Construction’s Promotion Path Can Fuel Executive Impostor Syndrome

By Priya Raman

About 70% of C-suite leaders (chief executives and other top executives) seriously considered quitting for jobs with better wellbeing support, according to Deloitte and Workplace Intelligence’s 2023 research. In the DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2023, 72% of leaders said they often felt used up at the end of the workday.

Martha Fernandez, a licensed clinical social worker and co-founder of Cerevity, a private-pay therapy provider, places construction leaders within those broader findings. She argues that the industry’s promotion structure creates a specific risk of impostor feelings at the top.

Her analysis draws on her clinical practice, and her views are her own. Impostor-syndrome therapy accounts for a large share of her work with senior leaders.

Promotion creates a new kind of exposure

Fernandez says construction promotes from the field more than almost any industry she knows. A project engineer becomes a project manager. A superintendent becomes a vice president of operations. A foreman with a jobsite reputation eventually runs the company.

That path is one of the industry’s real strengths. It is also why many construction executives quietly wonder whether they belong in the jobs they now hold.

They remain confident on jobsites, where they read schedules, crews and drawings faster than anyone in the room. Their confidence can falter in lender meetings, board reviews and negotiations over nine-figure contracts, when they start to fear someone will notice they learned executive work 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 exposure as frauds.

Fernandez stresses that it is not a diagnosis and not a confidence problem that a pep talk fixes. She describes it as a forecasting habit: the mind predicts exposure, and the person keeps working to prevent a verdict that never comes.

Her practical response starts with a chief executive who says, “Walk me through that again, I want to be sure I have it.” Fernandez says that sentence gives everyone below permission to ask and gives a newly promoted vice president permission to stop bluffing.

Leadership data meets construction pressure

Cerevity’s 2026 report, The Leadership Mental Health Index, pulls together large leadership surveys. It finds that the people responsible for everyone else are doing worse than the people they lead.

Fernandez places construction leaders within those findings. She then identifies several industry-specific multipliers:

• Thin margins leave a company exposed to the possibility that one bad bid can sink a year.
• Project liability follows a project long after its ribbon-cutting.
• Labor shortages force leaders to cover field gaps while trying to run the business.
• A culture that rightly prizes toughness on the jobsite tends to treat strain at the top as something leaders push through rather than manage properly.

Impostor feelings become a business risk

An executive with impostor feelings rarely looks insecure. Fernandez says these leaders usually overprepare, accept every assignment, and keep decisions that should be delegated because delegation feels like admitting they cannot carry the load.

They also stop asking questions in meetings where a question could save money, because asking might expose a knowledge gap.

Construction runs on early escalation (raising a known problem before it becomes an incident), and its safety culture depends on people speaking before a situation worsens.

An executive privately bracing for exposure is therefore among the least likely to raise a hand and admit confusion over a deal structure or to say the company set its bid too low.

Fernandez says construction has spent decades teaching crews that stopping work signals competence. Leaders often fail to extend that lesson to themselves. Fernandez calls this a business risk: problems go unraised and decisions stall.

Burnout follows the same pattern

Fernandez says some leaders spend years working to outrun a verdict that never arrives. The exhaustion is real even if the feared exposure never occurs.

Leaders in her practice often seek help without the impostor label, arriving because they cannot sleep, their tempers shorten with people they care about, and a job that once energized them feels like a weight.

What should contractors change after a field-to-executive promotion?

Fernandez recommends three moves that replace an informal title change with structured support, normalized questions and confidential care.

1. Name the transition. Fernandez says a field-to-executive move is a major role change. Firms invest heavily in safety training and estimating software, but little in finance, governance (company oversight) and board dynamics. Structured onboarding (planned instruction and support for a new role) should include a mentor who came up through the trades and reduce pressure to fake fluency.

2. Make basic questions normal. Leaders set the tone. Fernandez says a chief executive who asks for clarification gives everyone below permission to do the same. It also gives newly promoted vice presidents permission to stop bluffing.

3. Offer confidential support outside the company. An employee assistance program (a company benefits channel for confidential support) helps many employees. Senior leaders often avoid those channels because colleagues, insurers or the board may discover their use.

   Fernandez recommends private burnout care, scheduled around a calendar that does not stop and delivered by clinicians who understand executive pressure. Owners and boards should make that help easy to reach and say plainly that leaders show good judgment by using it.

Fernandez’s final judgment is direct: “The builder who became the boss earned the job.” She says the industry would benefit if more promoted builders believed it and their companies made it safe to say when the weight becomes heavy. Her diagnosis points to a business risk: construction could promote operationally fluent builders into executives who conceal doubts, defer decisions and burn out.