Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough
According to Korn Ferry’s ‘Workforce 2024 Global Insights Report’., 71% of US CEOs experience imposter syndrome.
Do what?
This raised so many questions for me. Why? Does this matter? Why should I care? Am I supposed to feel sorry for them? (Reaches for world’s smallest violin). And what is imposter syndrome, actually?
There’s a disconnect here between this result and the image we have been given of the all-powerful CEO who leads the company to success and deserves the astronomical rewards they get. Are our heroic leaders, who we must obey and pay homage to, not the chisel-jawed titans seen on the front cover of Time but, like the Wizard of Oz, simpering mediocrities cowering behind the curtain of their Executive Suite?
But here’s another disconnect. 85% of CEOs say they are totally competent in the role.
So hang on, are they confident or full of self-doubt? What’s going on here?
Here’s a thought or two.
The people who are identified as ‘High Fliers’ and put onto the management fast-track, who have the MBA and Magna Cum Laude and all the rest of badges, they are high achievers. Their self-esteem is built upon their personal achievements.
All through their life, they’ve been top of the class, aced all their exams whilst playing the lead in the school productions, learning 14 different instruments, winning cups at many different sports and getting fluent in several languages including Mandarin, Serbo-Croat and a particularly difficult sub-dialect of Yoruba.
But as a CEO, your personal achievements are irrelevant. Your ability to affect the performance of the business (let’s be honest here, that means increase the profits and move the stock price upwards) through your own efforts is non-existent. You work through others.
There’s no clear linkage between what you do and how the organisation performs. There’s no guarantee that if you do all the right things, then you will get the right results. In fact, it’s impossible to know what ‘the right things’ are.
Maybe this isn’t imposter syndrome they are feeling but the result of the work of the CEO not filling the achievement buckets of the person doing it. The feedback loop that has fuelled their path to the top is broken. They replace it by using proxies like salary and bonus, the corporate jet, the invitation to DAVOS or whatever but they can’t feed the hunger. They have an underlying feeling of dissatisfaction, so they wonder what they are doing wrong.
And they’re not necessarily doing anything wrong, they’re just in the wrong job.
The other, less charitable, version is that they know the whole thing is a scam. That now they’ve climbed to the top of the greasy pole, they know what they do is meaningless and they’re just there to skim off as much as they can before they get pushed out. If they are there in an upswing, they claim all the credit (and the bonuses) and if they are there in a downturn, they protect themselves by deflecting the blame and chucking a few thousand employees under the bus.
In which case they are not suffering from imposter syndrome. They are, in fact, imposters.
More Than A Feeling
Imposter syndrome was first identified in 1978 (it was actually called ‘Imposter Phenomenon’) and was then seen as a being common amongst high-achieving women.
Since then, it has been found to affect both sexes equally, and across all levels of achievement. Indeed, the Korn Ferry research finds it present even amongst ‘early-stage professionals’ but at a lower level (35%).
So now it’s a thing, and we all have it, it seems.
It’s not a mental disorder or a trait, though, it’s an experience a person has. A reaction, if you like; a feeling.
Intuitively, it feels like a thing, though, doesn't it? We’ve all had that thought “I don’t belong here”, or “I’m out of my depth and I’m going to get found out”. It’s distinctly unnerving, it provokes a physical reaction. It’s visceral. Your stomach lurches, your face reddens, you become hyper-alert as your fight, flight, freeze response kicks in.
But is it any more than that just an experience? Is it just a momentary wave of doubt? It might become quite common, maybe rather more so than we would like, but is it a ‘thing’?
It’s not like it didn’t exist before 1978, it just hadn’t been singled out and given a name. And there’s no reason to suspect it wasn’t as widespread as it is today, is there? Just because they observed it amongst high-achieving women (and there’s a whole other question about why they started looking there) that doesn’t mean others groups didn’t feel it.
Perhaps it’s just anxiety. Self-questioning. A part of the human condition.
Actors have been experiencing it for ever (ironically, given that their profession is to literally be an imposter). Recurring anxiety dreams of going on stage naked, or forgetting your lines, or being unable to speak, or having the audience laugh at you as you do Hamlet’s soliloquy - these are common place amongst thespians.
Sir Laurence Olivier, seen by many as the finest English-speaking actor ever to tread the boards, suffered from ‘nerves’ throughout his long and storied career. At every performance he did, he would throw up violently into a strategically-placed bucket before stepping onto the stage.
Also, actors are notoriously paranoid about their abilities, constantly questioning themselves and often striken with self-doubt, right up until the moment they step out and perform. Then they are suddenly in their element and full of confidence.
Is that imposter syndrome? Or just understandable anxiety?
Perhaps the only difference between actors and the rest of us is that they have that stage to perform on. It’s the ultimate test, doubt is impossible when you are in the moment, where you embody your ability and competence. The ultimate proof of your talent and right to be there is in the applause.
Whereas for most us, we don’t have that moment of truth, that clarity of proof. We can’t know if we are good enough or not, there are always uncertainties. We can never know if we truly belong where we are, whether we fully deserve what we have. This makes us uncomfortable and puts us in an unresolveable state of anxiety.
Maybe that’s what ‘imposter syndrome’ is.
Just The Way You Are
Imposter syndrome is of a piece with looking at work through the psychological lens. To quote Wikipedia, research suggests it is ‘linked to neuroticism, low self esteem and perfectionism, and is negatively correlated with the personality traits of extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness’.
This leads you to believe it’s all about us, doesn’t it?
But correlation, we should remember, does not mean causation. I haven’t read all the papers to check whether this is addressed, but what if there isn’t a causal relationship? Or if it’s the other way around to what we expect?
And what if neuroticism is simply a rational response to an irrational and uncertain world?
What if low self-esteem is caused by the burden of constant testing at school, the over-organising of children who are not trusted to do their own thing and the pressures of social media on developing minds?
What if perfectionism is being triggered by media manipulation of images, the prominence of ‘celebrity culture’ and, once again, social media?
What if the causes of imposter syndrome (and it’s apparent rise) are systemic rather than psychological?
If we look at the work environment, maybe we increasingly feel like we’re imposters because we are constantly gaslit by our employers, our work is detached from meaning and purpose and we are sold an unachievable dream of what work and life should be?
It has been an long-term tactic of employers to downplay our worth and contribution, to tell us we are easily replaceable and just another cog, in order to suppress pay and benefits. Simultaneously, they have been ratcheting up the demands of the job to levels that are impossible to meet without sacrificing large parts of our personal life and our being. The bar is being set at unreachable levels but is being presented as reasonable and achievable.
When our lived reality doesn’t match the one that we are being told we should be seeing, we assume that everyone else is killing it and we are failing. We falsely conclude that we are at fault, we must be doing it wrong and so obviously don’t belong. And any day now ‘they’ are going to realise and throw us out.
Or, as in the case of Graeber’s thesis on ‘Bullshit Jobs’, you realise that what you do adds no value to the world even though you are rewarded handsomely for doing it and so you feel like a fake.
Maybe a lot of us feel like imposters because the system makes us feel like imposters.
Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad
I’m not playing down imposter syndrome here. I’ve felt it myself, I know many of you have too.
It can also have bad consequences, as people who feel it tend to be less satisfied at work and have lower job performance. They also show higher rates of burnout (although it’s important, once again, to point out that correlation is not the same as causation).
I’m just not sure it’s that helpful to make it a separate thing, And it’s definitely not helpful to make it a psychological thing, something that’s just to do with us (another case of victim blaming being used to divert attention from the real causes?).
It’s not necessarily bad to experience some anxiety, or to have self-doubt. These are signs of being in a growth environment, outside of our comfort zone. It’s that funny feeling in the tummy before giving a presentation or a talk, that sharpens the responses, spikes the adrenaline and gives you the necessary edge to do it well. Actors, and sportspeople, welcome that and learn to harness it to their advantage.
Self-doubt helps us to continue to grow and develop, to avoid complacency, to keep us on our mettle. It’s part of a healthy practice to the development of our craft and keeps our feet on the ground. Without it, we believe our own bullshit, are confidently wrong and eventually crash and burn.
When self-doubt becomes imposter syndrome, then it points to an imbalance between our needs and the systems demands, not an imbalance within. It’s a symptom of our emotional regulation getting out of bounds due to pressures beyond our control. We can get better at managing ourselves and building up our resources but the solution is to remove the systemic pressures. That’s not going to be done with a few ‘lunch and learns’.
As for our poor CEOs, what’s with them? I don’t think there’s any single explanation but there’s a kind of Shakesperian tragedy here, isn’t there? They’ve reached the pinnacle of their ambitions only to find that the need for self-achievement that got them there cannot be sated by being there.
Or perhaps they’ve reached the top only to realise that it is a chimera, that the power they have sought cannot be exercised in a meaningful and satisfying way, that the riches showered upon them feel unjustified. That the crown is, in fact, made of thorns.
Or, now they are on the summit, they find out that the perspective is terrifying in it’s scope and complexity and they’ve just developed vertigo.
They are only human, after all. Well, 71% are. The rest of them are psychopaths.