Are you losing confidence… or are you leading in a system that keeps moving the goalposts?

There is a particular kind of self-doubt that I see in capable, experienced women in senior leadership positions, and it doesn’t always start because they lack confidence. Sometimes it starts because they are trying to lead inside a system where nobody has made it clear what they actually have the authority to lead.

You’ve been appointed to a senior position because the owners or founders want to step back. They tell you they trust you. They tell you they want you to take ownership. They want you to lead the team, make decisions, improve the business and take responsibility for the day-to-day operation so they can spend more time working on other things.

On paper, you’re in charge. Except you’re not. Not really.

Decisions still circle back through the owners. They’re copied into emails they probably don’t need to see. Team members bypass you and go directly to them because that’s what they’ve always done. An owner jumps into a conversation before you’ve had an opportunity to handle it. Something you thought sat within your authority suddenly requires approval. Responsibilities overlap, roles blur and different people have different ideas about who is responsible for what.

Eventually you start wondering whether the problem is you…. And that’s when the gaslighting self-talk starts:

Maybe I’m not being decisive enough.

Maybe I need to communicate better.

Maybe I should know this.

Maybe I’m not ready for this level of leadership.

Maybe they’re stepping in because I’m not doing a good enough job.

That’s the part I think we need to talk about, particularly with senior women in leadership, because when you operate in ambiguity for long enough, it becomes incredibly easy to gaslight yourself.

When capable women start questioning their capability

I use the word “gaslight” carefully here. I’m not suggesting there is necessarily someone deliberately manipulating you or trying to undermine your confidence. Often there isn’t.

The business owners may genuinely want you to succeed. They may genuinely believe they have handed over responsibility. They may even be frustrated that you aren’t taking more ownership. The problem is that what they say they want and what the system allows can be two very different things.

For example, they say, “We want you to run the business,” while continuing to insert themselves into operational decisions. They say, “You don’t need to check everything with us,” but then question decisions they weren’t involved in. They say, “We want the team coming to you,” while continuing to answer questions when team members bypass you and come directly to them. They say, “We need you to take ownership,” without defining where your authority begins, where it ends and which decisions are genuinely yours to make.

All of That creates an impossible leadership environment because you are being asked to take responsibility without being given the corresponding authority. And when you’re a conscientious leader who cares deeply about doing a good job, you often don’t immediately question the system…. you question yourself.

What if it isn’t a confidence problem?

This is where I often encourage leaders to mentally remove themselves from the situation for a moment. Take your personality out of it. Take your confidence out of it. Take your relationship with the owners out of it. Take away the history, emotion and fear about what people might think of you. Now look at the business purely as a system:

·Are the roles clear?

·Does everyone know who is responsible for what?

·Is decision-making authority clearly defined?

·Do people understand what they can decide independently, what needs consultation and what genuinely requires approval?

·Is there a clear escalation process?

·When someone is away, can the business continue functioning without everything grinding to a halt?

·Are there systems for transferring information, responsibility and knowledge, or does everything live inside particular people’s heads?

When you look at the situation that way, something interesting can happen. The question changes from, “What is wrong with me?” to, “What is missing from the system?”. That sparks a very different leadership conversation.

You cannot delegate a business by changing someone’s job title

This is one of the biggest traps founders and business owners can fall into as their organisation grows. They have spent years building the business through sheer effort. They know every client, every process, every problem and every workaround. They have been the decision-makers, troubleshooters, relationship holders and safety net.

That approach may have been exactly what the business needed in its early stages. Then the business grows.

There are more people, more clients, more complexity, more decisions and more pressure. Eventually the owners realise they cannot continue being involved in everything, so they appoint someone senior and say, “We need you to take over.” But appointing a General Manager, CEO, Operations Manager or other senior executive does not automatically create a business that can operate without its owners. You cannot replace a system with a person.

If two founders have spent years holding dozens of responsibilities between them and simply transfer those responsibilities to one senior leader, they haven’t removed key-person dependency. They’ve simple moved it all over to someone else and sometimes they have actually made it worse.

The new executive becomes the person who knows everything, approves everything, solves everything and carries everything. Then, when she inevitably becomes overloaded or something falls through the cracks, everyone starts questioning whether she can cope with the position.

Including her.

The better question to ask here is whether the position was ever designed to be sustainable in the first place.

Stepping back is a process, not an announcement

If business owners genuinely want to remove themselves from day-to-day operations, there needs to be an intentional transition from owner dependency to organisational capability.

That means defining roles. Building systems. Transferring knowledge. Establishing decision rights. Developing people. Creating escalation pathways. Allowing other people to make decisions differently from the way the founders would make them. Most importantly, it means learning not to jump back in every time something feels uncomfortable.

That last part can be incredibly difficult.

For an owner who has spent years protecting the business, checking can feel like care. Getting involved can feel responsible. Being copied into everything can feel reassuring. Fixing a problem themselves can feel quicker than allowing someone else to work through it. But care can easily become over-functioning, and over-functioning can easily be experienced by everyone else as control.

The owner thinks, “I’m helping.” The executive hears, “I don’t trust you.”

The owner thinks, “I’m just keeping across things.” The executive hears, “You need to prove everything you’re doing.”

The owner thinks, “I’m protecting the business.” The executive starts wondering, “Why did you put me in this position if you still need to make every decision?”

Nobody necessarily has bad intentions, but the impact has bad ramifications.

Responsibility without authority creates hesitation

One of the most damaging consequences of unclear authority is that it changes the way good leaders behave. A leader who would normally make a sound decision starts checking, then double-checking, then wondering whether she should raise it with the owners first. She begins anticipating what they might think rather than asking what she believes the business needs.

She starts softening recommendations she would previously have made with conviction. She holds back an idea because she isn’t sure how it will be received. She spends more time managing upwards and less time actually leading. Eventually the owners may notice the hesitation and think, “She doesn’t seem confident, have we made the right choice promoting her to this position?”.

The irony is that the environment may be creating the very behaviour they are concerned about.

If every decision can be second-guessed, overridden or revisited, hesitation is a perfectly understandable response. You learn very quickly that although you have the title, you may not actually have the authority.

Before you question yourself, question the environment

For the senior women reading this who are currently wondering whether they have somehow lost their edge, I want you to consider another possibility:

·Perhaps you haven’t suddenly become less capable, perhaps you are trying to perform a role that hasn’t been properly defined.

·Perhaps you are carrying responsibilities that were never designed to sit with one person.

·Perhaps you are trying to lead people who are still receiving direction from multiple sources.

·Perhaps you have accountability for outcomes without sufficient authority to influence them.

·Perhaps you are trying to meet expectations that nobody has ever clearly articulated.

·Perhaps the goalposts really are moving.

That doesn’t mean there is nothing for you to work on. There almost always is. Senior leadership requires us to examine our own behaviour, communication, boundaries, courage and decision-making. But self-awareness is not the same thing as automatically making yourself the problem.

There comes a point where endlessly asking, “What do I need to do better?” stops being reflective leadership and starts preventing you from asking the equally important question, “What does this organisation need to do differently?”

Put the problem back where it belongs

If you recognise yourself in this, try looking at the organisation as though you were an external consultant brought in tomorrow. Forget personalities for a moment and look at the structure.

·Where are decisions being made and where should they be made instead?

·Which responsibilities overlap?

·Where are people bypassing the organisational structure?

·Where does the business rely too heavily on one person?

·What happens when that person is unavailable?

·What information is trapped inside people rather than captured in systems?

·Where have accountabilities been assigned without corresponding authority?

And the biggest question of all: what would need to change for the owners to genuinely step back rather than simply say they are stepping back?

You may discover that what you have been experiencing as a personal confidence problem is actually valuable information about the business. Your frustration may be showing you where the structure is unclear. Your overwhelm may be showing you where capacity is insufficient. Your hesitation may be showing you where authority has never been properly transferred. Your team’s confusion may be showing you where leadership boundaries overlap.

Those aren’t excuses. They are data… and senior leaders need to be able to read the data to make sound decisions.

Your job isn’t to carry a broken system more efficiently

There is a dangerous version of high performance where capable women simply become better and better at absorbing dysfunction. We work longer. Remember more. Fill the gaps. Smooth things over. Protect the team. Keep the owners informed. Pick up the work nobody owns. Create another spreadsheet. Carry another responsibility. Try harder.

And because we can carry it, people keep handing it to us… until we can’t.

Leadership at an executive level is not about proving that you can personally hold the entire organisation together. It is about helping create an organisation that doesn’t need one person to hold it together.

That may require a different kind of courage. Not the courage to work harder or somehow become “more confident”, but the courage to put forward what you can see, explain what the business needs and make your recommendations with conviction.

The owners still get to decide. It is their business. They may agree with you. They may disagree. They may choose to change the structure or continue operating exactly as they are. But their choice does not determine whether your thinking was valid.

Sometimes the most important shift for a senior leader is recognising the difference between, “I’m not capable of doing this job” and, “I cannot do this job effectively under the current conditions.”

Those are not the same statement.

And before you allow yourself to believe the first one, it might be worth getting very curious about the second.