Leadership: An Antidote to Impostor Syndrome

Impostor syndrome is the affliction of high-achievers and leadership may be the cure.

What is Impostor Syndrome?

Impostor syndrome was first outlined in a 1978 paper by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. The paper states, "Despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments, [people] who experience the imposter phenomenon persist in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise." In other words, if you feel like a fraud, phony, or con artist unworthy of your success...be sure to keep reading.

There is a wealth of knowledge available on the origins, signs, and potential remedies for impostor syndrome from high-class sources such as The Harvard Business Review, Time, and the American Psychology Association. Yet, they all lack discussion on the importance of practicing leadership.

Adaptive Leadership

It's easy to mix up authority, or a position of power, and leadership so we'll start there. To paraphrase from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky - authority is the provision of direction, protection, and order in exchange for cooperation. It's a social contract which means you have to hold up your end of the bargain and meet or exceed expectations to keep your position of authority. You have expectations from staff, superiors, and stakeholders - which may be conflicting and can certainly be stressful.

When we operate from a position of authority, we expect ourselves to be experts. Taken to the extreme, we need to know everything, do everything, and be everything or we feel like we don't deserve that position and its benefits. Hello impostor syndrome, goodbye sanity.

Here is where leadership comes in, specifically adaptive leadership. Adaptive leadership is mobilizing others to tackle adaptive challenges. In other words, it's helping people get from where they are to where they want to be while wading through all the values that might be holding them back. It's messy work. There are no clear-cut answers, well-defined expectations, or roadmaps to success. Even worse? "Adaptive leadership is not about meeting or exceeding...expectations; it is about challenging some of those expectations, finding a way to disappoint people without pushing them completely over the edge" (Heifetz et al., 2009). I don't know about you, but the thought of disappointing others makes me shudder.

Like most good things in life adaptive leadership is difficult, scary, and worth the effort. It helps us make progress on our most meaningful challenges and it can be both empowering and freeing. When you choose to consciously explore the unknown, you release yourself of the responsibility of being the expert. You move from fear of being "discovered" to discovering new interpretations and opportunities that can drive progress. Not only is adaptive leadership an antidote to impostor syndrome, but it is also vital to creating change on what matters most.

Next Steps

Adaptive leadership is a practice that can be done by anyone and it helps to be prepared. If you'd like to learn the tools of adaptive leadership and apply them to your organization's challenges, you can book a training consultation today. Need help applying adaptive leadership to your challenges or struggling to make progress? Check out our coaching packages for some one-on-one partnership.