71% of CEOs admit to feeling like imposters. Which means the other 29% are either lying or too self-absorbed to notice.
It’s a strange statistic when you think about it. These are people who have clawed, maneuvered, or lucked their way to the top job. They have the power to hire, fire, and redirect entire companies, and yet privately they think they shouldn’t be there.
It’s easy to imagine that feeling in the early years, when the board is still watching closely and every misstep feels like a vote against you. But some of these confessions come from people with decades in the role.
At that point, it’s less “maybe I’m not ready” and more “is anyone ever?”
Part of the problem is that the job itself has no real definition. There’s the formal version - steward of shareholder value, setter of strategy. But then there’s the actual one, which is messier. Managing egos. Negotiating with reality. Performing confidence in public while privately revising the plan for the third time this quarter.
Every decision is a bet placed with incomplete information, and you can never quite prove you made the right one. If you need certainty to feel legitimate, you’re in the wrong profession.
The other part is that leadership roles create distance. From the work you used to do well, from the colleagues who used to treat you like one of them, from the metrics that once told you if you were good at your job.
You’re left with abstractions: culture, direction, brand. Harder to measure. Easier to doubt. Even success feels suspicious, because you can’t be sure how much of it was you versus timing, luck, or the competence of the people around you.
Imposter syndrome is often framed as a personal flaw to be conquered. Think affirmations, confidence workshops, “remember your wins”, and so on. But if seven out of ten CEOs feel it, it’s not an individual quirk. It’s structural. A side effect of roles where the expectations are limitless, the information imperfect, and the scoreboard blurry.
The only truly alarming case is the person who never doubts themselves. They exist, and they’re dangerous. Certainty without scrutiny breeds the kind of decision-making that keeps lawyers and crisis PR firms in business.
Doubt, handled well, is a safeguard. It keeps the thinking sharp, the ego contained, and the illusion of competence from hardening into delusion.
So maybe the right question isn’t “how do we get rid of imposter syndrome?” but “what happens if it disappears?” You might not like the answer.