Nemesis In Nebraska + Thoughts On Confidence Vs. Ego
Years ago, I worked as a legislative aide for a U.S. Senator from Nebraska. I was one of the only people on his staff who hadn't grown up in Nebraska and the only woman on his legislative team. This meant I was outnumbered in basically every meeting and every conversation about the Cornhuskers. (In addition to being a Knicks fan I also happen to love the Cal Bears since I married a California native!)
My job was to help the Senator figure out how to vote on the issues his constituents cared about. I was one of his main liaisons with other Senators' aides and with folks back home in Nebraska. It was serious work, and I treated it that way, which is no small feat when you're twenty-something and trying to be taken seriously by people twice your age who've known each other since grade school!
The only other non-Nebraskan in the office was the Press Secretary. You'd think that shared "outsider" status might have made us instant allies. Unfortunately, it was just the opposite.
He spent his time needling me and trying to undermine me. He'd often make crass or belittling remarks in front of colleagues, sometimes even in front of the Senator. It seemed like he was trying to make it look like I didn't know what I was doing. It got under my skin more than once, but I held my ground.
It took me years and a lot of hindsight to understand what was happening. I think I seemed like a threat to the identity he'd built (on pretty shaky ground), and the easiest way for him to feel bigger was to try to make someone else feel smaller. As the newest outsider, I was an easy target.
The press secretary was arrogant, not confident, and those are not the same species even though they dress alike. Leading with ego and insecurity has diminishing returns over time; it's basically a treadmill you can never really step off of.
On the flip side, leading with confidence and humility is more subtle, less flashy, and garners way less attention. But it produces better outcomes, and it brings out the best in everyone around you.
The Research Reveals What the Best Leaders Already Know
For years, swagger was misconstrued as "executive presence" — and the more recent data on this has become hard to ignore.
A 2025 study published in the Academy of Management Journal found that leaders who demonstrate humility are more likely to build teams of engaged, high-performing, life-long learners than their ego-driven counterparts. A University of Colorado Boulder study of over 600 leaders found something similar: humility was directly linked to higher quality performance and demonstrations of promotability. And a recent meta-analysis of leader humility research confirmed that this quality predicts follower outcomes—trust, engagement, and discretionary effort.
Wharton professor Adam Grant has a phrase for the sweet spot these studies reveal: "confident humility." It's the ability to be secure enough in your own competence to openly admit what you don't know. Grant points to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver's response at the start of the pandemic as a textbook example. Silver didn't pretend to have a plan for shutting down and restarting an entire professional sports league.
Instead, he told his team, in essence: I don't yet know how we solve this, but I believe in our ability to figure it out together. That single move did two things at once—it reassured people that leadership was in capable hands, and it invited everyone else into the problem-solving, rather than positioning Silver as the lone hero with all the answers.
Compare that to what happens when ego runs the show. Boeing's leadership during the 737 MAX crisis is a well-documented cautionary tale: initial defensiveness and denial in the face of engineering failures eroded public and market trust in ways the company is still recovering from.
Now contrast that with Satya Nadella's tenure at Microsoft, where a deliberate cultural shift toward openness, feedback, and learning from mistakes helped fuel one of the most remarkable corporate turnarounds in recent memory. Same industry pressures, same high-stakes decisions—wildly different outcomes, driven largely by how each leader carried their confidence.
Four Ways Confidence Shows Up Differently Than Ego
When I'm coaching a leader through this type of dilemma, I ask them to notice a few tells that show up in real, observable moments rather than as abstract personality traits.
How they handle a question they can't answer
A confident leader can say "I don't know, what do you think?" in a room full of direct reports without feeling diminished by it, because their sense of authority isn't tied to having every answer. An ego-driven leader tends to hear that same question as a challenge, and will often talk around the gap in their knowledge rather than acknowledging it.
Where the credit goes after a win
I like to watch what a leader does in the thirty seconds after good news gets announced. The confident ones tend to almost reflexively name the people who made it happen, while leaders operating from ego let the win quietly attach itself to their own brand.
What they do with silence
In high-stakes conversations, the leader who feels the need to be the loudest voice in the room may be the one least sure of their footing. Leaders with real confidence can let a hard question hang in the air for a beat, without rushing to fill it, because they trust that the silence won't cost them anything.
Whether the plan can change
I find myself discussing this with many of my clients because so many leaders build their identity around being "the strategic one." Once that identity forms, demonstrating otherwise can start to feel like admitting failure. The leaders who last, the ones that boards want to promote and teams want to follow, treat their strategy recommendations as working hypotheses rather than something to defend at all costs.
Building Confidence Takes Practice
Real confidence isn't a personality trait you're born with, it takes practice. In my work with executives, we build it through a few specific behavior adjustments:
Sharing views as possibilities rather than stakes in the ground that need to be defended. The final decision results from team alignment and the leader ultimately owns it.
Engaging in structured "pre-mortems" where the team pokes holes in a plan before it launches, so course-correcting becomes routine rather than rare.
Deliberately sharing credit with the team in public settings until it becomes reflexive rather than requiring effort.
This is closely tied to the four pillars I use in my coaching—being Transparent, Aware, Curious, and Trustworthy. When a leader operates with TACT, their confidence reads as grounded rather than performative, because the people around them can see the reasoning, not just the conclusion. It's also why rebuilding trust after a rocky stretch almost never starts with a bold declaration of vision. It starts with the harder, quieter work of consistency.
The Bottom Line
Ego needs an audience to survive, while confidence tends to earn one simply by being consistent over time. The leaders who build lasting influence, the Nadellas and the Silvers, the ones your best people would genuinely follow into the trenches, aren't the leaders who never doubt themselves. They're the ones secure enough to let that doubt be visible, trusting that their own judgment, and the team around them, will carry them through it.
If you're building that kind of leadership presence, or coaching others toward it, I'd start with the same question I ask every executive I work with: When was the last time you were wrong in front of your team, and how did you handle it? The answer usually tells you almost everything you need to know.