I think the first thing is is imposters spelled with an E or with an O. It sounds to me like you might be experiencing some uncertainty about this topic. I wonder whether you feel probably equipped to talk about it. I'm not sure.
I was like, which one is it? I don't know what I'm doing. Do you feel like you're in a position, you've been put in the position to talk about this topic but you're not properly trained and experienced to be able to do it? Exactly.
Absolutely. You're feeling like an impostor? Yes, completely. Oh, hi listeners.
Thanks. So nice to see you here at the Management Cafe. Take a seat. Because Tim and I were just talking well, you heard us probably about impostor syndrome and well, we're going to be here for about 20 minutes.
So you're very welcome to join us. Tim, we've just well, we won't talk about it when it's spelled with an E or an O. I don't know. But is this something that you think about often or that you used to think about often the whole?
Or is this something you've always had a name for? That's a good question. I think the term is very famous basically. So I've known the concept for a long time.
I think we all have times that we've experienced doubt and uncertainty about what to do. Something that's been very interesting for me, we've exchanged some articles and a bit of chat in the lead up to this is it's much more nuanced than I initially thought of in my mind. Impostor syndrome was just basically any time where you felt like you were in over your head. You were having to do something or make a decision or whatever that you weren't ready to do or you didn't feel prepared to do.
I think there's a bit more subtlety to it than that. What do you think? Yeah, I'll be honest, I only started coming across the term a few years ago. So I don't think I had ever thought of having it or going through it.
Many times though, I have felt I don't know what I'm doing. And I've been in situations where, especially to be honest, sometimes when I'm working with clients in that first meeting where they we talk about what their problems are and their issues and stuff and I just sit there going, I don't know what to do. What? They're going to find out that I haven't got a clue.
What am I going to say? And then I just get into my head just starts going, what are you going to say? And you don't have a clue. And if you get the joke, how on earth are you going to sort that out?
So it's always present in that way. So I think it's very relatable. I mean, you'd have to be perhaps on sort of sociopath to never experience that doubt, where you always felt confident that whatever you were going to do was going to be the right thing and you knew what to do in every situation, either that or you're not being tested very often, perhaps. I think in, you shared an article where it talked about, I think it's half a business review, and it talked about how there's actually some really healthy and positive aspects to it to being open to being wrong, you know, being willing to consider that there might be other avenues or other possibilities that you did, are the instinctive things that you first thought of.
What do you mean by that? Well, I think there's sort of there's a couple of ways of operating, right? One would be that that you go, you know, I'm in this position. I know what I'm doing at all times.
And so I'm just going to make whatever decision I want to make because I know I'm right. I'm sure I'm right. The other option is that there are times where you say, I'm not sure if I'm right here or not. And being open to that, which is a bit of vulnerability.
You know, it takes a bit of a bit of vulnerability, particularly in a leadership position to admit that you might be wrong or you might not have the answer. But by doing that, you create space for there to be more options. I think it actually it frees you up to be able to make a better decision because you're perhaps able to step back and view things on their merits as opposed to feeling like you have to have the answer straight away. Yeah, I see what you mean.
What the article, which was actually called Imposter Syndrome has its advantages. What a great title. And on the HBR, made you in 2022. And I think you're right that it did surprise me this thing of saying, let's not ignore it because after all, I think they cited nearly 70% of people having had imposter thoughts at one point in their careers and thinking, okay, others might not think, well others might think that I know more.
All right, let's see. Like you say, start from a question of what else can I find so that then I feel like I am in that position because I think that this thing of imposter syndrome being that believe that you're not as competent as others think is really okay. Why are they thinking that and what kind of questions can I ask that I get more information so that I then know what I'm talking about? No, no.
Yeah. I think framing because I've thought of it in terms of I don't know what I'm doing. So I feel like I shouldn't be in this position because I'm not sure. The imposter part is actually an external thing.
Others perceiving you to be capable and you perceiving yourself to be not capable. Maybe I don't think it's so much about what other people are thinking of me. I assume that people know that I'm pretty clueless. Yeah.
Yeah. What the Adam Grant has a newsletter and he said, he put it very well. He said, I don't know what I'm doing. It's only a matter of time until everyone finds out.
So I think the reason element in that and for me it is that it's I don't know what I'm doing is fine if no one knows. The problem is if everyone finds out that actually I was supposed to be expert in this and I am not. I think there's something there. And if we bring it back to the management position, I think this it comes also with a fear of if people if people find out that I don't know what I'm doing with my team members suddenly go, she doesn't quite know what she's doing.
And we thought she did. I think that's for me the fear of leading a team. It's because it's fine as long as you can kind of keep it together and you know you might not be sure about something and then later you address that. But I think it's that projection of other people are going to find out how on earth did you get this position?
Yeah. Yeah, that's that's true. And a lot of this is in our own heads. And I think particularly for early managers, it can be difficult in that sometimes you can feel a bit like you're managing in a vacuum or working in a vacuum in that as an individual contributor, you tend to get more immediate feedback on your tasks.
And typically, let's say that you're at the common pathway where you're experienced as an individual contributor, you've got a job, you're doing well, and then you're promoted into a leadership position within that same area of competency. You're moving from something that you know very well and you sort of mastered or close to it, to a management role which you haven't really done before, and whether the feedback mechanisms that you get are quite different. So it can feel quite disorienting in that, am I doing the right thing here? Am I being a good manager here or not?
What are the signs that would show me that? And then also because so much of the work is around human interaction and dealing with people in sort of complex situations, at the beginning in particular, you don't have that sort of well of experience. Like the first time you have to performance manage someone is the first time you have to performance manage someone. It could be really scary.
You can feel like you're not equipped to do it. Once you've done it 10 times or 20 times, it's a different feeling and you approach it with hopefully you know with a lot more confidence. I don't think how important it is in that case to be getting feedback also from people who are not your direct reports. Because I'm putting my mind in someone who's getting stuck in that feeling of, you know, they think I know what I'm doing, but I don't really know it.
And then you get, you start to hear feedback, but you start to say, well, they're giving me that they're saying I'm okay because they don't really know either. What else are they doing? I don't know. I think that, I mean, this is probably going to another phenomenon, but I think it's about not believing that you are either getting better or that you're doing okay.
So. Oh, for sure. Yeah. It was also because the people who report to you kind of have to say nice things about you.
So if you've got that voice of doubt in your head and someone who's reporting, he says, oh, you're a great manager. You go, well, you kind of have to say that because I'm going to do your performance review and I get to decide if you get a pay rise. So of course you're going to say I'm doing a good job because it's in your best interest to do it. It's easier, I think, to discount that.
And one of the interesting shifts you talked about, or I think the article talked about shifting from an imposter mindset to a growth mindset. But I think particularly in those situations, you know, like you were talking about before when you're in a client, an initial client meeting and they say, oh, we want to do this and I think, well, how would I do that? I haven't done that specific thing for the specific client before. And one of the gaps that we have in our mental, you know, dialogue or certainly that I experience is what I should be saying to myself is you're in this position because you can make good decisions because people trust that you've got a good set of values or that you're going to be able to navigate this, even though even if you don't have all the experience or all the answers, you'll be able to find a way through it.
And that's a different sort of framing, I think, you know, the framing that I'll work it out as opposed to I don't have the answer right in front of me, therefore I shouldn't be here. Yes. Yeah, it was also in the Adam Grant newsletter. I don't know what I'm doing yet.
It's only a matter of time until I figure it out. It's a growth mindset. I think that's really valuable because actually that's probably also what people are seeing. So if we go back to this thing, if everyone thinks I can do it, but I can't, they're going to figure it out.
Actually, maybe that's what people are seeing also. They're not seeing that you can do everything fantastically all the time, but they see that you can navigate circumstances. They see that eventually you work it out. I think there's that distance and it might be also that long distance view in a way as well.
It's really useful. Yeah. Well, yeah, for sure. I mean, something that I'm thinking of is at the beginning of COVID and I was running a shield geo with Duncan at the time and I was terrified of what could happen to the company and for the people, you know, worried people are going to get sick, worried we might financially suffer and have to lay people off or all sorts of doomsday scenarios we're going through my head and also aware that we were the leaders of the company and what we meant to do in this situation where we had no idea, no one, basically nobody knew what was going to happen.
And something that I found very helpful in that time was the values that we had as a company, which we'll fairly closely align to the values that Duncan and I sort of shared in the way we wanted to work. So we could use those as a sort of guiding point for how we wanted to behave, the decision we wanted to make, what we wanted to do and so on. And then looking back at it afterwards, that was an interesting sort of lesson to take from it was I had felt like an impossi- you know, I felt like I was in a situation, in a position that I didn't deserve, you know, my experience in skills did not warrant me being in the position that I was in, I was in it just because I owned the company. Yet I had some characteristics which helped me navigate that.
And so I think particularly for if you're trying to instill confidence in a manager, you know, one of the things you said before about if you're an early career manager or early in your management journey and you want to get, so let's say you're looking at someone in that position and they're suffering from impossi- I think if you help that person see or build confidence in those innate abilities that the qualities in them that have helped them be promoted into that management role. That's something that can build confidence and it's very much separate from knowing what to do in the situation. What do you think? It's actually where the person becomes more important than the job in a way.
It's because, and this is the problem with management as a kind of progression in any kind of job, is that hopefully that person is there because they have qualities that make them good at that, nor that actually they know how to do every single thing. So I think I like that distance. I don't know if it might help someone who's in the middle of it, but like you say, someone does point that out to you. Again, it's tuning into the growth mindset.
So again, it's saying the potential is there, you just need to discover and navigate it. Yeah, I love the framing that you had of it as a person as opposed to the job, because it then becomes about character. You're saying that you as a human being, that's what we're trusting here. That's why you're in this position.
That can be a wonderful, I think, a firming message for somebody. What a lovely thing to hear about yourself. That people have looked at who you are as a person and said, who you are as a person is who we want to be following, who we want to be leading us in those situations. It takes me back to something we talked about a couple of weeks ago, which was the idea we have of what a manager is.
I think that sometimes this idea of they think I know what I'm doing, but I don't, is because maybe other C are more, for lack of a better word, authentic style and it's working. But maybe in our heads, we have an idea of us that we should be operating in a different way because we have this idea of what a manager is. So I'm wondering as well whether that can be conflicting. The idea that we have is actually what, in a way, we do well.
That might lead us to think, well, actually, I don't know what I'm doing and you're wrong. Yeah. That's absolutely true. I wonder if imposter syndrome tapers over time.
I would like to think that it does, that when you're new into a role or new in a situation, join a new company, whatever, that those would be the scenarios where you're more prone to feel those thoughts. I would hope that over time with the experience and familiarity that comes from being in a role for a period of time, that the imposter syndrome aspects would become lesser. I'd love to hear our friends' thoughts about these early business thoughts because I'd like to throw in that it might come in waves as well. You know that thing of when you think, when you start, sometimes you think you know a lot, but actually you're not aware of how little, you know, and sometimes with time that changes.
So I wonder if it's a wave. Oh, yeah. Listen, we'd love to hear from you and we've got an email that you can use if you want or a contact form, our email address is managementcafepodcast at gmail.com or we are at managementcalf.com on Twitter. Anything else that's on your mind before we close this coffee?
Oh, look, my drink is almost. Now I'm now wondering if anyone has experienced a sort of like mid-life crisis, but an imposter syndrome crisis, you're sort of starting to get besieged by it. It doesn't sound very pleasant, suddenly imposter syndrome is everywhere. Yeah, and what they've done to navigate it?
Well, hopefully, well, there might be in the middle of it, it's an opportunity to ask some questions as well. So, coffee is over for us listeners, now it's over to you. Thank you for joining us at the management cafe. Remember, you can subscribe to the show on whatever podcast I've used to make sure you get your weekly dose of reflection.
Our website is management.cafe and on Twitter we are at managementcalf. That's all for this episode from ourself, killer orty and our fellow co-hosts in Burgess. Thank you for listening.