these cues helps you time an intervention so that it will support the decision maker’s direction.

If you’re vying for a decision maker’s attention with a peer, remember it’s also far easier to agree with and reinforce someone’s (the peer’s) point, before offering an appendix with your own thoughts, rather than challenge a speaker directly.

In meetings, aim to be useful. If nothing original has been said, resist contributing for contribution’s sake. Instead, look for value-adding moves, such as clarifying assumptions, tying proposals to measurable outcomes and proposing how next-step actions may be achieved and measured.

This is all very easy to say (write) but we’ve all been in a situation when a meeting has finished before we’ve had the opportunity to have your moment, So what do you do next? Experience says, don’t be afraid of engaging one-to-one.

Sometimes it’s catching up with someone in a corridor ’for a quick clarification on something’, a client call or coffee to ensure ‘we’re on the same page’. If it’s brief, constructive and furthers overall goals, it will be a welcome interaction.

Finally, reinforce your quiet confidence after the meeting. There are far too many meetings in this world filled with talk and little ownership of action. Those who follow-up are in the minority and this a great opportunity to exert soft power. If you are the person showing how you will be contributing to any ‘next steps’, you become the person who gets things done.

Substance shouts louder than any meeting noise and by adopting a set of tactics to show off your competence will get you noticed for all the right reasons and allow your voice ot be heard.