> ...but they don't know how good their own people are.

Trust. Easily lost, hard to win and all that. If you don't actually trust those you manage you're not really operating at your best, let alone bringing out the best of your team.

It's a humbling experience tbh, requires putting your faith of success in other people, which in my experience is harder to teach (and is often learned through tough failures) than any kind of computer skills.

To maybe make trust easier, let's say there's two kinds trust:

* Sometimes you implicitly trust that someone will do the right thing. Easy: you just know.

* Other times, you decide you're going to invest in trusting someone to do the right thing.

In the second kind, people can pick up on that investment, and respect it or be inspired, in which case it is self-fulfilling.

Though some people won't pick up on it, or won't care, or will think your investment is naive and to be taken advantage of.

So you have to think about how you convey it, and decide who you're going to invest in.

Investing in everyone on your team is a good default to start with.