In last week’s Leadership Lab, we discussed Leader Identity—something every leader development program should assess, because it indicates whether programs are fulfilling their fundamental role of actually developing leaders.
This week, we’re looking at a construct that’s essentially the “other side of the coin” of leader identity: leader self-efficacy. While leader identity deals with who someone perceives themselves to be (i.e., “I am a leader”), leader self-efficacy addresses the how and what—the actions, effort, and persistence required for effective leadership. Thus, like leader identity, leader self-efficacy is a “gimme” measure, because any program that claims to develop leaders should be strengthening not just who leaders believe they are, but what they believe they can actually do. However, while it might be the “other side of the coin,” leader self-efficacy presents its own challenges for assessment.
Defining Leader Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy, meaning belief in your ability to carry out the behaviors needed to accomplish your goals and produce your desired outcomes, is one of the most extensively studied phenomena in social and organizational psychology. First popularized by Albert Bandura almost 50 years ago, self-efficacy has been shown to shape performance, motivate effort, and increase resilience across a variety of domains, including leadership.
Thus, leader self-efficacy refers to an individual’s belief that they can effectively perform and navigate challenges in a leadership context. However, despite this relatively simple definition, leader self-efficacy is highly contextual, and what it looks like can depend on what it is specifically applied to, a phenomenon that Bandura called “task specificity.”
Individuals can feel confident about some leadership capabilities while being highly insecure about others. For instance, a leader might feel highly capable when it comes to conflict management or creating a psychologically safe environment for their team, while at the same time feeling unable to set a team’s direction or gain followers’ commitment. Similarly, leader self-efficacy can be conceptualized more globally (i.e., “Overall, I’m capable of being a leader”) or more specifically (i.e., “I am capable of leading teams through transitions”). These different levels of conceptualization can pose a challenge to assessment strategies, because you need to ensure you are measuring the most relevant type of leader self-efficacy at the appropriate level of specificity.
Why Leader Self-Efficacy Matters
While measuring leader self-efficacy can be challenging, that doesn’t mean it can be ignored. Like leader identity, leader self-efficacy is a “gimme” measure when it comes to planning an assessment, because a program that claims to develop leaders must, in some capacity, be increasing leaders’ belief that they are capable of leading.
While knowledge and skills are important, they’re ultimately useless if leaders don’t actually deploy them in the everyday processes of leadership. Leader self-efficacy is what makes that happen.
Research has consistently shown that leader self-efficacy is associated with leader emergence (i.e., taking steps to become a leader), resilience under stress, and persistence in the face of challenges. Importantly, leader self-efficacy’s power doesn’t remain internal; it creates observable effects. Leaders with higher self-efficacy are rated as more promotable by their superiors. They are rated by followers as more transformational. They are viewed by those around them as more effective, especially over time. How leaders view their own capability translates into meaningful, impactful behavior.
Perhaps most important for those of us in leadership development is that leader self-efficacy is developable using numerous methods, including executive coaching, mentoring, constructive thought training, and other structured developmental interventions. Whatever your method of choice, the evidence is clear: leader self-efficacy can be built, and building it matters. However, knowing that such development is occurring requires appropriate measurement.
Measuring Leader Self-Efficacy
Leader elf-efficacy’s highly contextual nature means that the level at which you measure matters enormously. If your program is designed to create resilient, self-aware leaders, but your self-efficacy scale focuses narrowly on leading a team in a specific technical context, you might miss meaningful development occurring. Similarly, if your intervention is highly task-oriented but your measure is overly global, you might fail to detect important, meaningful, but highly specific shifts.
Assessing leader self-efficacy requires measures matching the intended specificity of your program. Sometimes a broader, more general leader self-efficacy scale is appropriate. Other times, a task-oriented, domain-specific measure is more defensible. At the Doerr Institute, we use both, depending on programs’ specific goals and context.
Whatever measure you use, however, certain elements of leader self-efficacy are non-negotiable. First, the language must be capability focused. Leader self-efficacy is not identity language (“I am the kind of person who…”) or abstract potential (“I could do this if needed”); it’s about confidence and capability—“I am confident that I can…,” “I am capable of…,” or even comparative judgments of competence (e.g., “compared to other people, I am better at…”). The emphasis must remain on perceived capability.
Second, leader self-efficacy measures should be process-oriented, not about guaranteed outcomes or external circumstances. It is about one’s belief in their ability to execute the behaviors of leadership, especially when those behaviors are required under pressure. The core questions are simple: Can I lead when it matters? Do I believe I can step forward, take action, and persist?
Beyond the “Gimmes”
Taken together with leader identity, leader self-efficacy represents one of the two “gimme” measures for leader development. If you claim to develop leaders—i.e., to change how individuals understand themselves and how they lead—then you must measure both who they believe themselves to be and what they believe they can do. If you are not measuring these, there is reason to question whether you are truly measuring leader development.
At the same time, these two measures are not the entirety of leader development, and so as this series continues, we’ll explore additional constructs that can help capture the broader, more nuanced work of developing leaders.
