“Time and again, we see how an amateur first manager can destroy confidence far faster than any Jobcentre can rebuild it.”

That’s Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, quoted in HRreview this month. She was talking about young people who are not in education, employment or training, and the national obsession with getting them through a door. Her point is what happens on the other side of it.

I’d go further. Confidence isn’t something people bring to work with them. It’s made there and unmade there, by the design of the job and by whoever manages them, and most of what wears it down has nothing to do with the person at all.

The “not ready for work” story has it backwards

The story we’re told is that a generation arrives fragile. Lockdowns, screens, insecurity, so they need toughening up before they’ll cope.

Look at what they arrive into. Only about six in ten employers plan to recruit in the next three months, according to the CIPD’s latest Labour Market Outlook, and in the private sector it’s the lowest outside the pandemic. The CIPD’s own economist calls it “low hire, low fire”, a market that has largely stopped moving. Routes in for first-time jobseekers are closing, and progression for people already in work has stalled with them.

Then, if a young person does get in, more than four in five managers are what the CMI calls accidental managers, promoted for being good at their old job and never trained to manage people. Sink or swim, poor feedback, and being seen at your desk counted as commitment.

So a person with little experience of work meets a manager with little experience of managing, in a market where there’s nowhere else to go. Whatever confidence they had is now in someone else’s hands. And we call the result a problem with the young person.

I’ve made a version of this argument before about the jobs market as a whole. This is the same argument, one level down, at the desk where the young person actually sits.

What our own community said

Our learning community on WhatsApp has spent August on confidence and self-doubt, and I’ve been running a poll each week. It’s a small group, around sixty people who’ve done mental health training with us, so this is a shape rather than a statistic. But the shape is clear.

Week one asked what the self-doubt voice actually says. The top four answers were all comparisons against other people. You should be further on by now. You’re not as good as the others here. You’re going to be found out. You only got here through luck or timing. The two options that were about the work itself, getting it wrong and having to redo it, came bottom on one vote and none.

Week two asked what had knocked people’s confidence. A health problem, physical, mental or both, was double anything else. After that came watching other people move ahead, money worry in the background, and redundancy. Right at the bottom, on one vote each, sat “a manager who never said anything good” and “a workplace where everyone’s competing”. Not because those don’t happen, but because when you ask people what took their confidence, they name things that happened to them, not things they did wrong.

Two weeks of answers all point outside the person. The voice compares you with the room you’re in. What knocks it hardest is life, and going back into a job that wasn’t set up for you when you return.

That last part is in government research too. DWP interviews with employees about sickness absence found people commonly going back to work before they felt recovered, and some who couldn’t go back sooner because the adjustments they needed weren’t in place. That’s a design decision, made by an employer, with a person’s confidence as the cost.

Resilience is the same story wearing a different word

Carl Lyon asked in Workplace Insight whether resilience is a personality trait or a flaw in workplace design, and the evidence they used matches our poll. In the Civil Service, poor mental health accounted for nearly half of all long-term sickness absence in the year to March 2025. Not in one grade, one age group or one type of job. Everywhere. You can’t get to that from a generation gone soft.

Their diagnosis is that the moments where confidence and resilience used to be built have been engineered out. The corridor conversation. A proper break. A mistake talked through on the day instead of stored up for an annual review. Small recoveries between one demand and the next. Corporate life removed most of that in the name of efficiency and then wondered why people stopped bouncing back.

If you want to know why I don’t teach resilience, that’s why. It asks the person to absorb what the design is doing to them.

The staff survey can’t see any of this

Most organisations, at this point, would reach for the engagement survey. Sam Monteath, who has run employee research for hundreds of employers, wrote a piece this month that explains why that won’t help.

Suppose “my manager treats me with respect” comes out as your lowest score. The obvious move is to tell managers to be more respectful. But the score tells you almost nothing about why. Managers under impossible workload. Roles nobody has made clear. People with no say in decisions. The low number is a symptom, and acting on the symptom leaves the cause exactly where it was.

Surveys are also organised into the categories the questionnaire designer chose: leadership, wellbeing, communication, development. Employees don’t experience work in categories. They experience it as a system, and what looks like five separate low scores is often one thing, such as not knowing whether your job is safe. Read the survey as a scorecard and it hides the design problem. Read it as a system and it might show you one.

A CEO who called it a design problem

Corporate Rebels told the story this month of Francesca Moriani, who runs Var Group, an Italian IT company that grew from 700 people to more than four thousand. Halfway through that growth, with the numbers pointing up, she tore up the org chart.

Her reason wasn’t performance. It was that people were splitting themselves in two between who they were at home and who they were allowed to be at work, and carrying the frustration back out of the door. She calls that a flaw in the structure. The article puts it plainly: not a personal weakness, not something a wellness programme will fix, a design problem.

Her first attempt failed. She removed the hierarchy and told thousands of people the decisions were now theirs, and they stood there, hands open, with nothing to hold on to. Freedom without structure produced hesitation, not ownership. The rebuild that worked gave people clear roles and real accountability at the same time as it gave them the keys.

That’s confidence in one paragraph. People don’t become confident by being told they’re free, or by being told to be more resilient. They become confident when the work around them is clear enough to stand on.

If you manage people, this is yours to fix

Nobody arrives at work without confidence. They arrive with whatever the last place, the last manager, the last stretch of illness or the last redundancy left them with. What happens next is decided by the design of the job and by you.

So the useful questions aren’t about the person. Does a new starter know what good looks like in this role, or are they left to work it out? When someone comes back from being off, is the job set up for the person returning, or for the person who left? Is there anywhere in the working day where a mistake can be talked over while it’s still small? Does the survey get read for what people are telling you, or for which box scored lowest?

I’ve spent more than a decade training people to notice what a colleague is carrying and to ask about it. I don’t teach anyone to be more confident, because confidence was never the missing skill. It’s what’s left when the work stops taking it away.

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