Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It: Why People Demand it

Believe You Can Do It

Self-confidence is not the same as competence. Knowing that you have competence and believing that in a given situation you can use that competence to achieve your goals are different mental sets. Cognitive psychologists refer to this as self-efficacy. As Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura explained, “self-efficacy is concerned with people's beliefs in their capabilities to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources, and the courses of action needed to exercise control over task demands.”22

Researchers have found that beliefs about capabilities partly govern the level of a person's performance. They observe that “a capability is only as good as its execution. People often fail to perform optimally even though ...