Aug 18, 2026 · Comments ↓

Last updated on Oct 2, 2026

Confidence at work is made and unmade by design

Confidence isn't brought to work. It's made and unmade there, by the design of the job and by the first manager. What our community and the Civil Service show.

“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 in August. 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 was about what happens once they’re through 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 summer 2026 Labour Market Outlook. In the private sector it’s 57%, the lowest since the CIPD started asking in 2016, leaving out the pandemic. The CIPD calls it a “low hire, low fire” market: hiring has dropped, redundancies haven’t risen, so hardly anyone moves. Its senior labour market economist, James Cockett, warned that a market like this closes off routes into work for first-time jobseekers and blocks progression for people already in a job.

Then, if a young person does get in, 82% of managers were promoted into the role without any formal management training. The CMI calls them accidental managers. Francke lists what young people meet: sink-or-swim management, poor communication, and presenteeism, where being seen at your desk counts as commitment.

So a person with little experience of work meets a manager with little training in 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, about what happens once a young person is actually in the job.

What our own community said

Our learning community on WhatsApp spent August on confidence and self-doubt, and I ran a poll each week. It’s a small group, around sixty people who’ve done mental health training with us, so I won’t call it a statistic. But the pattern was 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 about the work itself, getting it wrong and having to redo it, got one vote and none.

Week two asked what had knocked people’s confidence. A health problem, physical, mental or both, got twice as many votes as anything else. After that came watching other people move ahead, money worry in the background, and redundancy. Near the bottom, on one vote each, were “a manager who never said anything good” and “a workplace where everyone’s competing”. That doesn’t mean those don’t happen. But nearly every answer near the top was something that happened to the person, not something they did wrong.

Two weeks of answers, and they all point outside the person. The voice compares you with the people around you. What knocks it hardest is life, and health above all.

Some of that knock comes from the way people are brought back to work. DWP interviews with employees about sickness absence found people commonly going back before they felt fully recovered, and some who couldn’t go back sooner because the adjustments they needed weren’t in place. The employer decides whether those adjustments are in place, and when they aren’t, it’s the person’s confidence that takes the knock.

Resilience is the same story with a different word

Carl Lyon asked in Workplace Insight whether resilience is a personality trait or a flaw in workplace design, and his evidence points the same way as our poll. In the Civil Service, mental ill health was the biggest single cause of long-term sickness absence in the year to March 2025, at 47.1%, nearly half. That’s across the whole Civil Service, every department, every grade, every age. A workforce that size doesn’t get there because one generation has gone soft.

Lyon says workplaces have cut out the moments where resilience used to get built. The corridor conversation. A proper break. A mistake talked through on the day instead of saved up for an annual review. Small recoveries between one demand and the next. Plenty of workplaces stripped all that out 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 job is doing to them.

The staff survey can’t see any of this

At this point a lot of organisations reach for the engagement survey. Sam Monteath, who has run employee research for hundreds of employers, wrote a piece in August on why reading it the usual way 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 with more work than anyone could manage. 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 sections the questionnaire designer chose: leadership, wellbeing, communication, development. Employees don’t think about their working lives in those sections. They experience work as one thing, and what looks like five separate subjects can turn out to be one need, such as wanting to know your job will still be there. Read the survey as a scorecard and it hides the design problem. Read it for how the answers connect and it might show you one.

A CEO who called it a design problem

Corporate Rebels told the story in August 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 going 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 home with them. She sees that as a flaw in the structure. The article says 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. Without a clear structure, people hesitated instead of taking ownership. The rebuild that worked gave people clear roles and real accountability as well as the power to decide.

That’s how confidence works too. 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 rely on.

If you manage people, this is yours to fix

People arrive at work 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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