There is a person in almost every organisation who has done the job well for years and still, quietly, does not think of themselves as someone who does the job. New research in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, based on in-depth life narrative interviews with 22 organisational leaders, gets at why.
The finding is that people developed a stronger leader identity by making meaning of their experiences across different stages of their careers. Most described a gradual movement from uncertainty and imposter feelings toward a more coherent sense of themselves as leaders. The interpretation offered in Scott Hutcheson’s write-up is the clean version: experience does not interpret itself. Competence provides evidence, but leaders have to understand what that evidence means before it can become part of who they are.
Which explains the thing that puzzles everyone who has ever managed anybody. You can hand a person a promotion, a stretch assignment, a budget and a title, all four of which are designed to build confidence, and watch them arrive at the other end more competent and no more certain. The organisation supplied the experience and assumed the meaning would come attached. It does not come attached.
Coffee shows this in the most literal way available.
Take someone who has worked a bar for three years. They can pull a consistent shot in a rush, they know the grinder by sound, they have trained two other people, and they will tell you without irony that they are not really a barista, they just work in a cafe. The skill is not in question. Anyone watching can see it. What is missing is the step where they look at what they have done and draw a conclusion about who they are.
Now notice what actually changes it, because in coffee it is almost always the same two things and neither is a certificate.
The first is being asked to teach. The moment you have to explain why you adjust the dose when the humidity shifts, you are forced to convert accumulated habit into stated knowledge, and hearing yourself say it out loud is the interpretation step. The second is somebody outside the room naming you. A visiting roaster, a customer who knows coffee, a judge at a small competition, anyone whose opinion you did not already control, saying you are good at this. Identity is partly granted rather than earned, which is uncomfortable and appears repeatedly in this literature.
The practical implication for anyone running a team is sharper than the usual advice about confidence, and it costs nothing. If experience does not interpret itself, then the interpretation has to be deliberately provided. That means telling people specifically what a piece of work demonstrated about them, rather than that it went well. It means asking someone to explain their own method to a new starter. It means, at the end of a hard quarter, actually naming what the person did that only they could have done.
None of that is praise in the ordinary sense, and it is not the same as validation. It is supplying the missing half of a process that was always going to be incomplete without it.
The research is qualitative and small, twenty-two people telling their own life stories, and it is worth reading as a map rather than a measurement. What it maps is durable: confidence becomes more stable when people can connect what they have done to a clearer sense of who they are becoming.
Three years behind the machine is not the same as three years of knowing it.
Source: Inc., “Experience Doesn’t Automatically Create Confidence. New Research Finds How to Bridge the Gap”
