What nobody tells you about imposter syndrome

For 10 years after leaving high school, I worked in a range of trades: painter and decorator, lift engineer, and air conditioning engineer. I was not a fully qualified engineer, by the way, just the assistant or 'mate', as they called it in the lift trade.

However, when I was 29, I decided to go to university and, after four years studying law, I became a barrister. I then had six months of pupillage, which is where you apprentice to a senior barrister, and suddenly I found myself standing up in court, in full wig and gown, arguing cases and cross-examining witnesses.

Boy, did I feel like an imposter.

I lived in constant fear of being 'found out'. Each case felt like an ordeal, and if the slightest thing did not go well, I turned it over and over in my mind, feeling even more like a fraud as I stepped into the courtroom the next day.

This imposter phenomenon is, of course, not unique to painters turned barristers. If you are leading people and privately wondering whether you really belong in the role, it may feel uncomfortably familiar.

So today, and over the next couple of weeks, we are going to look at what the imposter phenomenon really is and how we can overcome it.

You'll usually hear this called imposter syndrome, but I'm going to call it the imposter phenomenon, and I want to briefly explain why, because it matters for how we approach it.

A syndrome implies a medical condition: something diagnosable and, in this context, something that would potentially sit in the official manuals of psychiatric disorders. The imposter phenomenon does not. It is not a disorder. It is a pattern of thinking, with identifiable causes and, importantly, evidence-based responses. Calling it a syndrome can make it feel fixed and pathological. Calling it a phenomenon is more accurate and, I think, more useful.

The imposter phenomenon was first described in 1978 by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who identified it in high-achieving women who attributed their success to luck, charm, or knowing the right people rather than to their own ability (Clance & Imes, 1978). Research since then has found it across medicine, law, engineering, finance, academia, and technology.

The numbers are striking. At least 70% of high achievers report experiencing the core features of imposterism at some point in their careers (Bravata et al., 2020; Gottlieb et al., 2020). This is not a rare vulnerability affecting a fragile minority. It is a very common experience among people who push themselves into demanding roles.

Which means it is almost certainly present in your meetings, on your leadership team, and in the heads of your direct reports. And, if this is something you recognise in yourself, you can be sure you are not alone.

The imposter phenomenon refers to intense feelings of intellectual or professional fraudulence despite clear evidence of competence and achievement (Clance & Imes, 1978; Zanchetta et al., 2020). People who experience it tend to believe that their success is due to factors outside their control, such as luck or the efforts of colleagues. They do not believe that their own results are genuine evidence of ability.

At the heart of it is the fear of being found out or exposed as a fraud. Because that fear is future-focused, present success rarely suppresses it for long.

There are also real consequences beyond the discomfort. Research shows that imposter phenomenon is associated with lower job satisfaction, reduced organisational commitment, lower career motivation, and, specifically relevant for this newsletter, lower motivation to lead (Neureiter & Traut-Mattausch, 2016, 2017).

These are not minor inconveniences. For a new manager already questioning whether they belong in the role, imposter feelings can become a significant drag on development and career progression.

Research points to several explanations, and more than one may be present in any individual case. It is helpful to think about which of these might be shaping our own imposter feelings, because that can guide how we respond.

In the leadership context, when we move from individual contributor to manager or from one leadership level to another, we carry a self-concept rooted in the technical competence and personal performance that made us good at our previous job.

Leadership is less and less about our own output. It is about the output of others, and our ability to create the conditions for our team to succeed. That is a genuinely different skill set, and it takes time to build. The problem is that while we are building those skills, we judge ourselves harshly because we are used to being equipped with the skills needed to be a top performer.

It is worth remembering the the self is not a fixed thing. It is, as developmental psychologists would put it, a system of stories, beliefs, and understandings that emerge through our experience and context (see Cavanagh, 2013). When the context changes suddenly and we experience the unfamiliar feeling of lacking competence, our sense of self can become unsettled. But, the truth is, we are not failing, we are learning a different job. We are not frauds; we are in transition.

The second mechanism is the one I recognise in my own experience and in many of my coaching clients.

This is about explanatory style: the habitual way a person explains why things happen. Research shows that people with high levels of imposter feelings make a consistent asymmetric error (Clance & Imes, 1978; Zanchetta et al., 2020). When something goes well, they attribute the cause to external circumstances, such as luck, timing, or a helpful team. When something goes badly, they blame themselves: insufficient ability, being out of their depth, not being the right person for the job.

The practical effect is that the benefits of success do not accumulate. They pass without changing how the person sees themselves. Failures, on the other hand, stick and confirm an existing story about being inadequate. As neuro-psychologist Rick Hanson says, our minds are often like Teflon for the good and Velcro for the bad.

Over time, this means that no amount of evidence changes the underlying belief, because the person has built an unyielding and distorted view of the world: good outcomes are discounted, while bad ones are retained as proof of inadequacy. In leadership, that can look like dismissing praise for a well-run meeting as down to the contributions of others, then treating one awkward conversation as evidence that you are not cut out to manage people.

The problem is that, in order to build confidence in our ability to accomplish difficult tasks (self-efficacy), we need to keep doing them. Psychologist Albert Bandura showed that what we believe about our own ability is a primary determinant of what we choose to do, and for how long we persist (Bandura, 1977; Maddux, 2002).

So, if we ignore our own role in our successes, we risk sabotaging our prospects of building the skills we need because we become less likely to do the work that would help us build them. It becomes a vicious circle: high self-efficacy leads to greater challenge and persistence, while low self-efficacy leads to avoidance and premature resignation during setbacks.

Thus, the imposter phenomenon weakens self-efficacy at its root: it stops successful experiences from doing the confidence-building work they would otherwise do.

There is one more piece to this. Research by Carol Dweck and colleagues on mindset theory offers a further explanation for why imposter feelings can persist even in the face of repeated success.

People with a fixed mindset believe that qualities like intelligence and ability are largely stable and innate. Kumar and Jagacinski (2006) found that individuals with high levels of imposter feelings tend towards this kind of thinking: they are convinced that their abilities are limited and cannot grow. From this position, every challenge is a test of fixed worth rather than an opportunity to learn. Every mistake becomes evidence of inadequacy rather than information they can use to learn from.

Dweck's work shows that people with a growth mindset, who believe abilities develop through effort and learning, experience setbacks very differently. They see them as a natural part of getting better (Dweck & Molden, 2007; Blackwell, Trzesniewski & Dweck, 2007).

For new leaders, this distinction is significant as it shows that a fixed mindset can turn every stretch moment into a test of whether you belong, rather than part of the learning that leadership requires.

It is important to understand the mechanisms behind imposter feelings. These are not character defects. They are predictable, well-documented cognitive patterns that appear in high-achieving people across many demanding professions.

Importantly, they are responsive to intervention. So next week, we'll look at what the research tells us about the evidence-based strategies leaders can use to address imposter feelings, and why some commonly offered advice turns out to be less helpful than it appears.

The bottom line is that feeling like an imposter does not mean you are unsuited to leadership. It means you are a normal human being on a path of growth.

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.

Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: a longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78(1), 246–263.

Bravata, D. M., Watts, S. A., Keefer, A. L., Madhusudhan, D. K., Taylor, K. T., Clark, D. M., et al. (2020). Prevalence, predictors, and treatment of impostor syndrome: a systematic review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35, 1252–1275.

Cavanagh, M. (2013). The coaching engagement in the 21st century: new paradigms for complex times. In S. David, D. Clutterbuck, & D. Megginson (Eds.), Beyond goals: effective strategies for coaching and mentoring. Gower.

Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241–247.

Dweck, C. S., & Molden, D. C. (2007). Self-theories: their impact on competence motivation and acquisition. In A. J. Elliot & C. S. Dweck (Eds.), Handbook of competence and motivation. Guilford Press.

Gottlieb, M., Chung, A., Battaglioli, N., Sebok-Syer, S. S., & Kalantari, A. (2020). Impostor syndrome among physicians and physicians in training: a scoping review. Medical Education, 54(2), 116–124.

Kumar, S., & Jagacinski, C. M. (2006). Imposters have goals too: the imposter phenomenon and its relationship to achievement goal theory. Personality and Individual Differences, 40(1), 147–157.

Maddux, J. E. (2002). Self-efficacy: the power of believing you can. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology. Oxford University Press.

Neureiter, M., & Traut-Mattausch, E. (2016). An inner barrier to career development: preconditions of the impostor phenomenon and consequences for career development. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 48.

Neureiter, M., & Traut-Mattausch, E. (2017). Two sides of the career resources coin: career adaptability resources and the impostor phenomenon. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 98, 56–69.

Zanchetta, M., Junker, S., Wolf, A-M., & Traut-Mattausch, E. (2020). "Overcoming the fear that haunts your success": the effectiveness of interventions for reducing the impostor phenomenon. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 405.

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