#13 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Imposter Syndrome at Work

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU WONDER

• “What the heck are people talking about….I don’t understand what they are saying…I SHOULD KNOW that already.”
• “I want to do that…but I don’t know if I can do it. I’m trying but I’m not sure if it’s good enough. What if it’s not good enough?
• “ I can tell other people they did a good job but when they tell me, I just can’t take it in.

…you’re in the Good, Bad & Ugly of Imposter Syndrome at work.

THINK // 3 insights from the field

?? THE GOOD THING about Imposter Syndrome is that it is normal - even for truly successful people who you think would never suffer from the same bouts of self-doubt that you are inflicted with.

Imposter syndrome is a psychological occurrence where someone:

• has self-doubts about their abilities, accomplishments, experience
• feels unqualified and out of their depth given the responsibilities they are expected to carry out
• when successful, feels they are getting away with it, undeserving and waiting to be found out as a fraud that doesn’t know what they are doing.

Look at famous author Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art speech :

“The problems of failure are hard. The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you. It's Imposter Syndrome…I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door...to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn't consist of making things up and writing them down, and reading books I wanted to read. And then I would go away quietly and get the kind of job where you don't have to make things up any more.”

Or look at billionaire, former COO of Meta, Sheryl Sandberg’s quote here:

“Every time I took a test, I was sure it had gone badly. And every time I didn’t embarrass myself – or even excelled – I believed I had fooled everyone yet again. One day soon, the jig would be up. There are still days when I wake up feeling like a fraud, not sure I should be where I am.”

It is normal for leaders in any field to feel like frauds , since they are

• often put into demanding situations of great uncertainty
• asked to achieve something good though much is unknown
• entrusted with responsibility to confidently and skillfully bring everybody up to speed about what all can do in the uncertainty.

Many successful people like Gaiman have confessed to feeling like frauds - and yet, learnt to own their imposter syndrom as a superpower and turn it into a force for good.

Imposter syndrome can make you healthily humble and prevent you from being a Know-It-All (as discussed in our last edition #12). When people make peace with their Imposter Syndrome, they can:

ask for advice from other peers, experts, team-mates

• ask many questions and keenly listen for answers
• interrogate their assumptions
• consider “I may be wrong” and state it out loud without anxiety
• share responsibility for decision-making
• take in compliments from others without letting the compliments over-inflate their ego or over-depending on compliments for self-worth

?? THE BAD THING about Imposter Syndrome is that it can easily trap you in a never-ending cycle of self-doubt. This can lead you to self-sabotage your professional progress - or cripple your ability to internalise and enjoy your professional gains.

Take a look at the Imposter Cycle below by Dr Pauline Clance, the researcher who coined the phrase from her clinical observations of therapeutic sessions with high achieving women. Despite the factual evidence of their success, the women believed they were intellectual frauds and as a result were plagued with anxiety, fear of failure and dissatisfaction with life.

You may suffer from the Imposter Cycle if this feels familiar to you:

1. An achievement-related task is given to me
2. I feel so much anxiety, self-doubt and worry that I over-prepare or over-procrastinate followed by frenzied preparation.
3. I accomplish the task and feel initial relief and some positive feelings.
4. But once I get positive feedback from others, I discount it or deny that the task’s success had anything to do with me. If I tend to over-prepare, I will credit my success to effort rather than my skill. If I tend to procrastinate, I will credit my success to luck rather than my skill. I may believe hard work does not reflect true or real ability.
5. If I succeed, I feel even more fradulent, self-doubting, depressed and anxious. I may even feel guilt especially it is unusual in my family or their peers that may cause rejection. I may also feel fear that my success may lead to higher demands and greater expectations. I may be uncertain about how to maintain my current level of performance and turn down additional responsibility or other opportunities
6. When another achievement-related task is given to me, the cycle repeats.

Imposter Syndrome can really impact your personal well-being if you persist in those cycles of self-doubt. It causes you to feel a lack of motivation, higher levels of stress, a bad mood, and a lack of positive risk-taking. You stop being as effective, confident, and assertive.

For leaders especially, unchecked Imposter Syndrome can damage your credibility. Because the more you start distrusting your own decisions, skills and abilities, others may begin to doubt your skills and decisions too. And this can create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

?? THE UGLY THING about our Imposter Syndrome is that it may not be individual - it may be more structural than we think.

People “like us” may suffer from it because there were overt or covert familial, organisational, cultural or systemic messages that we internalised along the way that we aren’t good enough when we actually are already more than enough. For instance, if the system tends to over-value the more extroverted who talk a lot, the more introverted may internalise that their voice is not desirable or valuable at the table even if they are sitting on a goldmine of thoughtful ideas and well-informed opinions.

Sometimes people with Imposter Syndrome actually are the genuine competent people we need who can challenge and change the structural problems and inequalities of a system so that others can feel free to do their jobs well.

When we allow our Imposter Syndrome to imprison our minds and stifle our own potential at work, we may allow the real imposters who talk a big game but are not actually more competent than you to take up space, to make decisions and to get into the positions of power that we refused out of self-doubt.

One significant - and controversial - reason why less members of minority groups rise to the top is that they may self-sabotage and take themself prematurely out of the leadership race because they judge their performance as worse than they objectively are while more members of majority powerful groups judge their own performance as better .

Remember Dr Pauline Clance’s study? That was in 1970s-80s and the problem of more women suffering from Imposter Syndrome than men has not gone away: A 2020 KPGM study has shown that 75% of executive women experienced imposter syndrome and many of its side effects.

FEEL // 2 links to help you feel less alone

READ Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of software company Atlassian, shares how he constantly feels like an imposter, but how he’s learned to harness those feelings for his benefit.?

WATCH CEO & communications expert Lou Solomon describes how she survived a life of suffering under the Impostor Syndrome, a widespread condition that prevents successful people from internalizing and enjoying their accomplishments.

DO // 1 strategy to try this week

If we happen to be in leadership positions and are also members of majority groups that have more power in the systems we are in, we can:

1. Listen and learn when someone “not like us” brings us their struggles with feeling inadequate for the job: Get curious and sense whether their answers echoes the experience of similar groups of people across the organisation or society at large.
2. Help them own their innate adequacy and gently turn them away from any denial of their own worth: If you hear people push away compliments of their work saying it was all “good luck,” “hard work” or “other people helped”, consistently affirm their innate abilities instead. So don’t just say, “Great job!”. Say “Meng, you are great with people and you ran a team well. It wasn’t just them. It was you.”
3. Change what’s within your power to change so that more people feel rightfully chosen and seen as adequate for the work: You can advocate for people who have been looked over as “not enough”. For instance, if introverts tend to be perceived as “having less leadership potential” vs extroverts, advocate for more objective look at the evidence of how introverts manage work and lead people. Or if men tend to be platformed to speak in high profile events because people believe “women aren’t as compelling”, you can change policies around how speakers are selected and get people to focus on competencies rather than perceptions.

If we are the Imposter-feeling members of minority groups that have less power in the systems we are in, we can:

1. Write a factual list of what qualifies us to ask for what we want. What evidence can we cite that make us less qualified than others? What evidence can we cite that actually make us more qualified?
2. Name yourself + your accomplishments out loud to yourself. Research shows that you just adding your name in front of any self-affirmations can be surprisingly empowering. So don’t just say, “I have more experience than anyone on this team”. Say “Sunita, you have more experience than anyone on this team”
3. Focus doubt away from yourself and more on your ideas, assumptions or process: Doubt is not a bad thing, it just needs to be focused on the right area. If you have to doubt, don’t doubt your personhood. Use your doubt to re-examine the thing you are working on, the process you are using, the assumptions that you have. Test those doubts (without doubting youself) by talking to people you respect and get their take on it.
4. Name your inner Imposter + Name your inner Radical Advocate + let the Advocate talk it out with the Imposter: Give a playful name to your inner Imposter who always has doubtful things to say about your worth. Imagine up an inner Advocate you want within you who can humourously but boldly counter what the Imposter says. Give your Advocate a playful fun name. CEO Lou Solomon (in the video link below) names her Imposter “Ms. (Darth) Vader” and imagines her inner Advocate as a sassy, Southern woman who isn’t afraid to be rude and brazen in her defence of Solomon. This helped her faciliate her internal crippling dialogue with some humour and psychological distance.
5. Don’t Fake It Till You Make It. Make It Till You Make It. Don’t fall for the lie that says you need to fake it till you make it. Normalise having doubts, normalise talking about doubts with others, normalise working with, working through and working out each others’ doubts deliberately, kindly and intellingently. Nobody should have to fake it to make it. We should just make it while we make it - allowing the psychological safety for ourselves and others to mistakes, learning, imperfections is part of doing our work well.

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