The leadership team meeting has finished.

You presented a decision that matters to the business. One of your colleagues asked a difficult but reasonable question. You answered it; the conversation moved on, and nobody appeared especially troubled by the exchange.

On the journey home, the question returns.

Then it changes shape.

What if they have lost confidence in me?

You replay the moment. A pause that seemed unimportant in the room now feels loaded. You remember someone looking away. By the time you reach home, you are composing a follow-up message in your head, explaining the decision more fully than anyone asked you to.

Nothing in the meeting has changed.

But the question is no longer only about the decision. Somewhere between the meeting room and home, it has become a question about you.

When the question changes shape

This shift is easy to miss because it happens inside our own thinking. A colleague asks, ‘What have we based that assumption on?’ What we hear is, ‘You have not thought this through.’

They ask, ‘What happens if this does not work?’ What we hear is, ‘You are about to let us down.’

The words may deserve serious consideration. Good leadership requires us to remain open to challenges, especially when a decision matters. But we are no longer responding only to what was said. We are also responding to what our mind decided it meant about us.

You were not overreacting to the question. You were reacting to what the question had quietly come to mean about you.

That distinction matters because the two responses lead to very different places. A question about the decision invites curiosity. A question about our credibility invites defence, explanation, or control.

What i mean by the mask

We all have ways of responding to situations that we learned long before we became leaders. When something leaves us feeling exposed, our nervous system can register it as a threat, even when we are not in any real-world danger.

We may find ourselves explaining too much, working harder, taking excessive control, seeking approval or withdrawing completely. These reactions can begin before we have consciously decided what to do. They are automatic. Familiar. Often remarkably convincing.

In my Leading Unmasked approach, I call this automatic response the Mask. It is constantly scanning what is happening around us for ‘danger’. Not danger in the life-threatening sense, but psychological danger: an abrupt email, a tough question in a meeting, or a phone call we were not expecting.

It is especially alert to anything that might expose the belief it already carries: ‘I am not enough.’

The Mask is not who we are. But because it generates thoughts, stirs feelings, and prompts action within us, it can easily feel like us.

The question in the meeting may have been about risk, timing, or evidence. The Mask hears another possibility: they are beginning to see that I am not good enough to lead this.

That is why the thought feels so persuasive. It is not merely offering an interpretation of the meeting. It is sounding an alarm about who we might be revealed to be.

What the team experiences

The alarm is private. Its effects are not.

The following morning, you send a long, explanatory email. You reopen a decision that was ready for implementation. You ask for additional reporting or become unusually involved in work you had previously delegated.

Your team experiences a change in you without knowing what caused it. A reasonable question is followed by greater control. A thoughtful challenge creates more work. People learn what happens when they express uncertainty, and they become more careful about doing it again.

A private interpretation has quietly become a condition of working in the business.

A recent McKinsey article reported that 57 per cent of senior executives described their primary leadership challenge as personal. That makes sense to me. What happens inside a leader does not stay inside the leader. It shapes the quality of conversation, challenges, and trust around them.

Separating the question from what it came to mean

The answer is not to dismiss the thought or replace it with something more reassuring. ‘Everyone still believes in me’ may be just as unsupported as ‘They have lost confidence in me.’

The more useful move is to separate the question that was asked from the judgement you heard.

What did they actually say?

What did I decide it meant about me?

What am I now tempted to do because of that meaning?

You may discover that the decision needs more work. You may need to return to the colleague, ask what they were seeing and listen properly to the answer.

But that conversation will be very different if you enter it curious about the decision rather than trying to repair your standing.

The meeting may have contained a question worth answering. It did not contain the verdict that followed you home.

If this has brought a recent conversation to mind, you are welcome to reply. I would be interested to hear what changes when you separate what was said, from what it seemed to say about you.

Until next week,

Gavin

Source: McKinsey & Company, An inside-out approach to leadership (2025). mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/an-inside-out-approach-to-leadership