The advice is everywhere: be more confident. Project certainty. Walk in like you belong there.
It’s aimed at the wrong thing. Confidence is about your internal state. Your team is not experiencing your internal state — they’re experiencing whether they know what they’re supposed to do.
Those come apart more often than people expect. You can be full of doubt and completely clear. You can be entirely self-assured and leave everyone confused.
What people actually need from you
Three things, and none is reassurance.
What’s expected of them. Not the job description — what good looks like in practice, this month. Most underperformance I’ve seen was someone doing their best against a standard nobody had described.
What matters most right now. When everything is presented as important, people choose by instinct, and their instinct is calibrated to their job rather than the business. Naming the priority is a single sentence that prevents weeks of effort going the wrong way.
Where they stand. Whether they’re doing well. Whether the thing they’re worried about is a problem. People will invent an answer if you don’t give them one, and the invented answer is usually worse than the truth.
Supply those three and a team can function with a leader who is visibly uncertain. Withhold them and no amount of confident bearing compensates.
Clear and uncertain at the same time
This is the part that gets missed, and it’s the most useful thing in this post.
Clarity doesn’t require knowing the answer. It requires being precise about what you know, what you don’t, and what happens next.
“I don’t know yet whether we’re taking on the second location. I’ll know by the end of March. Until then, nothing changes about your role, and I’ll tell you the day it’s decided.”
That is entirely clear and admits total uncertainty. It gives people what they need: the actual state of things, a timeline, and instructions for the interim.
Compare the confident version: “We’ve got exciting things coming, watch this space.” Self-assured, warm, and it tells them nothing. So they speculate, and speculation in an information vacuum runs pessimistic.
The enemy of clarity isn’t doubt. It’s vagueness. And vagueness is frequently a way of managing your own discomfort about not knowing — which is understandable and gets paid for by everyone else.
Why this matters particularly for women
Women are told to be more confident more or less constantly. It’s the standard feedback, it’s the theme of an entire industry, and it’s frequently the wrong diagnosis.
Two problems with it.
First, it’s unfalsifiable and unhelpful. “Be more confident” describes a feeling you’re meant to generate on command. There’s no instruction in it. Clarity, by contrast, is a set of things you can actually do — say what you expect, name the priority, tell people where they stand. Available on any day, regardless of how you feel walking in.
Second, the confidence framing locates the problem in the woman. Sometimes that’s right. Frequently what’s actually happening is that the same behaviour is read differently depending on who’s doing it — and the answer to being read as uncertain is not to perform harder, it’s to be so specific that there’s nothing to interpret.
Specificity is difficult to dismiss. “I think we should probably look at pricing” invites a shrug. “Our margin on this service line is 14%, the industry range is 30 to 40, and I’m proposing we raise prices by 20% in the next quarter” is a different kind of statement. It doesn’t require you to feel any particular way.
How to tell whether you’re clear
You cannot assess this from inside your own head, because your intentions are perfectly clear to you.
The only reliable test: ask someone to tell you back.
“Just so I know I explained it properly — what are you going to do first?” It’s a small, unembarrassing question and the answer is frequently startling. People will confidently describe a task adjacent to the one you asked for, and neither of you would have found out for three weeks.
Two other checks worth running:
- Could they act on this without asking a follow-up question? If not, something is missing — usually the priority or the deadline.
- Have they had to guess at anything? Every guess is a place where your clarity ran out, and guesses compound quietly.
Where confidence does matter
To be fair to it: there’s one place it genuinely counts, and it isn’t the one people mean.
You need enough confidence to say the uncomfortable thing. To raise the price. To have the conversation you’ve been avoiding. To tell a client their brief doesn’t work. That’s not a performance of self-assurance — it’s a willingness to tolerate someone being unhappy with you.
That kind of confidence is worth building, and it’s completely different from projecting certainty in a room.
The projecting kind is optional. Being clear is not.
More on the skills that actually carry a team and setting decision rights so people don’t have to guess.
