The Phenomena of Impostorization in Leadership Teams - A EUMian perspective

The Context

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A few days ago, I was working with a leadership team that comprised of brilliant managers and professionals, several of them who had left careers with FAANG companies as well as Indian unicorns, and had joined an start-up – a well-funded Tech venture over the past year or so. Many of these managers had travelled the IIT-IIM journey, and an average experience of 15 to 20 years had them excitedly looking forward to success and excellence in leading this firm. The industry had already witnessed several successful unicorns.

?However, the past 12 months had been extremely challenging - Revenues were trailing behind the ambitious goals, several experiments to grow the market had abysmally failed, and the team was feeling stuck, challenged, and threatened. The investors and shareholders in the firm were fast losing their patience with the leadership team, and taking charge of goals, strategy, and even execution decisions.

?This was becoming an intensely downward spiral that was impacting all of them – most of them feeling claustrophobic, depressed, and were prone to externalizing their own anxieties by criticizing the other department – while abdicating their own agency, creativity, and tacit wisdom. Navel gazing became the norm and competition in the market space was exploiting their frozen stances. Many of them wanted to leave this firm and forget these nightmarish months – but they were also realizing that non-performance was impacting their individual reputations and attractiveness in the market.

?When the CHRO first reached out to me, the scoping of the intervention objective was to build alignment, collaboration, and synergy. Cultural conflicts was cited as a challenge to overcome as the group came from diverse backgrounds and careers. While we were trying to design an intervention, we agreed to use the EUM portfolio of tools. The design allowed me to have one on one meetings with each leader and these meetings highlighted more complexity and my search for patterns left me restless, ill-equipped, and anxious.

?These feelings were perhaps the first resource for me to discern a phenomena of ‘Impostorization’ within the leadership group, and EUM offered me the patterns that signal to this dysfunctional and unconscious process.

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Part 1

It all began with the Imposter Syndrome

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In 1978, two women researchers – Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, published an article titled – “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention”. The two women leveraged their own experience of being women scientists and coined a term – ‘the impostor phenomenon’ – where they spoke of an incessant pressure from within that led to an experience of ‘intellectual phoniness’, and where despite achieving substantial academic success in the form of new ideas, great research, and insights, they felt self-doubt, high anxieties, and morbidity. They spoke of their struggles with anxiety and fears of being ‘found out’.

?In 1985, Pauline Clance published a book on the Impostor Syndrome – and while the initial stance was that this is gender related and women feel it more, studies revealed later that this phenomena is widespread in both men and women and in many professional settings. So for example, some of the celebrities that are supposed to have owned up the impostor syndrome would include Tom Hanks or Michelle Obama…

?The movie - Inside Out 2 - refers to this phenomena in the life of an adolescent and quite creatively too by introducing ‘Anxiety’ and ‘Envy’ as accompanying feelings. Most of us would have experienced the impostor syndrome in our lives as we move from one system to another including role-transitions. Very often, this gets worked with while engaging with a friend and speaking of one’s inner fears and inadequacies and embracing the same is often the first step towards working with it. When I joined my business school – I did feel like an impostor for the first few months – asking myself whether I deserved to be a part of the institution, given that I was not an engineer from IIT.

?It must be noted that the Impostor syndrome is not a recognized psychiatric disorder and is not featured in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. However, impostor syndrome has become widely discussed, especially in the context of achievement in the workplace.

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Part 2

Impostorization as an Institutional Process / Unconscious Systemic Process

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The term “impostorization” was first used by Angélica Gutiérrez (Gutiérrez 2021). She defined impostorization in terms of policies, practices and seemingly innocuous interactions or micro-aggressions in the workplace that may lead employees to feel like a fraud and trigger a fear that others will discover that they do not belong.

Gutierrez and Jean Lee Cole wrote papers on how Impostorization makes or intend to make select individuals (i.e. women of colour or a professional from an impoverished class) question their intelligence, competence and sense of belonging within the firm.

By Impostorization, Gutierrez and Holmes take our attention to the possibilities of exploring how it emerges:

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1. Does the problem lie with the individual (and his / her shortcomings) or with the System? Many thinkers have offered the cue that much of the personal distress originates in social structures.
2. Is it an individual shortcoming or a sociological process that gets triggered by systems of stratification including the class, gender, and caste divide?
3. I would like to add another perspective – Is Impostorization as an institutional process (including design of policies or innocuous micro-aggressions) – an unconscious process? ?

Most of the research on Impostorization has happened for universities and colleges as systems, and devoted to uncovering systemic racism and such other institutional processes that render individuals and groups in the grip of feeling like imposters.

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Part 3

Impostorization in Organizations

It is perhaps time, we look at impostorization in a more competitive systems such as a business organization and how this process gets unleashed. Let me relate by what I imply as ‘Impostorization’ as a systemic and unconscious process in the client system that I have referred to in the opening paragraphs.

A Group Process that appears to be common and even insignificant happened …

“The Heads of Technology and Product were adamant that the Chief Marketing Officer and his / her team were not doing enough – there were whispers around the CMO and team being incompetent and irresponsible. In public meetings – the Heads would offer the usual onslaught of half-baked ideas and off-the-cuff recommendations on how marketing needs to happen and happen quickly. Eerily, the CMO and his / her team would not fight back and remain passive – and the dialogue possibilities stopped right there with silence. Very often the Business Head would end up defending the function in a stalemate that had everybody – the Accuser and the Accused - feeling unhappy and ungracious.” ?

It was important to note that the CMO and his / her colleague had earlier worked with FAANG companies, and carried degrees from ivy-league American universities as well as the well-known IIM and IIT. The heads of technology and product had illustrious (and I mean it) careers before joining this firm and yet the nature of dialogue referred to a regression around who is a better salesman.

This looks like a common process within leadership groups – most OD practitioners would term it as inter-personal conflict or inter-functional rivalry, and design interventions to target this process, but it is where the EUM data offers so many insights. ?

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Part 4

Impostorization from the EUM lens of EUM-O and EUM-I

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I know that many of my readers are not familiar with the EUM construct, and a paragraph or two does not do justice to this elegant framework created by Ashok Malhotra. Owning up my inability to offer deep insights into the framework in this blog, let me begin by summarizing that the EUM looks at a living system (both the individual and the collective) and maps five key imperatives (or strands or building blocks) that enable the mapping of ‘identity’ – both for the individual and the organization.

?The interplay of the following key strands or building blocks or imperatives create a dynamic pattern of how role-taking, behaviours, values, and group processes are enacted – and it is these patterns that offer insights on the interplay between the Individual and the System:

a)???? Strand 1 - My or the Systemic need for belonging and safety – and builds a tribalistic grounding that emphasizes on loyalty, sincerity, and dependency

b)??? Strand 2 - My or the Systemic need for power, desire, and expression – and emphasis on spontaneity, risk taking, and agility

c)???? Strand 3 - My or the Systemic need for norms, rules, boundaries, processes and role-taking and creates a clockwork mechanistic grounding

d)??? Strand 4 - My or the Systemic need for high achievement, excellence, meritocracy and innovation and creates a pressure to perform at one’s peak

e)??? Strand 5 - My or the Systemic need for inclusion, meaningfulness, and intimacy – and creates a space for dialogue, consensus and quality of life?

I am offering anonymized data for this leadership team in this blog:

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Artefact 1

The EUM-I Collective Profile

The INDIVIDUAL Leader

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Artefact 1 is a summary of how the individual leaders look at themselves. The table and the graph illustrate that the individual leaders are:

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• Highly aspirational and achievement centric – and take pride in wanting to be seen as excellent, meritocratic, and creative. On the face of it – they would be very collaborative. (Strand 4)
• Low on their need for belonging and safety – these leaders would not value tribalistic bonds of homogeneity, dependency, tradition, and loyalty (Strand 1). One of them used the adjective of ‘mercenaries’ for the leadership
• Low on Strength and Desire – experiencing themselves as increasingly passive, passive aggressive, impotent, and stuck – there is a hope that each leader can enhance this strand and become more assertive and agile. ?
• On the same hand, across the leadership group, they sense ‘Others’ to be tremendously competitive, assertive, self-centric, individualistic, and equally ambitious (perhaps the term mercenary is more of a projection) and where the other offers no sense of dialogue, of diversity of ideas and community, and empathy (Low Meaningfulness and Intimacy scores). ?

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Artefact 2

The EUM-O – Organization Identity

The Organization held in the Mind

As you would notice the Artefact 2 reveals interesting mirrors between how the leaders look at Self and experience the systems:

• ?The organization is seen as highly Network oriented – there is a high commitment towards ambitious goals, excellence, success, and growth. The emphasis is on excellence and meritocracy
• The organization is experienced as low on the tribalistic contract – of Clan and the need to lower belonging and safety within if seen from an idealised lens. Most people do not identify with the clan / family.
• The organization is experienced as an intense battleground (Arena scores) and there is a need to lower the intensity of agility required, of competitiveness, and of uncertainty within.
• The organization is experienced as highly bureaucratic with little sense of empowerment and decisiveness (high Clockwork scores) and perhaps of greater micro-management and heightened control.
• Most other firms are seen as highly purposive and ambitious, except that these firms appear to be less bureaucratic, and less inclined towards creating a sense of safety, community, and emotional cathect.

Patterns of Impostorization

Given that this particular tech firm was unique in its own industry, and that it had to recruit managers from global companies of other industries, the firm offered opportunities including ESOPs to attract talent. The PE fund as a part of the owners had set ambitious goals and charters for the newly formed leadership team.

The EUM data highlighted and suggested an unconscious process – perhaps that of Impostorization because of the following highlights: ???

1. Both the EUM-I and EUM-O lens were convergence on becoming successful, meritocratic, excellent, and purposive – both the artefacts represent very high scores on the fourth strand for both the individual and the firm. This is significant for it lays out the crucial link between individual aspirations and organizational growth charters. The sense one gets, is that of high performance expectations from outside and within.
2. Given this demand for success (internal and external), the other convergence is that of low Clan – Low Safety and Belonging scores – both the artefacts speak of a denial for the need of safety, and denial of belonging or kinship within the team either at the organizational level or at an individual level. The sense one gets, is that of low faith and trust in the systemic and individual capabilities to deal with inadequacy or failure.
3. The third trend was a contrast between the EUM-O and EUM-I scores on Arena – at an individual level, there is very little experience of one’s own tenacity, power, and strength (low scores of strand 2) and at a Systemic level – and experience of high need for agility, risk taking, aggression, and competitiveness. It is quite possible that the systemic needs for action, fire-fighting, and high growth rendered the individual leader feeling a lot more vulnerable and passive.

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Given that the three strands had very little variance in individual responses to the EUM battery of tests – this appeared to be a systemic pattern impacting all individual leaders barring none.

?Caught in the need to be highly achievement centric leaders creating a high-growth tech firm, there were very few institutional spaces designed for any real dialogue to take place where people could speak of their vulnerabilities and ‘phoniness’ – most spaces were transactional and reactive.

?Adding to the mystery was that of the ‘Other’ in EUM-I – there was not a single leader who was profiled with high strength, desire, and power scores, and yet the pattern of Othering was troubling. Even the owners and the PE stakeholders were not living up to the image of the Other – competitive, aggressive, dominating etc.

?The Other was perhaps the recipient of ‘projecting’ these aspects that the individual leaders were not willing to own up – and it is this pattern that makes the hypotheses around Impostorization stronger.

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Hypothesis 1?

As there were no systemic processes and practices for creating reflective dialogue spaces where individual leaders could work with vulnerability and lack of knowledge – there was a tremendous need to be seen as aspirational, meritocratic, and excellent. Absence of such safe spaces and processes around belonging may have triggered Impostorization.

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Hypothesis 2

?With wanting to experience oneself as fragile, submissive, impotent, and passive, the group was blind to micro-aggressions that were inflicted on each other – rendering the process of impostorization stronger. Passive aggression (as discerned from the process) was the coping mechanism and this unconscious process across the institution created a blindness to micro-aggressions.

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Conclusion?

While this blog has only tried to link EUM patterns with Impostorization – an unconscious systemic process, it does not offer quick-fix solutions.

While I would be delighted to claim that creating a safe psychological space to acknowledge one’s own fears and express these, was enough to bring about some changes in this particular leadership team, I know that this would not create long term impact.

There are institutional processes that affect all systems in the market world today. The long term impact would mean examining interesting questions for capitalistic organizations in market world today:

a)???? Does the CEO feel like an imposter within, if the capitalistic world deems his salaries and bonuses to be a huge multiplier of average employee wages?

b)??? Does the CXO feel like an imposter within, if he or she is straddling technology that has a lifecycle of 18-30 months, and he or she may not even know what technologies count?

c)???? Does the top management feel like an imposter, given the growing gap between the super-rich in India and the poor? How does the team manage its own awareness of this gap?

d)??? Is becoming ‘narcissistic’ and or ‘a sociopath’ the only way to deal or cope with the rising Impostorization within systems?

Some of these questions may seem too philosophical or ideological and therefore unimportant but all I can say is that Impostorization is real and cannot be denied.