Jamie Dimon Says Insecurity Can Ruin a CEO. New Research Explains What Really Builds Confidence

Confidence grows when leaders turn experience into evidence about what they can handle.

Expert Opinion by Scott Hutcheson, Author, BIOHACKING Leadership

Confidence is often treated as one of the prerequisites for leadership. Jamie Dimon recently offered a different way of thinking about what happens when it is missing. The JPMorgan Chase CEO said insecurity can become especially dangerous as executives move into larger jobs and find themselves responsible for areas they do not fully understand. Some leaders grow into that uncertainty. Others respond by surrounding themselves with people who agree with them, either filtering bad news or trying too hard to appear certain.

Dimon’s observation raises a useful question. If insecurity can undermine leaders, where does durable confidence actually come from? New research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior suggests that confidence may develop through a slower process in which leaders accumulate experiences, interpret what those experiences mean, and gradually construct a clearer sense of themselves as leaders.

Experience gives leaders evidence

Researchers Sonja Zaar, Piet van den Bossche, and Wim Gijselaers conducted in-depth life-narrative interviews with 22 organizational leaders, asking them to reflect on experiences across their careers. Most described an evolving sense of themselves as leaders, often moving from uncertainty and imposter feelings toward what the researchers call identity coherence and feeling like an “original.”

That progression makes intuitive sense. Early in a career, people have limited evidence about how they will perform when a project fails, an employee pushes back, a customer becomes angry, or a difficult decision carries real consequences. Experience gradually supplies that evidence. A person learns that they can handle a difficult conversation, recover from a mistake, make an unpopular decision, or solve a problem they initially did not understand.

Competence therefore matters because it creates evidence. Each successfully navigated experience adds another data point about what a person can do. The problem is that evidence alone does not automatically become confidence. Someone can accumulate years of achievement while continuing to explain each success as luck, timing, or the work of other people.

Meaning turns experience into identity

The researchers found that development involved changes in how leaders interpreted their experiences. They became better able to see complexity, reconcile their evolving behavior with their ideas about what a leader should be, and develop greater clarity about who they were in the role. The experiences mattered partly because leaders engaged in deliberate reflection about what those experiences meant.

That distinction matters for managers developing other people. Giving someone a stretch assignment may produce new capability. Helping that person interpret what happened can help incorporate the capability into identity. Questions such as “What did you learn about how you make decisions under pressure?” or “What can you handle now that you could not have handled a year ago?” encourage people to notice evidence they might otherwise overlook.

This connects with a broader problem I have previously written about previously for Inc. Leaders frequently judge themselves by their intentions while other people respond to observable behavior. Identity develops through a similar evidence problem. People can tell themselves they are capable, trusted, or ready for greater responsibility, but repeated experiences provide the evidence from which those beliefs become credible.

Confidence Is an Outcome of Development

Dimon’s description of secure leaders is revealing. He says they can trust other people, hear criticism, and acknowledge what they do not know. At JPMorgan, he has said he leaves board meetings so directors can speak without him and allows executives who disagree with him to make their cases directly to the board. Those behaviors suggest confidence that does not require continual proof of certainty.

That is a useful goal for leadership development. Managers can give people progressively more consequential experiences, followed by opportunities to examine what those experiences demonstrated. Over time, competence produces evidence. Reflection gives that evidence meaning. Meaning becomes part of identity.

Confidence then has something solid underneath it. Leaders no longer need to manufacture certainty because they have accumulated enough evidence to know who they are, what they can handle, and when they need someone else’s help.