Imposter in Your Team? (Part 2)

Imposter Syndrome – secretly feeling like a fraud and fearing being found out – affects 70% of high-achieving professionals at some point in their careers. Some experience it as a constant anxiety and a major stress in the working lives, other suffer only occasionally when certain conditions arise.

Who does it affect?

This applies to your team too; those bright, capable, confident people you carefully selected to make your business great. However, the key fact in Imposter Syndrome is that people hide it, try to cope and put on a brave face. They’re not deliberately trying to fool you, instead they genuinely believe that they have been hired by accident, good timing, luck or with unfair help. So you can’t know by weeding sufferers out in a selection process or by spotting them in a meeting.

And sufferers are capable and confident, they’re already good, but their distorted thinking tells them that they’re not good enough. They tend to be perfectionists and focus on what’s not perfect rather simply having high standards. They also worry that at any moment someone is going to discover that they aren’t good enough and be asked to leave.

Significant costs

The problem with this phenomenon is the stress it causes; anxiety, worry and sleepless nights focusing on the tiniest of errors. They tend to over-prepare and over-work and can develop stress-related illnesses, volatile behaviour or depression, or they find coping mechanisms in addictive behaviours. If the stress continues it can lead to burnout or people quitting their jobs – for no reason that you can see.

In your business, ironically as they want to perform perfectly, Imposter Syndrome sufferers are anxious, exhausted and feel isolated. Certainly not in the best frame of mind to operate at their peak.

Two triggers

For most sufferers, the typical Imposter behaviours of perfectionism, needing to be right, over-preparing, and secrecy are latent tendencies in the background. It’s a low-level stress that, for the most part, they can deal with

However two circumstances can trigger a case of Imposter Syndrome; a change to a challenging role may cause it, as discussed in Imposter in Your Team? (Part 1).

The second trigger is a negative or critical working environment. It is the workplace influence we will discuss here.

Trigger 2: Negative Environment

Imposter Syndrome has its roots in learning that our worth depends on what we do. That is, if a child is obedient, quiet, does well in school, then they are likely to get approval. But if they are noisy, disobedient, messy, make mistakes, then the attitude of adults changes around them. The child sees frowns, sighs or more obvious anger.

Regardless of the subtlety of the delivery, the message is clear that their behaviour is disapproved of. Children conclude that when they don’t get things right, then they are bad. Not worthwhile.

This is not taught deliberately in our society, so there is no blame for any adults here. We teach our children the world as we know it.

What it means for your team is that a negative or critical environment can become a trigger in adults.

What can you do?

While you can’t know who might develop Imposter Syndrome, you can create a working environment that does not create a trigger for it. The good news is that this environment also creates ideal conditions for maximum performance and creativity within your whole team.

To start with, review your interactions with your team and those within your team. As a leader you will take on a de facto ‘parent’ position for your team, as anyone with authority does, which is a normal psychological pattern in humans. This means that your actions, in particular, can help reduce the damaging effects in several areas.

Making mistakes
Tone of meeting
Positive regard

Making Mistakes

Intolerance of making mistakes is a hallmark of Imposter Syndrome. The assumption is that if I make a mistake (in the one area on which my worth depends) then I am bad/flawed/worthless and a fraud. But it is an unconscious assumption. Generally experience a vague anxiety, or beat themselves up when they make mistakes. The solution for the team member appears to be perfectionism, overwork and hiding mistakes.

A Teaching and Learning Environment

The real solution for a leader is to create an environment where mistakes are acceptable and used to learn personally and as a company.

Accepting mistakes means not being angry, disappointed or blaming when an error is made. Seeing it as an opportunity to teach or to refine the business systems is very helpful.

However it does not mean condoning low standards. Every mistake should have a learning come out of it, so that it is not repeated, or new checks put in place to catch it before it becomes a problem again.

This kind of positive teaching and learning environment makes the team more comfortable. It gives them more access to their creativity when looking for solutions too.

Tone of Meeting

The tone of any meeting should reflect the acceptance of ideas and opinions without ridicule or humiliation. Most of the time your team members will be resilient to banter, however when it turns into anger, scapegoating and sniping then it becomes destructive.

This is where a leader needs to have great self-awareness and commitment. It’s not easy to challenge our own behaviour as a possible source of the problem. The fact is that the tone of a meeting is set by you, the leader, and you create the rules for conduct within the meeting. You have the power to make all the difference.

Positive regard

Certain positive behaviours from a leader are a tremendous help against Imposter feelings. But they have to be the right ones to actually help.

Praising people for success does not actually help when they feel like an Imposter because they don’t believe that they deserve the praise. They’re till focused on the tiny things that weren’t perfect. Or they believe it was just luck and they could not reproduce the same results in the future.

Therefore praise can make someone feel isolated and unseen; uncomfortable that they have managed to fool you again. A better approach is to ask what they enjoyed about their success/project, and what did they learn from it. This helps them claim the success as their own.

Another powerful behaviour is to give your team members your undivided attention when they are talking to you. Multitasking someone makes them feel unimportant to you.

When you stop reading, checking emails or texts when they are speaking, you convey a strong message that they are important to you and that they belong there. That they are, indeed, good enough.

Imposter Syndrome is more common in successful people than anyone likes to admit. It is not a weakness or flaw, however. These certain procedures and attitudes help eliminate Imposter Syndrome, and they also promote excellence with the company.

These few changes will positively impact your whole team. You cannot predict who will develop Imposter Syndrome, or when. Yet your proactive choices make it much less likely to develop and turn into a crisis. Prevention is a much easier path.