The Performance of Competence Costs You Trust

I got promoted to manager, and for a while, I was insufferable.

Not loud insufferable. Not the type who yells in meetings. Something quieter, and in some ways worse: I performed the job instead of doing it.

I'd been a supervisor for a couple of years by then. I knew every lever of that role, every landmine. I'd basically built it myself. Three direct reports, work I knew intimately. Manager was a different animal. I now had supervisors reporting to me. People doing jobs I had never personally done a day in my life. I was suddenly accountable for ten times as many people, and for financial performance I'd never had to think about before.

I was excited. I was also terrified.

I didn't have language for imposter syndrome back then. I just felt the hum of it underneath everything I did. So instead of leading, I acted the way I thought a leader should act. I projected confidence I didn't fully feel. I referenced my authority — a lot. I reminded people, subtly and not so subtly, that I had the title. As if saying it enough times would make it true.

One day, my boss pulled me aside. I don't remember what set it off. I do remember exactly what he said.

"You already have the job. Stop trying to prove you deserve it and do it."

It landed like a slap.

After the sting wore off, I understood him completely. No one was questioning whether I deserved that job.

Except me.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about competence: performing it and actually having it are two different skills, and the performance is the one that costs you.

Every time I over-explained a decision, I was quietly telling the room I didn't trust my own judgment enough to just make it. Every time I inserted myself into work that belonged to someone else, I was telling my team I didn't trust them to handle it without me. I thought I was building credibility. I was spending it, dollar by dollar, and calling it leadership.

So I tried something that felt radical to me at the time. I stopped narrating my leadership. I asked more questions instead of supplying answers I didn't need to supply. I let my supervisors work through problems without swooping in to rescue them. I said "I don't know" out loud in meetings without flinching or following it with three sentences of justification.

I braced for the room to fall apart.

It settled instead.

That's the part that still catches me off guard, years later, every time I coach a newly promoted leader through this exact season. We think competence has to be visible to be believed. We think if we stop proving ourselves, people will stop trusting us. It's backwards. People don't put their trust in the leader who looks like she has it all handled. They trust the one who's honest about what she's still figuring out and shows up to figure it out anyway.

I think about that season a lot these days, mostly because I'm writing about it. Half the chapters of the book I'm working on are, in one form or another, about the gap between the leader I was performing and the leader I actually was underneath the performance. The performing was exhausting. The honesty, once I let myself try it, was a relief.

If you're in a season right now where you're narrating your leadership — reminding people of your title, over-explaining your calls, filling silence so no one notices you don't have every answer yet — I'd gently ask you the question my boss asked me, in his own way:

What would happen if you stopped?

Not stopped leading. Stopped performing it.

You already have the job. You don't have to keep proving it. You just get to do it.

If this is the season you're in, I write about exactly this kind of thing every week — the parts of leadership nobody trains you for. Join the list for more of this in your inbox, or reach out if you want to talk about working together.