The Four Styles of Confidence on a Team (opens in new tab)

Most resonant quote from the article: "For more senior roles, look for dynamic range in their confidence levels." Great mental model of the types of senior people I've enjoyed working with.

I've found it's always more worthwhile to debate and work with people who have to consistently match their predictions against reality. In my life, that's been engineers that ship and money managers who tracked against a benchmark. Everyone else I'm happy to let them have the comforts of their opinions.

To what extent do tight-knit teams adjust their interpretation of confidence levels on an individual basis to reflect their ratio? Like, "Overconfident Oscar expressed a tiny bit of doubt, so he must not really have high conviction at all." Or, "Underconfident Uma expressed slightly more conviction than usual, so we should pay attention."

Also, from my experience, it seems like (and this isn't a strong opinion) doing competitive high school debate teams turns people into Overconfident Oscars.