Martha Fernandez, is a licensed clinical social worker and co-founder of private-pay therapy provider Cerevity. Opinions are the author’s own.
Construction promotes from the field more than almost any industry I know. The project engineer becomes a project manager, the superintendent becomes a vice president of operations, the foreman who built a reputation on the jobsite ends up running the company.
That path is one of the industry's real strengths. It is also why so many construction executives quietly believe they do not belong in the job they now hold.
I am a licensed clinical social worker, and impostor syndrome therapy is a large share of the work I do with senior leaders.
The pattern I see in people who came up through the trades is distinct. They are confident on a jobsite. They can read a schedule, a crew and a set of drawings faster than anyone in the room. Put them in a lender meeting, a board review or a negotiation over a nine-figure contract, and a different voice takes over: the one that says someone is about to notice they learned all of this on the fly.
Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first described the impostor phenomenon in 1978: capable people who cannot internalize their own success and fear being exposed as frauds. It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a confidence problem that a pep talk fixes. It is a forecasting habit. The mind keeps predicting exposure, and the person keeps working harder to prevent a verdict that never comes.
This isn’t just a few anxious individuals
A 2026 Cerevity report, The Leadership Mental Health Index, pulls together the large leadership surveys and reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: the people responsible for everyone else are doing worse than the people they lead.
In the DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2023, 72% of leaders said they often feel used up at the end of the workday. In Deloitte and Workplace Intelligence's 2023 research, about 70% of C-suite leaders said they were seriously considering quitting for a job that would better support their wellbeing.
Construction leaders sit squarely inside those numbers, with a few industry-specific multipliers.
Margins are thin and a single bad bid can sink a year. Liability follows a project long after the ribbon is cut. Labor is short, so the leader is often covering field gaps while trying to run the business. And the culture that rightly prizes toughness on the jobsite tends to treat strain at the top as something you push through rather than manage.
Impostor feelings are a business risk
The executive who feels like an impostor rarely looks like one. Usually the opposite. They overprepare, they say “yes” to everything, they hold decisions that should be delegated because handing them off feels like admitting they cannot carry the load. They stop asking questions in meetings where a question would save money, because a question might reveal a gap.
That last habit is the expensive one. Construction runs on early escalation. The whole logic of a safety culture is that the person who sees a problem says so before it becomes an incident. An executive who is privately bracing for exposure is the least likely person in the company to raise a hand and say, "I do not understand this deal structure," or "I think we underbid this."
The industry has spent decades teaching crews that stopping work is a sign of competence. Its leaders often have not extended that lesson to themselves.
Burnout follows close behind. When someone spends years working to outrun a verdict that never comes, the exhaustion is real, even if the fear is not. The leaders I see often arrive not because they think they have impostor syndrome, but because they cannot sleep, their temper is short with people they care about and the job that used to energize them now feels like a weight.
How contractors can react
First, name the transition. When someone moves from field leadership to executive leadership, treat it like the major role change it is.
Most firms invest heavily in safety training and estimating software and very little in helping a new executive learn finance, governance and board dynamics without having to fake fluency. Structured onboarding for new executives, including a mentor who came up the same way, removes a lot of the pressure to pretend.
Second, make it normal to ask the basic question. Leaders set the tone. A chief executive who says in a meeting, "Walk me through that again, I want to be sure I have it," gives everyone below them permission to do the same and gives the newly promoted vice president permission to stop bluffing.
Third, offer confidential support that sits outside the company. An employee assistance program run through the company's own benefits channel is useful for many employees, but senior leaders tend not to use anything that might show up where colleagues, insurers or the board could see it.
Burnout care for senior executives works best when it is private, scheduled around a calendar that does not stop, and delivered by clinicians who understand the pressure of the role. Owners and boards can make that kind of help easy to reach and say plainly that using it is a mark of good judgment.
The builder who became the boss earned the job. The industry would be better off if more of them believed it, and if the companies they run made it safe to say when the weight is getting heavy.
