They hired her because she was decisive. Fast, sharp, the kind of person who didn’t need her hand held through a decision.
Three months in, she was asking permission for things that were, by every formal description, entirely inside her role.
The CEO noticed this and read it as a confidence problem. Maybe the onboarding hadn’t given her enough context. Maybe she needed more encouragement to trust her own judgment. So they started coaching her toward ownership, telling her, in different ways, that she had the authority already, that she didn’t need to check in so often.
She kept checking in.
The part that gets missed
Here’s what usually gets missed in that story: she wasn’t guessing wrong about her own competence. She was responding, accurately, to what had actually happened the last few times she moved without asking.
Somewhere in her first weeks, she’d made a call that was hers to make, on paper, and something had gone quietly wrong two steps removed from her, in a part of the org she couldn’t see into. Maybe a dependency she didn’t know about. Maybe a stakeholder who should have been looped in and wasn’t. Whatever it was, the result taught her something faster than any onboarding document could: moving fast here has a cost that isn’t always visible in advance.
So she adjusted. Ask first. Stay safe. That isn’t a lack of confidence. That’s a rational response to an environment that punished exactly the behavior it claimed to reward.
Why coaching doesn’t fix this
This is where a lot of good leadership instinct goes sideways. The natural move is to coach the person: reassure them, remind them of their authority, encourage them to trust themselves. That’s a kind and reasonable response to what looks like a confidence gap.
But if the underlying condition hasn’t changed, if the same kind of invisible dependency is still sitting there waiting to bite the next decision, then all the encouragement in the world is asking someone to ignore evidence they’ve already collected firsthand. People don’t unlearn a real lesson because they’ve been told, verbally, that the lesson doesn’t apply anymore.
What’s actually being asked of her
What she needs isn’t more confidence. It’s a structure that doesn’t quietly punish her for using the authority she’s been given. Telling her to trust herself asks her to override something she’s already learned the hard way, through direct experience, not through a lack of nerve.
She’ll keep asking. Not because she lacks confidence. Because she’s paying close attention.
Myrto Zehnder partners with CEOs and founders of scaling organisations on the structural architecture underneath recurring organisational problems.
The Eagle’s Perspective — myrtozehnder.com