Getting the best from them

Although you're keeping an eye out for both the strengths and weaknesses of your players, your focus should be on their strengths. Conventional wisdom holds that self-awareness is a good thing and that it's the job of the manager to identify weaknesses and create a plan for overcoming them. But research has shown that self-assurance (labeled "self-efficacy" by cognitive psychologists), not self-awareness, is the strongest predictor of a person's ability to set high goals, to persist in the face of obstacles, to bounce back when reversals occur, and, ultimately, to achieve the goals they set. By contrast, self-awareness has not been shown to be a predictor of any of these outcomes, and in some cases, it appears to retard them.

Great managers seem to understand this instinctively. They know that their job is not to arm each employee with a dispassionately accurate understanding of the limits of his/her strengths and the liabilities of his/her weaknesses but to reinforce his/her self-assurance. That's why great managers focus on strengths. When a person succeeds, the great manager doesn't praise his/her hard work. Even if there is some exaggeration in the statement, the manager tells him/her that (s)he succeeded because (s)he has become so good at deploying her specific strengths. This, the manager knows, will strengthen the player's self-assurance and make him/her more optimistic and more resilient in the face of challenges to come.

The focus-on-strengths approach might create in the player a modicum of overconfidence, but great managers mitigate this by emphasizing the size and the difficulty of the challenges ahead. They know that their primary objective is to create in each player a specific state of mind: one that includes a realistic assessment of the difficulty of the obstacle ahead but an unrealistically optimistic belief in his/her ability to overcome it.

And what if the player fails? Assuming the failure is not attributable to factors beyond his/her control, always explain failure as a lack of effort, even if this is only partially accurate. This will obscure self-doubt and give him/her something to work on as (s)he faces up to the next challenge

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