The Confidence Code (25 page)

Our genetic results alone didn’t explain us to ourselves. We had data that didn’t fully correlate with who we have turned out to be. And that plunge back into the scientific mystery of it all prepared us for our final revelation about the perplexing makeup of confidence: It can’t be one size fits all.

On our mission to crack the confidence code, we have seen plenty of displays of confidence—from women who wield basketballs and guns, women who rely on textbooks and test tubes, women who frequent the halls of Congress and corporate suites. As the full picture came into view, we realized something we did not expect or consider: Confidence in women often looks different than it does in men.

We’re not suggesting that there’s a female version of confidence, like a mommy track, that is somehow less rigorous and ultimately sidelines us from the most engaging and rewarding professional challenges. What it means to be confident—and what it
does
for us—that’s the same for women as it is for men. Doing, working, deciding, and mastering are gender neutral. But we’ve come to see that even when confidence is fully expressed, the style and behavior of that expression does not have to be a factory-built, generic display.

It certainly does not have to be what even today remains the prevailing model of confident behavior, and is honestly not much different from what you would have seen a generation ago: a commanding (most likely) male figure showboating, acting like a decider, and asserting his authority over others.

Male workplace bravado—perhaps testosterone-fueled and
Mad Men
–inspired—is still the gold standard. It is currently the
only
standard. The drive to win no matter the cost. The boundless craving for risk. The propensity for quick decisions. The emphasis on high-decibel and high-energy interaction. Those are values and methods of behaving. Sometimes they work. But they’re not the definition of confidence.

For so long that’s the way we thought women had to play it if we wanted to win, and if we wanted to experience self-assurance, even if it felt forced and phony. It was as if donning the armor of a male version of confidence would somehow transform us.

Fortunately, that doesn’t have to be the way it is—especially not for women (and probably not for a lot of men, either). To put it plainly, we’d finally resolved the frustrating conundrum we’d been dragging around with us for more than a year: Do you have to be a jerk to be confident? No, thankfully. Our research and conversations with dozens of high-powered, confident women point in another direction, one that feels a lot more natural and authentic. It’s an approach altogether different. The ingredients are the same, but in the end, the product can be unique.

This nuance is essential to understand, because if we don’t pay attention, women will surely find ourselves chasing the wrong thing, yet again. (Neither of us has fully recovered from shoulder pads and bow ties.) Peggy McIntosh, the Wellesley scholar, thinks we need to understand that confidence has simply been “socialized over the years to be more aggressive in its display, but that it’s actually much broader and often more subtle.”

So, what might our brand of confidence look like? For simplicity’s sake, here’s a way to think about it:

Imagine yourself in that modern confidence crucible—the high-powered office meeting. You’ve got a critical point to make about an upcoming project, and you know it won’t be popular. Often, for women, this becomes an internal wrestling match. Self-doubt might prevail, leading to silence. Or we may become so doggedly intent on conveying authority and confidence, and on not falling silent, that we make our case stridently, even a little defensively, but without authenticity.

We’re saying that there’s a third way. We don’t always have to speak first; we can listen, and incorporate what others say, and perhaps even rely on colleagues to help make our point. We can pass credit around, and we can avoid alienating potential enemies. We can speak calmly but carry a smart message. One that will be heard. Confidence, for many of us, can even be quiet. Any of that might be the way confident behavior looks for women. (Sure, aggression comes naturally to some of us, but more often than not it comes across as inauthentic, and it is hard to feel confident when you’re playing a role.)

Perhaps ours is a breed of confidence that even allows for displays of vulnerability and the questioning of our decisions. Indeed, psychologists are coming to see that there may be an unexpected, untapped power in learning to express our vulnerability, and that for many, doing so can lead to more confidence.

But we need to be clear here, because more than a few people, notably our husbands, said
hey
—how can it suddenly make sense to show a weakness, or condone second-guessing yourself? Haven’t you been saying all along that’s
unconfident
behavior?

In order to navigate this subtle difference, we offer some examples: expressing some vulnerability can be a strength, especially when it connects you to others. Dwelling on insecurities, and basking in self-doubt is not. Reviewing your decisions with an eye to improvement is a strength, as is admitting mistakes. Ruminating for days over decisions already made or those to come has nothing to do with the confidence we envision. Our confident behavior cannot be apologetic or mumbling or retiring. Indeed, we have to be heard, and we have to act, if we want to lead. Our instincts, if we can locate them, will help us greatly. We need to start trusting our gut.

It’s what we had found in a number of different women with a number of different styles: in the crisp compassion of Valerie Jarrett; in the open, inquisitive warmth of General Jessica Wright; and in the remarkable candor of Linda Hudson. Like precious stones, we gathered up bits and pieces of the conduct of the many self-assured women we interviewed—trying to resolve, over the course of our project, the confidence we had in our heads when we started out with the very different, and appealing, brand we occasionally saw on display. Decisiveness and clarity. Approachability and often humor. The qualities varied. Christine Lagarde’s mix of nerves, vulnerability, and elegant self-assurance no longer appeared contradictory or puzzling. Mainly, these women just seemed comfortable with themselves.

As we were in the throes of writing this book, Katty realized that she is at her most confident as a journalist when she trusts her instincts in interviews instead of succumbing to the pressure to follow the prescribed path of being super-combative. “There’s huge pressure in our field to ask the tough-minded questions with a certain bravura. You have to be seen to be aggressive, to go for the ‘gotcha’ question. I’ve always worried that I’m not very good at it, simply because it’s not really who I am and it shows that I’m pretending. Then I realized that this type of interview style isn’t necessary, that it is more about getting attention for the reporter than the person being interviewed. Somehow that helped me take the pressure off myself and made my questions more natural and instinctive. It’s all about developing the confidence to do it my own way.”

We want to pause here and make plain that we don’t have blinders on. There are still plenty of old-school managers occupying corporate suites who have a more traditional idea of what confidence looks like, and it’s not particularly feminine. Sometimes we may have to pound on a table or two to please a Cro-Magnon boss. We’ve both learned how to interrupt loud and overbearing self-proclaimed experts on television, so that we can make our points. But there is deepening evidence that a more expansive view of confidence is actually the one that’s catching hold in the workplace. A recent Stanford Business School study shows that women who can combine male and female qualities do better than everyone else, even the men. How do they define the male qualities? Aggression, assertiveness, and confidence. The feminine qualities? Collaboration, process orientation, persuasion, humility.

The researchers followed 132 business school graduates for eight years and found that women who had some of the so-called masculine traits, but who tempered them with more feminine traits, were promoted 1.5 times as often as most men, twice as often as feminine men, three times as often as purely masculine women, and 1.5 times as often as purely feminine women. Oddly, the study didn’t find an advantage for men who tried to straddle the traits.

The headline to take away from this research is that women should not jettison what may be natural advantages. We need to cut our own path, and, on the matter of confidence, we need to be our own role models. Macho does not have to be our mantra. U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is adamant on this point. When we asked her whether it would be better if women, like men, were able to go around saying, “I am the best” she shrugged. “Why would you want to? You don’t want to turn women into men. You want to make women celebrate their own strong points. They just need to recognize they are not deficient in any way. They just need to know what it takes to be successful and define that in a way they fully understand.”

Gillibrand is fed up with what she considers the bogus assumption that, in the Senate, he who talks the loudest or longest is somehow the most effective. Her sentiments are reinforced by the findings of a recent Stanford University study: Female members of Congress get significantly more legislation passed than do the men, and work more often with members of the other party. (Maybe that’s all happening while the men are pontificating on the House or Senate floor.)

Michael Nannes, chariman of the national law firm Dickstein Shapiro and another of our generous male sounding boards, firmly believes that confidence can be displayed in many forms and reports that he himself favors a less aggressive style. Nannes suggests women look for a surgical opening when trying to work their way into a male-dominated conversation. “Make a point of having a different point of view,” he says. “Speak with authority, and be remembered for making a contribution.”

It’s worth pointing out that we often have different values in the workplace, which can affect the way we project confidence. Women, for example, according to years of corporate research, tend to have other priorities beyond profit and earnings and their own place in a hierarchy. They are often more concerned with the morale of workers and the company’s mission, for example. Imagine—if you are trying to build your own stature, you’re more likely to try to dominate conversations. If your goal, however, is to build consensus, you will listen to other people’s opinions.

Confidence, and success, comes from playing to your distinctive strengths and values. That notion has become a popular leadership development tool. Ryan Niemiec runs the education program at the Values in Action Institute (VIA), the leading organization in the United States for the study of character strengths. “It’s transformative for people to actually focus on what their strengths are,” he says. “Most of us have a kind of strength blindness.”

Niemiec says knowing your innate strengths doesn’t mean that you never focus on areas of improvement. For example, if he works with a woman struggling with confidence as she moves up the corporate ranks, he would certainly advise her to first focus on her strengths and on making the most of them. However, she might also clearly benefit from developing more persistence, even if it’s not one of her natural strengths.

Claire was surprised when she took the online VIA survey—not so much by the results, but by the interpretation. “I knew I had a good knack for people, but I’d never thought of it as my top character strength. But social intelligence came out on top for me. I learned I’m emotionally intelligent and that I’m adaptable in various social settings, and I connect with others. All true. That’s probably why I like reporting so much. But
knowing
that is a strength—that it is valuable in the workplace—that would have made me much more confident ten years ago.”

This, then, is the art of confidence. It is how we each create a confident interaction with the world that builds on who we are as women and as individuals. It is how we marry listening to the opinions of others without apologizing for our own. It is how we ask for votes, or donations, or support, while taming the voice that tells us we are being self-aggrandizing. It is how we reconcile what we both thought for more than a year was an irreconcilable paradox: our reluctance to speak up and take center stage, with the absolute need to make our voices heard.

Dare the Difference

Authenticity. That’s what we’re driving at here. It was the last part of the code to come to us, but it may be the linchpin. When confidence emanates from our core, we are at our most powerful.

In retrospect, we realized that was exactly what IMF head Christine Lagarde was talking about when she warned us, at our dinner, that leaning in the same way that the men do might force us to sacrifice what makes us unique. And, on that women-run Davos panel she had told us about, the women were actually displaying authentic confidence, as they listened, and took turns, and it looked nothing like the usual fare, which was being served up in the aggressive performance of the lone man on the panel.

Lagarde had also told us another story about making a virtue out of our differences, instead of trying to hide, erase, or change them. As we came to the end of our investigation, it seemed especially resonant. A new female president in the developing world decides she will make a change to a tradition. None of the previous presidents of her country, all of them men, would leave the palace without a suite of twenty-five cars in their entourage. But this new president finds that unnecessary. The country is broke. She decides she’ll use five.

“She goes forth,” says Lagarde, “but people tell her, especially the women, ‘Why do you do that? You’re doing it because you’re a woman, and, therefore, you’re going to undermine the status of the president as a woman, and people will then know that a woman is less than a man.’ ”

Lagarde, who serves as an unofficial counselor to female leaders around the world, didn’t hesitate to offer an opinion. “I told her to dare the difference,” she continues. “Make it your selling point. Don’t try to measure yourself, your performance, your popularity, against the standards and the yardsticks and the measurements that men have used before you. Because you start from a different perspective, you have a different platform, you want to push different initiatives, and you should be authentic about it. So she stuck with the five. But it’s hard. I can’t imagine the pressure. And I’m making a point of calling her every month now to say don’t give up.”