The Word "Confidence" Is Failing Women Leaders

Senior women aren’t climbing more slowly because they lack confidence. They’re being held back by a system that misnames the problem and hands them the wrong solution. Here’s what actually works.

Every week, somewhere in a corporate boardroom or a performance review, a manager tells a high-performing woman the same thing: “You just need more confidence.” It sounds like feedback. It sounds helpful. But increasingly, leadership coaches and researchers say it might be the most misleading piece of career advice in circulation.

Kirsteen Williamson-Guinn spent 32 years inside the banking industry, including more than a decade at director level in environments she describes as “very male dominated.” She watched talented women plateau, stall out, and quietly leave. And when she finally stepped away to found Elevate Women and write her book Unshakeable Confidence, she brought a clear-eyed diagnosis with her: the problem was never confidence. It was something more specific, more fixable, and something that lazy feedback loops have been glossing over for decades.

 

When “Confidence” Becomes a Cop-Out

Ask most leaders what they mean when they say a woman on their team “lacks confidence,” and they’ll struggle to give you a concrete answer. Williamson-Guinn has heard that vagueness her whole career. She’s also heard its cousin: gravitas, which is a word that, as she puts it bluntly, offers “thanks for nothing” when no one can define what it actually looks like in practice.

What Williamson-Guinn argues women actually need is a different triad entirely: strategy, positioning, and action. Not a mindset shift. They need a systems shift. Understanding the informal power structures at play, building the right strategic relationships before you need them, and taking intentional steps that put you in the room where decisions are made.

She learned this the hard way. In her final years in banking, Williamson-Guinn moved into one of the most male-dominated divisions of her organization. Formal meetings were essentially closed loops, dominated by voices who had already aligned offline. “If you rely on the meetings to get things done, especially in a male dominated world, you are going to struggle,” she says. So, she stopped trying to break through in the meeting itself. She took the conversation offline. She built the relationship before she needed the outcome.

That’s not a confidence strategy. That’s a power strategy. And it worked.

The “Imposter Shenanigans” Reframe

If the confidence myth is the most overused diagnosis, imposter syndrome is a close second. Williamson-Guinn bristles at the term and she has the data to back up her objection. She prefers to call it “imposter shenanigans”: a universal human experience, not a gender-specific pathology.

Research shows that approximately 95% of CEOs,  the majority of whom have historically been men, report struggling with imposter syndrome. That single statistic dismantles the idea that this is a women’s issue. It’s a leadership issue. The higher the stakes, the louder the self-doubt. Williamson-Guinn’s reframe is practical: instead of trying to eliminate the feeling, learn to channel it. Use it as a signal that you’re growing, not evidence that you don’t belong.

The Non-Promotable Task Trap

One of the most structural and least discussed forces holding women back isn’t about psychology at all. It’s about how time gets allocated, and who allocates it.

Non-promotable tasks are exactly what they sound like: work that consumes bandwidth without advancing your career. 

Taking notes in meetings. 

Organizing team events. 

Covering for colleagues. 

Mentoring junior staff without receiving mentorship in return. 

The work is real and often valuable. But it’s rarely what gets people promoted.

By the numbers:

•       Women volunteer for non-promotable tasks approximately 50% more than men

•       Men are more likely to ask women to take on these tasks, often without recognizing the pattern

•       Companies frequently assign women “side-of-desk” projects they would not assign to male colleagues at equivalent levels

•       Middle-level women are the most underserved group in corporate talent development programs, leaving organizations without a pipeline when senior roles open

The fix isn’t to start refusing every request. It’s to get intentional about what you take on and to recognize that saying yes to everything has real career costs. As Williamson-Guinn puts it: “Just because a project lands on your desk doesn’t mean you have to own it.”

The 4 Skills That Actually Future-Proof Women Leaders

As artificial intelligence reshapes every industry, the conversation around what it takes to lead has shifted. Technical expertise matters, but it’s no longer the differentiator. What sets leaders apart now is something AI can’t replicate: the ability to bring human judgment and connection to moments of high uncertainty.

Williamson-Guinn identifies four skills she sees as non-negotiable for women who want to lead in the next decade:

•       Curiosity: The willingness to lean into what you don’t know, especially with technology, rather than retreat from it

•       Compassion: The ability to lead people through change with empathy, not just directives

•       Collaboration: Building across silos, bridging human capability with technological tools

•       Courage: The capacity to move forward in ambiguity, ask for help, and make bold decisions when the map runs out

Importantly, she notes that these are areas where women often have a natural advantage, which makes the waste of talent all the more significant when mid-career women quietly exit corporate life rather than advance through it. Organizations that fail to develop and retain women at the middle management level don’t just lose individuals. They lose the pipeline that would have produced their next generation of senior leaders.

What Co-Creating Your Own Experience Actually Means

One of the most uncomfortable ideas in Williamson-Guinn’s framework is also one of the most empowering: the concept that we co-create our experience at work. 

Not that unfair systems don’t exist. Of course they do. 

Not that bias isn’t real. It is. 

But that within those constraints, the patterns we repeat either keep us stuck or open new doors.

Kirsteen says, “There are people that say they’re overlooked, but they don’t put their hand up. There are people who say they have to do everything themselves, but they don’t ask for or accept help. If you can disrupt whatever loop you’re in and start to do something different, you will create a different experience.”

This isn’t a call for toxic positivity or denial of structural disadvantage. It’s a call for agency, and the recognition that you have more influence over your trajectory than the word “confidence” has ever given you credit for. Strategy, self-knowledge, intentional positioning, and the courage to disrupt your own patterns: these are learnable. They’re also far more actionable than waiting to feel ready.

And that just scratched the surface of our conversation. 

This post covers one thread from a much richer episode. In the full conversation, Kirsteen Williamson-Guinn goes deeper into territory you won’t find in any leadership book:

•       The moment she was told at 16, on her first day of work, that she didn’t need to study for her banking exams because she was “going to get married and have children.” She dismissed it then. She wouldn’t now.

•       How watching both parents disappear at the same time, one to terminal illness, one to dementia, forced a radical recalibration of what success actually meant to her.

•       The client who went from “toxic workplace, no voice, no confidence” to doubling her salary, and the small, specific moves that made it happen.

•       Why the “compare and despair” spiral hits corporate professionals hardest when they first jump into entrepreneurship and how Williamson-Guinn navigated it when COVID wiped her launch plan clean.

Listen to the full episode How Women Can Build Confidence and Career Agency with Kirsteen Williamson-Guinn.