Leadership
Why a Leader's Confidence Can Sound Like Arrogance to the Team
A mentor's blunt warning taught Crispin Thompson that the confidence a leader feels is not always what the team hears.
Crispin Thompson: Founder The Leadership Studio
Video from Dr. Tom A. Dutta.
Generated from the canonical interview transcript and validated against source data by Guests on Air.
How can a leader tell whether their confidence comes across as arrogance?
Ask people you respect for honest feedback and be ready to hear it. Crispin Thompson learned that his confidence landed as arrogance only when a mentor told him so. He now advises leaders to notice their own posturing, treat self-doubt as a check rather than a weapon, and listen for what people meant rather than how they said it.
Early in his career, Crispin Thompson was promoted fast and knew exactly how good he was. Then a mentor he respected told him that nobody wanted to work with him. He had all the talent in the room, the mentor said, but he would not stay in the room if no one wanted him there. Nearly three decades later, he says he still feels that moment.
Thompson spent about 25 years inside the companies that became part of HP, moving through acquisitions, reorganisations and repeated rounds of layoffs. He was laid off at executive level twice and delivered the same news to others many times. Today he runs The Leadership Studio in San Antonio, Texas, coaching leaders who are being stretched into bigger roles than they have held before.
On the Quiet Warrior Show with host Tom Dutta, he explained why the confidence a leader feels is often not what the team experiences. His answer draws on his own mistakes rather than borrowed frameworks, and it offers a practical way for any manager to hear themselves the way the room does.
Key takeaways
- Confidence that feels natural to you can land as arrogance on the people who have to work with you.
- Self-doubt after a promotion is healthy when it keeps you asking whether you are ready and careful with decisions.
- Never get good at delivering bad news, and speak to people the way you would want to be spoken to.
- Listen for what people meant, not how they said it, especially when stress is shaping their words.
1. Why confidence can sound like arrogance
Thompson describes his younger self plainly: talented, promoted quickly, and more than a little full of himself. He believes he was promoted faster than he should have been. The warning that changed him came from someone he admired, a polished colleague who handled people in ways he wanted to copy. That respect is the only reason he listened, he says. Six months earlier, he would not have been ready to hear it.
What he heard was hard. He had been reading his own behaviour as confidence while colleagues experienced it as something else entirely. He began to notice the cues he had missed: how he answered questions, how he postured, and the fact that it was posturing at all. The picture he had of himself and the picture others had of him were not the same.
He now reads loud confidence differently. In his experience, people who project hard are often doubting whether they belong in the role. That insight shapes how he coaches today. He looks for leaders who ask for help, because a client who wants to be better will look honestly at the gap, while one who has to be convinced rarely will.
2. Promotion, self-doubt and the other side of the table
Thompson moved from overconfidence to impostor syndrome as his roles grew, a pattern he sees in many high performers. Each new job raised the same questions: am I ready for this, and why did someone trust me with it? He does not treat that doubt as a weakness. He argues it is healthy, provided the leader keeps it in their own head rather than taking it out on the team.
In his early leadership roles he did not manage that well. Unsure of himself in a bigger job, he walked in assuming he had been brought in to fix things and that his way must be right. Later he learned to slow down, get the lay of the land, understand who is who and let people be heard before changing anything. That approach also gave him a better sense of himself.
Layoffs taught him the most. One of his most influential mentors, a boss at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, told his managers never to get good at delivering that message, because he wanted them always to feel it. The rule was to speak the way you would wish to be spoken to. Thompson has given that advice to every leader in his organisation for about ten years.
3. Listening for intent in a harder, faster workplace
The pandemic sharpened a lesson Thompson now teaches directly. With teams rarely in the same room, leaders saw one another on camera or not at all. His advice is to listen for intent. When a message sounds rude or aggressive, stop, take a beat and ask what the person most likely meant, then act on that instead of reacting to the tone.
Pressure on people is often invisible to their managers, he points out: children at home, pets, and a working life they never planned. Leaders cannot control those stresses, but they can ask their team how they are and care about the answer. He calls that a simple differentiator that too few managers use. Accountability and empathy, he says, belong together rather than in separate conversations.
The same human skills sit at the centre of his book, The Human Advantage: Emotional Intelligence in the Age of AI, published last year. He tells leaders not to fight new tools or wait on the sidelines, since the tools can be learned conversationally without a technical background. Yet he is candid about their limits, recalling a late night when an AI assistant gave advice that contradicted everything it had said earlier.
