Leaders love to say “You can do this!”

But what if they can’t?

It’s easy to assume that enthusiasm is enough. That if someone’s eager, they’ll figure it out along the way.

Encouragement is nice, but you can’t wish skills into existence. Telling someone “I believe in you” before handing them the car keys doesn’t magically teach them how to drive.

Obvious, yet all too common

Walk into any organisation, and you'll see confidence being mistaken for competence all the time.

Say a new project pops up. As the room brims with anticipation, someone leans forward, eyes bright: “I’ll take it!”

In that moment, we don’t just see their willingness. We see their readiness. Because after all — who in their right mind would leap in with such gusto if they weren’t the right person for the job?

Meanwhile, in the same room, someone else is quietly scanning the risks, weighing the trade-offs, tracking how this one move might ripple through the organisation. But we don’t see all that mental effort. We see how they don’t leap out of their chair, and think they lack initiative. We hear how they hedge their words, and think they lack conviction.

And what happens when the confident go-getter takes charge? They rally the team and stoke the belief: “If anyone can pull it off, it’s us.”

Without the foresight or rigour to scope, plan, and calibrate, teams find themselves paralysed. Outcomes get declared but never defined. Expectations get assumed, but never aligned. Priorities shift on a whim. Decisions get made on the fly.

What’s worse — if you raise concerns with the leader, they don’t see a lack of structure. They see a lack of spirit.

So? More pep talk. More bravado.

A systemic blindness

It’s not one person’s fault. It’s baked right into our organisational systems.

When you grow up in a culture where the appearance of certainty matters more than the pursuit of understanding, you quickly learn an unspoken rule: you need to look like you know what you’re doing.

That sounding sure gets you further than being sure.

Over and over, confidence becomes our proxy for competence. From how we hire to how we promote, from the behaviours we praise to the instincts we validate — everything favours the voice that rallies over the mind that weighs.

And so, the bold, assertive individual who speaks fluently and moves quickly becomes our idea of a leader, while the silent markers of leadership go unseen.

In the rush to find someone who will push us forward, we often forget to ask if they really know the way.

Confidence is meant to be a signal of competence — evidence that there’s real substance beneath the surface. Without the substance, all we’re left with is an empty promise — like a wrapper without a gift.

And the more we keep buying that promise, the more our culture runs on placebo — prescribing confidence like some magic pill that feels good, but fixes nothing.

Seeing through

How do we learn to see through the biases shaping our judgments? Consider these nudges:

Question the calm

• We’re drawn to leaders who radiate certainty. Why? Because it soothes our nerves. Quells our anxiety. But in doing so, we stop thinking for ourselves.

• Probe the feeling: “Am I trusting this person because I know they’re right — or because I feel better when they speak?”

Watch the mental shortcuts

• Confidence is instantly perceptible. Competence is not. So we substitute the harder, slower judgment with the easier, faster one. That’s why we often trust a confident leader over a hesitant one, even when the latter has better reasoning.

• Notice what stands out, and ask why it stands out: “What signals am I picking up on? What story are they making me believe? Are those signals even relevant to the question at hand?”

Look past the halo

• When a confident leader messes up, we excuse it as a one-time mistake. When a less confident leader makes that same mistake, we see it as evidence that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

• Separate the who from the what: “Would I feel equally convinced if they sounded less sure of themselves? What if someone else said the same thing?”

Resist the easy read

• Some people carry confidence lightly, because they’ve never had to reckon with the edge of their knowledge. Others carry doubt, because they’ve stood at those edges — and know just how easy it is to get it wrong.

• Calibrate self-awareness by testing initial assumptions against final outcomes. Ask: “Did everything turn out the way we thought it would? What did we misread — in the work, or in ourselves?”

Yes, pep talks can spark a fire. They can fuel courage, galvanise action, and help us move forward in the face of uncertainty.

But leadership requires more than just cheerleading: it demands depth of thought, clarity of judgment, and an unflinching grasp of what’s truly at stake.

So the next time you say, “You’ve got this,” make sure they actually do.