That’s the useful premise behind Dr. Andre Martin’s new book, Collective Confidence: The Winning Formula of the World’s Best Teams. After more than 25 years working with organizations including Mars, Nike, Google and Target, Martin argues that the teams most likely to perform under pressure are not necessarily the ones with the most talent.
They’re the ones that believe they can figure things out together.
That sounds obvious until you examine how many organizations actually operate.
Leaders routinely tell employees to “be empowered,” “speak up,” “take ownership” and “challenge the status quo.” Then they surround those slogans with unclear decision rights, political consequences, bloated processes and leaders who punish inconvenient questions.
That isn’t empowerment.
It’s a contradiction.
Martin makes an important distinction between optimism and collective confidence. Optimism is essentially a prediction that things will turn out well. Collective confidence is more demanding. It comes from evidence: Look at what we have around this table. We have the capabilities, relationships and processes to deal with what comes next.
That distinction matters.
Because good leadership isn’t convincing people that nothing will go wrong.
It’s convincing them that something can go wrong without the team falling apart.
Confidence Is Built Before the Results
Organizations often treat confidence as a reward for success.
Win the contract. Hit the target. Launch the product. Beat the competitor.
Then everyone feels confident.
Martin’s argument reverses that sequence. Collective confidence can be a predictor of performance rather than merely a consequence of it.
That makes leadership considerably less glamorous.
Confidence isn't built primarily through inspirational speeches. It’s built through thousands of small interactions:
A leader makes a decision-making process explicit.
A manager lets someone challenge a senior executive without making them pay a political price.
A newcomer is allowed to question an established practice instead of being immediately trained to accept it.
A complicated assignment gets broken into achievable steps.
Someone gets recognized not simply for producing a result, but for demonstrating the behavior the organization needs more of.
None of these moments looks transformational.
Together, they are.
The Real Enemy Is Ambiguity
One of Martin’s strongest ideas is his emphasis on “rules of engagement.”
Most companies have plenty of values.
What they lack is operating clarity.
Who actually makes the decision?
How much disagreement is useful before it becomes obstruction?
How should conflict be handled?
When does an employee escalate a problem?
When should someone simply use their judgment?
What behavior is unacceptable even when the results look good?
These questions rarely appear in corporate value statements. Yet employees encounter them every day.
And when the answers are unclear, people don't become more empowered.
They become more cautious.
Martin illustrates the point with a deceptively simple example involving West Point cadets organizing elementary-school recess. The cadets created an elaborate system of lines, stations, and tightly controlled activities. Experienced teachers relied on a handful of basic boundaries: don't go into the parking lot, don't chase balls over the fence, don't hit anyone.
The difference is instructive.
Too little structure creates chaos. Too much structure creates dependency.
The leader’s job is to establish enough structure for people to exercise judgment—and then get out of the way.
Empowerment Without Clarity Is Just Abandonment
This is where a lot of leadership advice falls apart.
“Give people autonomy” sounds wonderful until nobody knows what they are actually accountable for.
Autonomy without context isn't freedom.
It's exposure.
Martin argues that employees need clarity on fundamental questions:
Why does this organization matter?
What is our mission?
How do we actually get work done?
How does the organization create economic value?
What does the leader owe the people doing the work?
Those aren't philosophical questions.
They are operating infrastructure.
Without answers, shared leadership can become a convenient way for senior leaders to push responsibility downward while retaining the power to veto decisions whenever they dislike the outcome.
That isn't shared leadership.
That's plausible deniability.
Psychological Safety Has to Cost the Leader Something
“Psychological safety” has become one of those management terms that can be repeated so often it loses meaning.
Martin gives it teeth.
If leaders want candor, they have to demonstrate that candor is actually safe.
An open-door policy means very little if the person who walks through it with bad news gets punished.
A company doesn't learn that dissent is welcome because the employee handbook says so.
It learns because somebody challenges the CEO and the CEO gets curious instead of defensive.
That moment is culture.
So is what happens afterward.
The same principle applies to newcomers. Organizations often rush to assimilate new employees: Here’s how we do things.
Martin suggests the opposite.
Give newcomers enough time to remain outsiders.
Let them notice what insiders have become blind to.
His provocative suggestion is to give them 90 days to be the organization's biggest critic.
That may make established employees uncomfortable.
Good.
Discomfort is sometimes the price of seeing clearly.
Stop Celebrating Only the Scoreboard
Most organizations are remarkably consistent about what they reward.
Revenue.
Growth.
Milestones.
Big customers.
Heroic individual performers.
The problem is that those measures tell employees what succeeded yesterday. They don't necessarily tell them what behavior will make the organization stronger tomorrow.
Martin argues for recognizing the behaviors themselves:
Courageous questions.
Useful dissent.
Curiosity.
Collaboration.
Intellectual honesty.
Helping another person succeed.
That matters because recognition is instructional.
What leaders notice becomes what employees repeat.
If you praise the person who saved the project at 2 a.m., don't be surprised when everyone starts creating emergencies that require heroes.
If you praise the person who prevented the emergency in the first place, you teach something different.
Small Wins Beat Inspirational Posters
There is another practical insight here: confidence needs evidence.
When people face a large, ambiguous challenge, leaders often make the mistake of throwing them directly into the deep end.
That may feel developmental.
It can also be stupid.
Martin advocates what he calls a “Goldilocks” approach: challenges should be difficult enough to stretch capability but achievable enough to generate early wins.
Those low-stakes wins matter.
A small success gives the team evidence that its approach works.
Evidence strengthens confidence.
Confidence increases willingness to tackle something harder.
That creates a positive feedback loop.
The alternative is familiar: overwhelm people, get mediocre results, interpret those results as proof that they weren't capable, then reduce their autonomy.
Organizations can manufacture their own lack of confidence.
Failure Is Only Useful If You Know What You Were Testing
The same logic applies to failure.
Some organizations claim to celebrate failure while quietly punishing anyone whose experiment doesn't work.
That teaches employees a predictable lesson:
Don't experiment.
Martin offers a more useful frame. An experiment that disproves an assumption may have produced exactly the information the team needed.
The question isn't simply, Did it work?
It's:
What were we trying to learn?
That requires defining success before the experiment begins.
Otherwise, organizations retrospectively label everything that didn't produce the desired result as failure—and everything that did as brilliance.
That's not learning.
That's storytelling.
The Strongest Leaders Know When They Aren't the Smartest Person in the Room
Perhaps Martin's most interesting argument is about humility.
A leader saying, “I don't have all the answers,” can appear weak
in a culture obsessed with executive certainty.
It can also be the beginning of better leadership.
The admission doesn't eliminate authority.
It reallocates it.
When the leader acknowledges the limits of their own knowledge, others are given permission to contribute what they know. Expertise becomes distributed rather than concentrated in the person with the biggest title.
That's increasingly important because the problems facing modern organizations are too complex for heroic leadership.
No CEO, founder, or department head can possibly know enough to solve everything.
Pretending otherwise doesn't create confidence.
It suppresses intelligence.
The Hard Truth About Collective Confidence
There is a temptation to turn Martin's argument into another piece of leadership inspiration:
Build trust.
Celebrate wins.
Encourage dissent.
Share authority.
Create psychological safety.
Everyone feels confident.
Everyone wins.
Reality is less tidy.
Collective confidence doesn't guarantee success.
It doesn't eliminate incompetence.
It doesn't make bad strategy good.
And it certainly doesn't replace accountability.
What it does is change the team's response to uncertainty.
A confident team doesn't necessarily believe, We will win.
It believes:
If this doesn't work, we'll figure out what to do next.
That is a much more durable form of confidence.
And it is one leaders can actually influence.
Stop Waiting for Confidence
Martin calls one intervention “borrowed brilliance”: showing people examples of comparable teams that accomplished something difficult.
That works because confidence often needs evidence before it has experience.
People need to see that the impossible has been done by people not radically different from themselves.
But the larger lesson is even more practical.
Leaders don't build confidence by telling teams to believe in themselves.
They build it by creating an environment that gives people reasons to believe.
Clear expectations.
Clear boundaries.
Useful processes.
Real autonomy.
Safe dissent.
Visible progress.
Shared responsibility.
Leaders willing to admit what they don't know.
None of this is particularly sexy.
That's precisely the point.
The strongest teams aren't held together by motivational speeches or charismatic leaders. They're held together by repeated evidence that the people around the table can be trusted to think, contribute, challenge, adapt, and recover.
Great teams don't wait until they feel confident.
They manufacture confidence through the way they work.
And when the inevitable crisis arrives, that accumulated confidence becomes something far more valuable than optimism:
the expectation that, together, they will find a way forward.