Confidence at Work: When the Situation Changes, Not the Person
Updated: 2 days ago
A team has worked well together for years. Everyone knows how decisions get made, what good work looks like and who to go to when something needs sorting. Then a new manager arrives, and within a few weeks someone who has been reliable for a long time is rewriting an email three times before sending it. They stay quiet in a meeting where they would once have been the first to speak. If you asked them, they would probably tell you their confidence has gone.
I hear versions of that story often, and the explanation people reach for is nearly always the same. They assume something has gone wrong with them. In my experience advising professionals over the past fifteen years, that is rarely where the problem starts. Confidence at work tends to drop because the situation around a person has changed, and they have not yet had the chance to catch up with it. Their ability is exactly where it was, but everything that used to tell them so has moved.
Why Confidence at Work Drops When Nothing About You Has Changed
Confidence is usually talked about as though it were a personal quality, something you carry around with you and either have or lack. In practice it works much more like a reading taken from your surroundings. Over time you build up a steady supply of signals that tell you you’re doing well. That supply comes from a manager who knows your work, feedback that arrives in a familiar form, and an understood way of doing things that means you rarely have to wonder whether your approach will be accepted.
When the situation changes, that supply can stop almost overnight. A restructure, a new remit, a merger or a change of manager can remove every one of those signals at once. Nothing in you has changed, but the evidence you used to rely on is no longer arriving, and doubt is very good at filling a silence. People start to read the absence of feedback as a sign that something must be wrong, because that is exactly how the absence feels from the inside.
This is also why confidence so often dips later in a career rather than at the start. Early on, you expect to feel uncertain, and the signals that you’re doing well are frequent and obvious. By the time you have ten or fifteen years behind you, a great deal of your confidence rests on things you no longer notice, such as long working relationships and a reputation that goes ahead of you. Take those away, and an experienced professional can feel less sure of themselves than they did as a graduate, even though they are far better at the job.
What It Looks Like When a New Manager Arrives
The early signs are quiet. People who used to make decisions on their own start waiting for approval, even on things that have always been within their remit. They over-explain in emails, adding context nobody asked for, because part of them wants to protect their credibility with someone who does not know them yet. They hold back in meetings because they have not worked out how the new manager takes challenge, and speaking up to someone you do not know feels like a much bigger risk than speaking up to someone you do.
If the new manager checks work more closely than the last one did, that closer checking gets read as a judgement. Someone who has done a task well for years starts to wonder whether they ever did it well at all. The manager, meanwhile, may simply be learning how the team works and have no idea the checking has landed that way. Both people end up reading the situation wrongly, and the team member pays for it in confidence.
I wrote about one client’s experience of this in Confidence at Work Was Never Meant to Be Constant, where a new manager seemed to find fault with everything. What stays with me from situations like that is how quickly a good person can start rewriting their own history. Very little of what they start to believe about themselves has anything to do with their ability.
Is It Me, or Is It the Situation?
Self-doubt is information, but it only becomes useful once you work out what it is pointing to. Sometimes it points to a real gap, a skill the new situation asks for that you have not yet built. Sometimes it points to a transition that has not settled, where you and the people around you are still learning how to work together. And sometimes it points to a situation that has quietly stopped giving you what you need to do your job well. Each of these calls for a different response, and treating them all as a confidence problem means none of them gets properly addressed.
A useful test is to ask what has changed in the past six months, and to be specific about it. If the answer includes a new manager, a new structure, a bigger workload or a different set of expectations, it is worth asking whether your confidence dropped before or after those changes. When the timing lines up, the situation is the more likely explanation. That does not mean you have nothing to work on, but it does mean the starting point is understanding the change rather than trying to fix yourself.
It also helps to separate the work from the way it is being judged. If you could do the job well a year ago and the job itself has not changed much, your ability is unlikely to have gone. What has changed is the lens it is being viewed through, and you are still learning how that lens works. I explore a related confusion in Imposter Syndrome at Work, where a label that sounds personal is often covering a gap in support.
Why Pushing Through Can Make It Worse
The usual advice on confidence is to act before you feel ready. Speak up anyway, back yourself and let the feeling catch up. That advice works well when the challenge is genuinely new, such as a first presentation or a step up in responsibility, because doing the thing builds the evidence that builds belief.
When the ground has moved under you, the same advice can backfire. Pushing harder to impress a new manager often means more checking, more preparation and more over-explaining, which are exactly the behaviours that wear confidence down further. When the extra effort does not produce the reassurance you hoped for, it becomes one more piece of evidence that you are falling short. You end up working very hard on the wrong problem.
Reassurance from other people has a similar limit. A colleague telling you that you’re doing fine feels good for a day and then fades, because it does not touch the belief driving the doubt. It is a single data point, offered once, and your own worry is far more persistent than that. What changes the picture is evidence, gathered on purpose and examined with the same fairness you would give a colleague rather than the harshness you save for yourself. I look at the pressure side of this in more depth in Losing Confidence at Work Is Rarely About Ability.
Evidence Beats Reassurance
I worked with a manager who was six months into her role. She was well regarded by her team and, by every measure I could see from the outside, clearly good at the job. She did not experience it that way. She described leading on instinct, unsure whether her approach was having the effect she intended, and quietly convinced that everyone around her had a clearer handle on leadership than she did.
Nothing she described pointed to a performance problem. Her situation had changed completely when she stepped into the role, and the feedback that had once told her she was doing well had stopped arriving in a form she recognised. What she was missing was outside information. I suggested she ask her team directly, not through a formal review but in an honest conversation about how her leadership was landing with them.
She came back two weeks later. Her team described her leadership as steady and meaningful, nothing like the uncertain picture she had been carrying privately for months. Her ability had not changed in those two weeks. What changed was that she had gone and found evidence instead of waiting for her confidence to return on its own.
That is the habit worth building, and it does not need to be dramatic. After a decision that went well, write a short note about what you did and why it worked. When someone gives you specific feedback, write it down rather than letting it fade by the end of the week. Ask one person you trust a direct question about how a piece of work landed, the way she asked her team. When you speak up in a meeting and it is received well, notice it, because doubt will make sure you notice the times it was not.
None of these feels significant on its own. Done regularly over a few months, they build something closer to a case file, a record you can return to when doubt shows up again, as it will the next time your situation changes. Evidence you have gathered yourself carries a weight that borrowed reassurance never quite manages, because you were there when it happened and you know it is true.
What Managers Often Miss
New managers rarely set out to unsettle a good team. Research by the Chartered Management Institute, based on a 2023 survey of more than 4,500 UK workers and managers, found that 82% of people who move into management roles have had no formal management or leadership training.
That figure goes some way to explaining what I see. A manager who has never been shown how to take over an established team will usually fall back on what feels safe, which tends to mean checking more, changing processes quickly to establish their own way of working and saying little about why. From the team’s side, that silence is the real difficulty. People fill it with their own explanations, and the one they reach for first is usually that the new manager does not rate them.
A wee bit of explanation goes a long way. A new manager who tells the team why they are checking work more closely, and makes clear it is about learning how things run rather than doubting anyone, removes a great deal of the guesswork. Asking each person early on what they are good at and how they like to work gives people a chance to be seen as they are before the doubt sets in. Noticing when a reliable person has gone quiet, and asking what has changed rather than treating it as a performance issue, can stop a dip in confidence from turning into a resignation.
Organisations frequently overlook how much a change of manager costs in the months that follow. The work still gets done, so the cost does not show up in any report. It shows up in slower decisions, quieter meetings and good people who start to wonder whether they should look elsewhere, not because they want to leave but because they no longer feel effective where they are.
A Different Question to Ask Yourself
If your confidence at work has taken a knock recently, try putting aside the question of what is wrong with you. Ask instead what changed around you before your confidence did, and how long you have been trying to adjust to it on your own. The skills and experience that got you this far are still there. The more useful question is whether the evidence of them has stopped reaching you, and what it would take to go and find it again.
If you would like support rebuilding that evidence and getting a clearer picture of what you bring, the Career Confidence Strength Programme is built for exactly this kind of situation. It starts from what you already have rather than what you think you are missing.
I'm Paula Donnan, a career consultant based in Belfast and founder of Paula Donnan Advisory, a strengths-led career and workforce consultancy.
More at pauladonnanadvisory.com.
Strength at Work — Better judgement. Stronger leadership. Higher performance.
If this is affecting you, book in for a free 30-minute initial briefing to discuss the way forward.
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