#63 | Why Promotion Can Trigger Imposter Syndrome And Damage Your Influence.

Have you ever been promoted into management and felt like you should sound more certain than you really feel?

For many newly promoted managers, promotion does not feel empowering straight away. It can trigger imposter syndrome, a loss of confidence, and the pressure to appear certain to protect credibility. In this episode, Caroline breaks down the science behind why early leadership feels so psychologically disorientating, and why real influence is built through honesty, clarity, and psychological safety rather than pretending to have all the answers.

• You will understand why promotion into leadership often triggers imposter syndrome, even in highly capable women
• You will learn why pretending 'you know it' or 'you've got this' can weaken trust and reduce your influence with your team
• You will take away three practical moves to help you lead with more clarity, credibility, and confidence

 Play this episode to learn how to handle imposter syndrome after promotion and build genuine influence without faking confidence.

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This podcast explores resilience, imposter syndrome, and credibility while unpacking how boundaries, conflict, and feedback shape the way we handle pressure, influence, and guilt at work. It also looks at promotion, work-life balance, people pleasing, decision making, and visibility, offering honest conversations about how to grow professionally without losing your confidence or yourself.

Transcript

Caroline Esterson (00:00)
Well, welcome back. It's Wednesday. You left Mia on Monday staring at an email from Matty, having just told him she was gonna get news tomorrow. Meanwhile, she hoped she was gonna get news, but what if she didn't?

Today I want to talk about why early leadership feels the way it does, why it feels and think it looked like from the outside, and what the science tells us about what excellent early leaders actually do differently, because it's not what most people think.

Caroline Esterson (00:33)
Hello, I'm Caroline Esterson and this is Little Moves Big Careers, helping women in corporate leadership who are constantly second guessing themselves to build the daily habits that compound into unshakable confidence. Yep, that's you.

Caroline Esterson (00:50)
So here's what you're getting today. Firstly, you're going to find out why the transition into management is one of the most psychologically disorientating experiences in professional life. Then you're going to discover why performing certainty you don't have doesn't reassure your team. It does something far more damaging than that. And the research behind this is going to make you rethink every vague answer you have ever given in a one-to-one.

And then you're going to leave with three little moves, including the most important thing Mia could have done before she replied to Mattie's email. Small enough to do today and significant enough to change how your team feels about following you. So let's get back to Mia and what was actually going on for her.

old manager made it look easy, like they just knew what they were doing, like having the answers and being able to see what was coming down the track, or at least looking like she knew what was coming. Psychologist Adam Grant and others who study expertise describe a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge. The difficulty experts have in remembering what it felt like not to know what they now know.

Mia's manager didn't find leadership straightforward because she was exceptional. She found it straightforward because she'd been doing it for years. What looked like natural authority was accumulated behaviour. What looked like having the answers was a practice comfort with not always having them. Mia is looking at the end result and comparing it to her beginning. And by doing that, she's always going to feel inadequate.

This is the first and most important reframe of early leadership. You are at the beginning. Everything will feel new and different and strange. And this feeling will continue for every new move you have from here on in. Anything that is new will feel this way no matter how many years of experience you have behind you. And that's okay.

something counterintuitive that people don't talk about. Research by organizational psychologists, including Linda Hill at Harvard Business School,

found that the transition to management is one of the most psychologically disorientating experiences in professional life, specifically because new managers expect to feel more in control and instead feel significantly less in control. And the reason behind this is obvious when you think about it. As an individual contributor, your results primarily depended on your own actions.

You were in control. As a manager, however, your results depend on other people's actions. That loss of direct control, even when you technically have more authority, creates a profound and largely unnamed disorientation that most new leaders interpret as personal inadequacy.

when it just isn't. Mia isn't struggling because she's not good enough for the role. She's struggling because the role requires a completely different set of mental models to the one that got her promoted. And nobody handed her those models when they handed her the title. Which brings us to Mattie's email and what happened in the one-to-one before it. Mia said she was still getting up to speed and she meant it as a holding position.

but what the team heard was a fob off and that in the middle of a restructure really is the most frightening thing a new manager can offer. This kind of performance of vagueness as a substitute for honest uncertainty is one of the most expensive habits in early leadership.

Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School has spent decades researching psychological safety. That shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, to ask questions and to admit uncertainty. That consistently shows that leaders who model uncertainty openly create significantly higher performing teams than leaders who perform certainty that they just don't have.

The performance of certainty doesn't reassure a team. doesn't tell them that you've got this. It haven't. It just means that they stopped telling you what's actually going on. And that performance of vagueness, you know, I'm still getting up to speed. That does something equally as damaging.

It tells the team that their anxiety is not something that you're willing to hold with them. So they decide to take it somewhere else to each other, to their inboxes, to Matty who summarises it in an email 40 minutes later. caught this.

honest.

At least it had a date, a next step, an acknowledgement of the anxiety. That was the right move.

And by doing that, what she's done is reminded herself just how important this is. So it will help her focus on it in her own one-to-one. It'll encourage her to ask the right questions. But here's another question for you. Should she have sent that email at all?

Mattie told him the team was anxious. Anxiety isn't really an email problem, is it? It's a human problem. It needs a voice, a face, 30 seconds of genuine contact that says, I hear you, I'm on it, here's what happens next.

An email, however well worded, keeps the distance that the anxiety is already feeding on.

excellent early leader doesn't just send the right words. She considers whether words on a screen are the right medium at all for what the moment actually needs. That's the little move Mia almost certainly isn't thinking about yet. Not what to say, but how to show up when her team needs her.

So let's move on and look at what excellence actually really looks like with three little moves.

Little move number one, be prepared to say, don't know yet out loud.

Replace, I've got this with, I don't have that yet, I'm finding out on Thursday and I'll update you by the end of the week. This openness is leadership. It gives Matty a timeline. He knows he didn't have to wait much longer, just a day or two. It demonstrates that you have a plan and it stops the performance of certainty from becoming a credibility trap that you just can't get out of later.

The leaders who say, don't know yet, are not the ones who lose the team's respect. They're the ones who earn it because they're the ones the team learns that they can trust to tell the truth.

Little move two, build your map as you go. Keep a running documents. Mia could start it tonight, call something like what I need to know. Every question she can't answer yet goes in the document. Every gap she identifies goes in.

not as evidence of inadequacy, but as a navigation tool. The map she was never handed by her own boss. She can build that herself and every week it gets more and more complete.

It gives her a focus for her own conversation with her manager so she doesn't walk out of that one-to-one without being clearer, without having something to share with the team.

And then you've got little move number three.

Ask your team to help you lead them.

with each team member, she could ask just one question. What do you need from me to do your best work? This is the most powerful question in early leadership. It tells the team you're there to serve their performance,

perform authority at them.

It gives you the information you need to lead effectively. And it begins building the psychological safety that will make me as team eventually one of the best performing in the organization.

Nobody told me it would feel like this because the people who've done it have forgotten what it felt like at the beginning.

because the curse of knowledge works on all of us. But here is what I really want you to know. Whether you're three weeks into your first management role or three years in and still waiting to feel like you've got it,

The feeling of not quite knowing what you're doing isn't a sign that you're in the wrong role. It's the universal, researched, documented experience of everyone who has ever taken on something new. The little moves that we're suggesting don't make that uncertainty go away, but they do make it workable. And workable, repeated enough times becomes something that builds into confidence.

So on Friday, we have the song and quickfire moves for navigating your first few weeks in a new role without the map, including one that I think Mia would have found extremely useful before she replied to Mattie's email. Before Friday, one question for you. Where are you pretending that you have certainty that you just don't have? And what would happen if you just stopped doing that?

ponder on that.

And if this week's episodes are landing for you, if Mears week three, feels like something you're living or have lived, hit subscribe wherever you're listening.

So Fridays lands in your feed automatically. Takes four seconds and it may just be the most useful few minutes of your working week. And if you know someone who's quietly in their first weeks of leadership role and performing certainty they don't have, send them Monday's episode. They need to know they are not on their own. I'm Caroline Esterson. See you Friday.