Imposter syndrome, the feeling of being a fraud or not belonging, isn’t unique to any specific industry. It exists in technology, in medicine, and in students in educational settings, too:
“[R]esearch suggests that students who feel they belong at their college are more likely to remain there . . . [and] first-generation and minority students are less likely to feel a connection to their colleges, and more likely to struggle with self-doubt and imposter syndrome — feeling like an intellectual fraud.“ (Field, 2018)
Although some populations are more at risk for feeling imposter syndrome, it can be found in people from all industries, races, cultures, genders, and ages. Lastly, it can be found in all job levels and roles, as well. From Direct Reports (individual contributors) to CEOs, we’re all capable of experiencing feelings of fraud or lacking a sense of belonging.
One of the bigger challenges People Managers face is helping Direct Reports who have imposter syndrome learn to perceive themselves as valuable contributors to the team and to ensure they feel like they belong. Feelings of being a fraud or not belonging can lead to an employee’s decision to leave the company — increasing employee turnover and impacting the culture of our teams. Ultimately, the employee ends up carrying those feelings with him into his next opportunity and the cycle continues.
So, what can you do as a People Manager to end this cycle for a Direct Report suffering from imposter syndrome? How can you ensure they’re actively contributing to the team and you’re fully utilizing their skills? Here are a few strategies to consider:
Strategy 1: Create a Sense of Belonging and a Safe Space for All Team Members
As a Manager, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your team environment is a safe space for everyone. Creating a safe space means ensuring that all team members have an equal opportunity to share their opinions and be heard — free of judgment, harassment, and the toxicity of ‘alpha teammates.’ Alpha teammates are people who speak over others, claim others’ ideas or contributions as their own, view peers as competitors instead of collaborators, and believe their knowledge is a competitive advantage instead of something to be shared so we can all grow. These people are toxic and non-conducive to building a safe space for your team members. As a Manager, you’ll need to work with them to correct their behavior or remove them from your team for the sake of creating a positive, supportive culture.
Eliciting vs. Soliciting Opinions
Removing obstacles and negativity is a first step to eliciting opinions, but you’ll also need to create a culture within your team that supports soliciting opinions from everyone. You can’t automatically expect a person with imposter syndrome to freely volunteer his opinions because, in his mind, that involves risking exposing that he’s a fraud. He fears that he’ll say something that’s inaccurate and the ‘truth’ will come out: everyone will know he’s an imposter. His willingness to be vulnerable and admit any lack of knowledge or skill will increase as trust builds. He will learn to be vocal and share opinions without fear through frequent, positive experiences and interactions with a team that embraces failure as a mechanism for learning.
All of us learn by admitting our mistakes and being transparent about our knowledge and skill gaps — but that requires trusting that teammates won’t judge us as inferior or inadequate when they discover we don’t know everything.
As a People Manager, it’s your job to foster a culture of learning through failure and to encourage transparency. You’ll need to solicit opinions and insist that your team provides constructive feedback in a respectful way. This might mean you’ll need to step in and correct situations where unhelpful feedback is given or coach others on listening first without interruption. These actions can create a culture in which it feels safe to be vulnerable and employees can feel confident in asking for information, clarification, or help without being judged. The more free they feel to ask questions, the quicker they’ll fill knowledge gaps and become a greater contributor to the team with a strong sense of belonging.
Strategy 2: Positive Reframing
This strategy involves helping your Direct Report manage negative opinions about himself or herself by reframing thoughts in a more positive light. For example, if your Direct Report shares that he feels less skilled than his peers (who have a similar number of years of experience) you could explain that everyone learns at a different pace and suggest that he focus on everything he has learned: celebrate his progress. Direct Reports who tend to focus on their perceived inadequacies might be slow to adopt this technique. When they share a negative thought, encourage them to focus on the positives and reframe it.
When Not to Use Positive Reframing
Positive reframing can work for Direct Reports who have imposter syndrome, but it doesn’t work for everyone. An article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explains that this technique of positive reframing might not work for individuals suffering from low self-esteem:
“…individuals with low self-esteem (LSEs) are less receptive than are individuals with high self-esteem (HSEs) to support that positively reframes their experience . . . and in turn providers felt worse about the interaction, about themselves, and about their friendship more broadly.” (Marigold, Cavallo, Holmes, & Wood, 2014)
As their Manager, it’s important for you to recognize whether your Direct Report has low self-esteem or impostor syndrome. How can you tell?
Recognizing Imposter Syndrome
As Gill Corkindale explains in a Harvard Business Review article titled “Overcoming Imposter Syndrome,” generally, people with imposter syndrome are high achieving, highly successful individuals. Oftentimes, they may appear to be perfectionists. They might share that their family often spoke of them as the ‘smart one’ of the bunch. Other cues include: expressing a strong fear of failure and being cautious about taking risks, attributing their success to luck or a fluke, or they might have “[t]he tendency to downplay success and discount it . . .” (Corkindale, 2008)
It can be difficult to differentiate between low self-esteem and imposter syndrome, but lacking confidence and feeling like a fraud are not the same. Your Direct Report can feel confident about her ability to complete her day-to-day tasks, yet still feel like an imposter.
People with imposter syndrome “…believe they give the impression that they are more competent than they are and have deep feelings that they lack knowledge or expertise.” (Corkindale, 2008) Their fear is rooted in their belief that the perception others have of them is not aligned with their own perception of self. This is much different than having low self-esteem: a lack of self-regard or respect for who you are.
If you feel your Direct Report is dealing with imposter syndrome, not low self-esteem, encourage her to rewrite her mental thoughts by sharing this advice from Harvard Business Review:
“Instead of telling yourself they are going to find you out or that you don’t deserve success, remind yourself that it’s normal not to know everything and that you will find out more as you progress.” (Corkindale, 2008)
Reframing her thoughts can help your Direct Report recognize feelings of normalcy and encourage her to be transparent about her self-perceptions. This is necessary for you to have enough insight to provide constructive feedback.
Strategy 3: Aligning Perceptions and Co-Constructing Identities
In addition to positive reframing, you can help alleviate a Direct Report’s concern about misalignment between your perception of her and her self-perception by asking questions and providing continuous feedback regarding her knowledge, skills, and abilities.
The feeling of being a fraud can stem from two things: 1) Not receiving enough feedback from others to adequately understand their perceptions of you and 2) Not being transparent or vulnerable enough with others to give them an adequate understanding of your capabilities and weaknesses.
Co-constructing Identities
We co-construct our identities and judge ourselves through communication and feedback from others. As Managers, we play a role in forming our Direct Reports’ self-concepts when we ascribe traits to them and provide them with feedback. Simultaneously, we manage our own identity based on the reflected appraisal we receive through verbal, non-verbal, and linguistic cues from others.
All communication is interpreted or filtered through our own tinted lenses: the personal experiences we’ve had, our cultural ‘norms,’ our beliefs, and our values. As such, communication is always prone to misinterpretation. So, it’s important to give adequate, specific, timely feedback, ask others to conduct a perception check with us, and also for us to check our own perceptions when others give us feedback.
Perception Checking
Perception checking involves asking for clarification, paraphrasing the feedback, and communicating back what you believe you heard so the other person providing feedback has an opportunity to correct any misperceptions. If you would like to learn more about perception checking and its role in identity management, “Bridges Not Walls: A Book About Interpersonal Communication” contains an essay titled Constructing Identities, that was written by John Stewart, Karen E. Zediker & Saskia Witteborn. This essay offers a great introduction to these concepts.
If your Direct Report is receiving adequate feedback from you about how you perceive her skillset, the two of you have built trust, and she’s being honest and vulnerable about her skill gaps, then the two of you can work together to ensure that her self-perception and how others perceive her is in alignment.
Acknowledge Opportunities for Growth
“BUT, what if I’m creating a safe space, my Direct Report is being vulnerable and admitting skill gaps that are an actual requirement for performing her job, and others perceive her as lacking those skills, too?” you ask.
Employees with imposter syndrome aren’t exempt from working towards personal growth. They obviously don’t know everything, and it’s certain that they’ll need to learn new things to perform their job well. If your Direct Report’s self-doubt and self-perceptions align with others’ perceptions of her, this simply means this is, indeed, an opportunity for growth and learning.
If you’ve built a trusting relationship with the employee and have fostered a safe culture, you and your Direct Report can have an honest conversation about her gaps in skill or knowledge. As with any other Direct Report, it will be important that you create specific action items and goals together to help her work towards filling these gaps, while also still recognizing her for the knowledge/skills she does bring to the team. Imposter syndrome doesn’t negate the need for you, as the sufferer’s Manager, to help identify areas for improvement and growth.
Summary
Through creating a culture that embraces failure as a form of learning, creating opportunities for your Direct Report to contribute and feel a sense of belonging, positively reframing negative self-perceptions, and ensuring self-perceptions align with how others perceive your Direct Report, you can lay a foundation that supports success in spite of imposter syndrome.
As a People Manager it can be time-consuming and challenging to manage someone who suffers from imposter syndrome, but the rewards of less employee attrition, less time spent training new hires, and helping an individual feel successful in his or her own shoes makes the investment well worth it.
Want to chat about people management and bounce some ideas around? Reach out to me at sherry@sherryumlah.com. Let’s talk!
Works Cited
Corkindale, G. (2008, May 7). Overcoming Imposter Syndrome. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2008/05/overcoming-imposter-syndrome
Field, K. (2018). A Third of Your Freshmen Disappear. The Chronicle of Higher Education, A8-A13.
Marigold, D. C., Cavallo, J. V., Holmes, J. G., & Wood, J. V. (2014). You can’t always give what you want: The challenge of providing social support to low self-esteem individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology(107(1)), 56–80.