The Impostor in Your Head: A Feature, Not a Bug

Here’s a weird fact: even the most accomplished people regularly battle self-doubt. Michelle Obama has admitted to feeling out of place at Princeton and Harvard Law, despite her evident abilities. Albert Einstein once called himself an “involuntary swindler.” Tom Hanks, despite multiple Academy Awards, still wonders if his next role will finally expose him as a fraud.

Meanwhile, a study from Link?ping University, published in the European Sociological Review (2023), uncovered a curious trend: top earners often score lower on intelligence metrics than those just below them. While this doesn’t directly explain impostor feelings, it challenges some of our assumptions about ability and peak performance.

Put these together — widespread self-doubt among high achievers and a counterintuitive relationship between intelligence and earnings — and a compelling question emerges: What if impostor syndrome isn’t a flaw to be overcome, but a mechanism that fuels growth? What if self-doubt, rather than being a barrier to success, is actually a feature — an evolutionary advantage that drives us to refine our thinking, improve our leadership, and stay adaptable in complex environments? Right? Stay with me.

The Adaptive Value of Self-Doubt

The Link?ping study suggests that something beyond raw intelligence drives success. Pair that with the well-documented prevalence of impostor feelings among high performers, and we see a potential link worth exploring.

The Dunning-Kruger effect gives us a useful lens. It’s typically framed as two problems: low performers overestimating their abilities (overconfidence) and high performers underestimating theirs (self-doubt). But what if the latter isn’t a flaw to be fixed? What if it’s the very thing that drives continual growth?

If so, impostor feelings might serve several key functions:

• Enhanced Self-Awareness: Like high earners succeeding through strategic adaptability rather than raw intelligence, those with impostor feelings may develop sharper emotional intelligence and leadership skills.
• Continuous Learning: The gap between perceived and actual ability creates a constant drive for improvement — mirroring how top performers stay ahead through adaptability, not static expertise.
• Authentic Leadership: Recognizing one’s limitations fosters more effective delegation and team-building, skills that often matter more than individual brilliance.

Rather than being a bug in the system, self-doubt may be the psychological mechanism that prevents complacency, fuels continuous learning, and ultimately enables sustained success.

Impostors Everywhere

If you want to see impostor syndrome in its natural habitat, look at organizations undergoing transformation. Change breeds doubt, and nowhere is this clearer than in groups shifting to a product operating model.

• Identity Shifts: Project managers moving into product roles often feel stuck between old delivery metrics and new outcome-driven expectations.
• Model Mastery: Leaders may feel pressure to be product experts while still learning. Even fundamental questions like “What is a product?” can feel like traps.
• Managing Expectations: Selling stakeholders on a new model requires confidence — even when leaders themselves are still figuring it out.
• Success Validation: Many earned their careers through excellence in project delivery. The product model can make them question whether those past successes even matter.

These shifts don’t just cause doubt; they require it. Without discomfort, there’s no reevaluation, no learning, no adaptation.

Achievement Transitions

Career jumps — promotions, leadership roles, bigger responsibilities — are prime impostor triggers. Suddenly, the gap between our self-image and our new position becomes glaring.

As work becomes more visible, scrutiny rises. Social media amplifies others’ curated successes, making our own doubts feel louder. Meanwhile, climbing the ladder often means fewer peers to confide in. The isolation makes it seem like we’re the only ones struggling — when, in reality, these doubts are a near-universal experience.

Case Study: My Turn in the Barrel

After a decade as a product management consultant, I stepped into a full-time Director role that fundamentally changed my relationship with work and expertise.

As a consultant, I helped companies adopt product thinking. But I was always an outsider — persuading rather than managing, offering insights rather than owning execution. I was often gone before long-term outcomes took shape.

Taking a Director role meant leading a team, mentoring a department, and confronting challenges head-on. The shift rattled my confidence in ways I hadn’t expected.

Three moments, in particular, stand out:

• The “Simple” Question: A senior engineer asked me to define what constituted a product in our organization. I’d advised countless clients on this, yet I found myself stumbling.
• The Budget Meeting: Presenting to leadership, I faced tough questions I would have navigated smoothly as a consultant. But now, as the person accountable, my uncertainty felt like incompetence.
• The Team Restructuring: Evaluating roles and making personnel decisions meant emotional conversations I could previously avoid. The weight of those choices amplified my doubts.

At first, these experiences felt like evidence that I was out of my depth. But in hindsight, they were forcing functions — each moment of doubt required me to refine my understanding, improve my communication, and deepen my leadership skills.

Growing as a Learning Leader

The learning leader approach isn’t just about managing your own impostor syndrome. It’s also an effective way to lead others — embedding learning into the culture, not just as a necessity but as an expectation.

Leaders who model curiosity and intellectual humility don’t just create more adaptable teams; they shape environments where uncertainty isn’t feared but embraced.

Difficult stakeholder questions, the ones that seem designed to test credibility, can leave a mark for days or weeks. But if we turn into the questions we force ourselves to articulate our reasoning more clearly, exposing gaps in our thinking that might otherwise go unnoticed. The process of wrestling with these questions doesn’t just strengthen us — it strengthens our teams. By normalizing self-doubt, we cultivate a culture of continual learning rather than static expertise.

Beyond team dynamics, the learning leader approach can also build political capital among high-level peers, particularly in environments where trust is fragile. Executives and senior leaders often navigate unspoken competition, where proving superiority takes precedence over collaboration. But what if learning — not posturing — became the shared foundation? Leaders who actively channel ambition into collective learning create alliances that aren’t built on authority, but on mutual growth. The very doubts that might otherwise isolate us can instead be the foundation for deeper trust and collaboration.

When leaders provide context for why impostor feelings emerge, they reinforce a key truth: doubt isn’t a sign that you don’t belong. It’s a signal that you’re operating at a level where growth — not certainty — is the goal.

The Feature, Not the Bug

Too often, we treat impostor syndrome as something to overcome, as if confidence is the goal. But confidence isn’t what makes great leaders or great thinkers. Doubt does.

The very self-doubt that causes discomfort is also what drives refinement, deeper learning, and higher achievement. It keeps us from settling into false certainty. It forces us to keep questioning, keep learning, and keep improving.

Instead of viewing impostor feelings as barriers, we should recognize them as part of the engine that propels us forward. They tend to come in waves, these feeling of self-doubt, but understanding them as a feature rather than a flaw helps us reframe the discomfort.

So the next time that familiar voice of doubt creeps in, try this: don’t fight it. Listen to it. What is it asking you to learn?

Because maybe the reason high achievers so often feel like impostors isn’t because they don’t belong. Maybe it’s because they’re still growing. And that’s exactly what keeps them at the top.