Your company hired you to drive a vision. Hit the numbers. Fix the platform. Turn the team around.
So when the doubt shows up at two in the morning, you tell nobody. Not your boss, who hired you for your certainty. Not your team, who need you steady. Not your peers, who sit across from you in the budget fight.
Advita Patel named this when she joined Debra and me on Corey-osity Unleashed. Part of why she wrote Decoding Confidence was to talk about confidence without letting shame into the room. Her point: no leader wants to admit a confidence gap. Somebody hired you to deliver against big objectives. Turning round and saying "I'm struggling with my confidence" feels like the last thing to help you.
She's right about the silence. I think she's also right about the cost, and I want to spend this post on the cost. Because the doubt isn't the expensive part. The hiding is.
The Doubt Is Common. The Silence Is the Problem.
Start with how ordinary this is.
A 2020 systematic review in the Journal of General Internal Medicine pulled together 62 studies covering 14,161 people. Depending on the screening tool, between 9% and 82% of participants showed signs of impostor syndrome. The range is too wide to quote one honest number. But the review found it in men and women, and in every age group from teenagers to late-career professionals. It linked the condition to worse job performance, lower job satisfaction and burnout.
So you aren't the only one. Your peers carry it too. They hide it as well as you do.
Seniority makes the hiding worse. Manfred Kets de Vries wrote about this in HBR in 2005. He found these "neurotic impostors" at every level of an organisation, and wrote they face their greatest challenges when promoted from senior management to CEO. More visibility, more to lose, fewer people to talk to.
The loneliness data backs him up. RHR International ran a CEO survey, and Thomas Saporito reported in HBR half of CEOs feel lonely in the role. Of those, 61% believe it hinders their performance. Among lonely first-time CEOs, the figure climbs to nearly 70%.
And where do those leaders take the doubt? Mostly nowhere. A 2013 Stanford and Miles Group survey of more than 200 CEOs, directors and senior executives found nearly two-thirds of CEOs get no coaching or leadership advice from outside the company. Nearly all of them said they enjoy the process when they get it.
The higher you climb, the more doubt you carry, and the fewer people you hand it to.
Hidden Doubt Doesn't Stay Hidden
Here's the part I wish someone had told me twenty years ago. Your team never sees the doubt. They see what you do to cover it.
The best evidence I've found comes from Nathanael Fast, Ethan Burris and Caroline Bartel, published in the Academy of Management Journal. They looked at managerial self-efficacy, a manager's belief in their own ability to meet the demands of the role.
In a field study, managers low on self-efficacy asked their people for input less often. Their teams spoke up less as a result.
Then the researchers ran an experiment. They lowered managers' sense of competence on purpose and watched what happened. The managers asked for less input. They rated an employee who spoke up more harshly. They put fewer of the employee's ideas into practice. The driver was ego defensiveness.
Read those findings again. Nobody in the study set out to be a bad boss. They felt threatened, and they protected themselves by closing their ears.
Your team has no access to the feeling. They only get the closed ears.
What It Looks Like in an Engineering Team
In tech teams, I see hidden doubt leak out in a handful of familiar shapes:
- The midnight rewrite. You approve a pull request in the morning and quietly rewrite it at night.
- The defensive design review. Every question about your architecture becomes an attack to repel instead of a gap to close.
- The decision on ice. "Let's wait for one more data point." Three weeks later, the team still waits.
- The hands glued to the keyboard. You stay on the critical path for every hard problem, because solving it proves you still belong.
Kets de Vries saw the same pattern in executives. In one case he described, a 360-degree review showed a leader leaning toward micromanagement, perfectionism and poor listening. He also wrote about perfectionism turning impostors into workaholics.
Your team won't call any of this doubt. They'll call it control. They'll call it a bad boss.
When I ran the research behind Step It Up HR, 99.5% of respondents said they'd had one or more types of bad boss. I don't believe most of those bosses set out to be one. I suspect plenty of them felt scared, and nobody knew, including them.
My Own Version
For years I had to be the smartest person in any room. I'm not the sharpest crayon in the box, so this was a losing game from the start. I couldn't say "I don't know" in front of my team. My career hit a plateau because of it.
The turn came in a meeting with my boss's boss at the table, when someone who reported to me told me I was wrong. He was right. I wrote about the day I was wrong in front of my boss's boss and about why nobody trains leaders to say "I don't know", so I won't retell it here.
The bit worth repeating: the doubt didn't vanish when I admitted it. It got smaller, because I stopped spending energy hiding it. And my department stopped being one brain and became ten.
The Fix Isn't an All-Hands Confession
I'm not telling you to stand up at the next all-hands and announce you feel like a fraud. In the middle of a reorg, your team needs steadiness from you, and a public wobble helps nobody.
The fix sits between total silence and total broadcast. It starts small and private.
Tell one person
Advita's own turning point came on a rainy Monday, stuck on the M62, complaining to a friend on the phone. Her friend held up a mirror and asked one question: what are you going to do about it?
You need one of those people. A peer outside your reporting line, a coach, a mentor, a former boss. Somebody with no stake in your next promotion. Two-thirds of CEOs in the Stanford survey had nobody like this from outside. Don't join them. I wrote more about mirror-holders in The Confidence Book Is Not a Private Jet.
Watch for the leaks, not the feeling
You won't always notice the doubt. You will notice the behaviour if you look for it. Once a week, ask yourself three questions:
- Did I redo somebody's work this week?
- Did I ask for input and then argue with it?
- Am I sitting on a decision I already know the answer to?
A "yes" doesn't make you a fraud. It tells you where the doubt went.
Ask more when you feel least sure
The Fast, Burris and Bartel research shows doubt pushes you toward asking less. So make a rule to do the opposite. When you feel shaky about a call, take it to two people on your team and ask, "What am I missing?" It feels backwards. It gets you better decisions and a team who keeps talking to you.
Separate the feeling from the evidence
Write the decision down. List the evidence for it. Then ask what you'd tell a peer who brought you the same page. Most of the time, the evidence holds up fine. The feeling was the only thing arguing.
Build it into how you grow managers
If you run leadership development, put confidence on the syllabus. Not as a motivational talk. As a skill with practice, peers and follow-up. The managers in your programme carry the same doubt you do. Give them somewhere to put it besides their team.
Your Team Sees It Anyway
Here's the uncomfortable truth. Your team already knows something is off. They don't know it's doubt. They think it's distrust, or control, or ego.
You don't get to choose whether the doubt shows. You only get to choose what it looks like when it does. It shows up either as a manager who grips tighter and listens less, or as a human who found somebody safe to talk to and came back steadier.
So who's your one person? If no name comes to mind, there's your first job for this week.