What is imposter syndrome in executives?

It's the ongoing sense that you've fooled people about your competence and could be exposed at any moment, despite clear evidence of your ability. In senior leaders it's common and often intensifies with seniority, as the work gets more ambiguous and honest feedback becomes rarer at the top.

Why does imposter syndrome get worse at senior levels?

Because the markers that reassured you earlier fall away. Competence becomes harder to measure, few people are positioned to validate your work, and the higher visibility and stakes give self-doubt more room. Many leaders also hide the feeling from their peers, so each assumes they're the only one experiencing it.

Can executive coaching help with imposter syndrome?

Yes. Coaching that combines work with the internal parts driving the feeling and somatic regulation tends to help more than talking yourself out of it, because imposter feelings sit in the nervous system as much as in your thinking. The aim is to stop the feeling dictating how you lead, so it becomes manageable even when it shows up.

What should I actually do in my first 90 days as an executive?

Spend the early weeks understanding how decisions really get made, who holds informal authority, and what the organisation is anxious about. Make one or two visible calls that are genuinely yours. Resist the pull to act broadly before you can tell which problems are real.

How soon do I need to show results?

Less soon than it feels. The pressure to demonstrate value quickly is usually internal, and acting on it produces decisions made on incomplete information that are hard to walk back. One well-chosen call lands better than five hurried ones.

Why am I so tired when I haven't done much yet?

Novelty is metabolically expensive. Every relationship, every norm and every unwritten rule is being processed consciously rather than automatically, and your system is also running low-grade vigilance about whether you belong. That combination is exhausting even in a good transition.

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Your first 90 days in a new executive role

The first 90 days are mostly decided by how well you read the informal system and how well you resist the pull to act before you can tell which problems are real. Almost everything that goes wrong in a transition traces back to one of those two.

You were hired because of what you know how to do. The trap is that doing it immediately is the wrong move, and the pressure to do it anyway comes from inside rather than from anyone around you.

This sits under transitioning to executive leadership, alongside the broader executive coaching practice.

Three things you're doing at once

A new executive role runs three parallel jobs in the same hours. You're learning an organisation, forming judgments about people while they form judgments about you, and delivering enough that nobody starts wondering. Each would be demanding alone.

Most transition advice addresses the first. The second and third are where people actually come unstuck, because both are relational and both run on a set of signals you can't read from a briefing pack.

The map that matters isn't the org chart

Every organisation has a formal structure and a real one. The formal one is in the induction deck. The real one shows up in who gets consulted before a decision is announced, whose objection quietly stops things, and which meeting the actual decision happened in.

Reading that takes weeks and can't be shortcut by asking directly, because people describe the formal system when asked. You learn it by watching what happens to proposals.

Two questions are worth carrying through the early weeks. How does a decision actually get made here, and what is this organisation anxious about? The second one explains a surprising amount of behaviour that otherwise looks irrational.

The pull to act early

Somewhere in week three, most new executives feel a strong need to do something visible. It presents as commercial urgency. It's usually about relieving the discomfort of not yet being competent in a role you were hired to be competent in.

Acting on that produces decisions made on incomplete information, taken in front of people who understand the context better than you do and can see it. Those are expensive to reverse, socially more than operationally.

The useful discipline is to make one or two calls that are genuinely yours, chosen because you can see clearly enough to make them well. One well-chosen decision establishes more than five hurried ones.

The team you inherited

You'll form views quickly and some of them will be wrong. Someone underperforming under your predecessor may be capable under different conditions. Someone impressive in the first fortnight may be good at new bosses.

Give yourself long enough to see people in more than one condition, including at least one situation with pressure in it. Moving too fast on people is the most common thing executives tell me they'd do differently.

There's also a version of this where you inherit someone who wanted your job, which is its own situation and covered in leading former peers.

Why you're so tired

New executives are often surprised by the fatigue, because on paper they haven't done much yet.

Novelty is metabolically expensive. Every relationship, every norm, every unwritten rule is being processed consciously instead of running on automatic. Underneath that, your system is holding low-grade vigilance about whether you belong here, which is normal in a transition and costs something continuously.

The practical consequence is that your judgment and your reactions are operating with less margin than usual, at exactly the point you're forming first impressions in both directions. That's the case for building recovery in deliberately from week one, which is covered in resilience for executives.

A rough shape for the 90 days

Weeks one to four

Listen with a purpose

Meet widely, including people two levels down and outside your function. Ask what's working, what they'd change, and what a new person usually gets wrong here. That last question produces the best material.

Say less than you want to. Everything you say in this period is weighted heavily and repeated.

Weeks five to eight

Form a view and test it

You should have a working picture of the real problems by now. Test it with two or three people who've been honest with you so far, before you say it in a forum.

This is also where you make the first call that's yours. Choose something you can see clearly and that matters enough to notice.

Weeks nine to twelve

Set the direction

Say what you're going to focus on and what you're going to leave alone. Naming what you're not doing is the part people remember, and it's the part most new executives skip.

Have an explicit conversation with your own boss about how they'll judge the first year, because their answer is frequently different from what you assumed.

Treat the timings as approximate. A turnaround compresses this and a stable organisation stretches it.

How coaching helps in a transition

A transition is one of the few periods where a confidential outside conversation is straightforwardly useful, because there's nobody inside the organisation you can think aloud with yet. Your boss is assessing you, your team is reading you, and your peers are working out what you mean for them.

Practically, the work covers reading the system, testing your judgments before you act on them, and keeping your own state steady enough that the fatigue doesn't start making decisions for you.

A free 30-minute call comes first. Engagements run fortnightly over three to six months, online or in person in Melbourne, at $550 a session plus GST self-funded and $750 plus GST organisation-sponsored. See the cost page or what to expect.

Starting something new? A free 30-minute call about the transition and whether coaching would help. No pitch, no pressure.

Book a free call

Common questions

What should I actually do in my first 90 days as an executive?: Spend the early weeks understanding how decisions really get made, who holds informal authority, and what the organisation is anxious about. Make one or two visible calls that are genuinely yours. Resist the pull to act broadly before you can tell which problems are real.
How soon do I need to show results?: Less soon than it feels. The pressure to demonstrate value quickly is usually internal, and acting on it produces decisions made on incomplete information that are hard to walk back. One well-chosen call lands better than five hurried ones.
Should I keep the team I inherited?: Give yourself long enough to see people in more than one condition. Someone underperforming under your predecessor may be capable under different conditions, and someone impressive early may be good at new bosses. Moving too fast here is the most common regret.
Why am I so tired when I haven't done much yet?: Novelty is metabolically expensive. Every relationship, every norm and every unwritten rule is being processed consciously rather than automatically, and your system is also running low-grade vigilance about whether you belong. That combination is exhausting even in a good transition.

Rudi Doku · Executive Coach (ICF PCC) · Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) · Melbourne, Australia · Coaching online worldwide