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Swagger needs humility
Confidence in a group
A leader needs people to be confident in them, whether the group is troops, a university faculty, or a basketball team, and a SEAL platoon needs some people with real swagger. Those people also have to understand that they aren't the smartest man or woman in the room. They listen to competing ideas, take other people's ideas, and then the group follows its leader and moves out.
Why humility matters
Humility is what makes the confidence work. Knowing all that you don't know is what lets you be confident about what you do know, and being prepared to be humble means a contrarian view that might be the right answer gets heard.
Finding the line
The line is hard to find, and leaders blow it a bunch of times. Overshoot into cockiness and you are past swagger and into the bad place, and having too little humility or too much throws the balance off. Aristotle treated virtues as midpoints between vices, and swagger fits: holding just enough swagger and just enough humility is a constant effort.
How did Aristotle see virtue as a midpoint?
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle described each virtue as a mean between an excess and a deficiency. Courage sits between cowardice and recklessness, and generosity sits between stinginess and extravagance. He added that the right midpoint depends on the person and the situation, so no formula locates it. Aristotle wrote the work in the fourth century BC.
Why does overconfidence trip up capable people?
Psychologists Don Moore and Paul Healy described three kinds of overconfidence in a 2008 paper in Psychological Review. Overestimation is thinking you perform better than you do, and overplacement is thinking you rank above others. Overprecision is being too sure your beliefs are right. The paper's central argument was that these three are separate effects that studies had often blended together.
Why does a contrarian view improve group thinking?
Psychologist Charlan Nemeth at the University of California, Berkeley has studied minority dissent for decades. In her experiments, groups exposed to a dissenting view considered more options and found more solutions than groups that heard only agreement. This held even when the dissenter was wrong. Nemeth summarized the research in her 2018 book In Defense of Troublemakers.
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