You were appointed, but you don’t think you have the job yet.

You've been in the role for months. You still run things past the person who held it before you. You still prepare for meetings you could walk into cold. You still find yourself asking a question in a tone that sounds a lot like asking permission, of someone who now reports to you.

Does this feel familiar? If so, here’s why. Two things were supposed to come together for you yet only one showed up. The authority to do this role arrived the day you were appointed. It was talked about, written about, and date stamped. However the authorisation to use this authority attached itself to the private sense that you were not entitled to use it so in effect hasn't turned up, and spoiler alert – it may never turn up on its own.

This gap between authority and authorisation explains more early-tenure drift than anything else I’ve witnessed as a coach, and it’s because being appointed and therefore being given authority is something other people do to you. It's your boss’s decision, a board decision, a contract, a press release. Authorising yourself is something only you can do as it is the decision to act as though the appointment was the right one, before you have the time to prove that it was.

Most senior people I work with have the first and are waiting for the second. They're waiting for the evidence to arrive and settle their bet with authority, but it doesn't work that way. Authorisation isn't the reward for a track record in the new role – it’s the entry requirement for building one.

This gap rarely looks like doubt, nope, it looks like consultation - there’s always one more opinion needed from someone whose view you can already predict. It can look like preparation - the deck you write that’s three times longer than the decision requires. It sometimes looks like deference - the quiet outsourcing of a call you're the one accountable for, to a predecessor, a founder or a long-serving faithful who carries more history than you do. And I know if I asked you direct now about these, you’d have a defence; ‘but consultation is good practice’, you’d say, ‘preparation is due diligence’, ‘respect for institutional learnings is wisdom’... and you’re not wrong. Each one in isolation is a strong defence but taken collectively it can become a system of weakness and is exactly why the gap can run for a year without anyone naming it. Every symptom has a respectable cover story, and the people around you have no reason to challenge a leader who is being thorough.

I see this the most when senior leaders must make finite decisions about infinite questions or scenarios. They seek as much information as they can from as many sources as they have available to them, then the over information paralyses them. It dulls their intuition and instinct and so begins a spiral of indecision which loads the doubt that the authority was mis-placed until the authorisation slows to a stop.

Beliefs about yourself update from lived experience and the kind of learnings that counts as evidence you can't explain away. Being chosen is not that kind of evidence because it's someone else's judgement, and you can attribute it to any number of things: the process, the timing, the alternatives, what the board couldn't see. To act with full authority and watching what happens is the kind of authorisation that is unattributable by anyone other than you, because it arrives only after you act.

So the sequence people (and likely you) expect is backwards, it’s: belief first, then act. In practice though: we act, then believe. This means the waiting isn't neutral because every week spent waiting to feel entitled is a week producing no evidence that you are.

And while the weeks pass by the runway continues to shorten. Russell Reynolds' Global CEO Turnover Index found that 86% of CEO appointments in 2025 across the 13 indices it tracks went to first-time CEOs, and that the average tenure of outgoing CEOs fell to 7.1 years, down from 8.3 in 2021. The share of CEOs departing within 30 to 36 months rose 79% year on year, which the firm reads as boards forming definitive judgements far earlier in the lifecycle than they used to. Its own CEO frames the shift plainly: leadership success is increasingly defined by the ability to deliver rapid, visible results.

I'm not reporting that to cause alarm (though if it does perhaps this article resonates deeper with you than you’d thought it might), but instead to frame the math for us: if a six-month authorisation gap is used against a three-year window in which boards are forming a verdict, that’s a sixth of your tenure spent operating below the level you were hired at – that’s a meaningful share of your time that doesn’t count.

None of this is an argument for arrogance, or for making calls you're genuinely not equipped to make, the leaders I'm describing from my coaching experience are not reckless, in fact they're quite the opposite. But it is worth being honest about authorising yourself not being a one-off event. It gets tested every time the stakes rise, and the gap can reopen on a bigger stage if you don’t work out how to close that gap.

And while you sit there and wait to feel entitled to the role, your organisation is watching a leader who defers, checks and prepares all the while that gap you think is private is becoming the most visible thing about your first year. Others can’t see your internal process - even if it feels like they’re all looking through you - they can only see your behaviour and believe me, they will draw conclusions from it.

Don’t let this week slip by without first asking yourself: Which decision this week is entirely yours to make, and who are you planning to run it past anyway?