How to Help Your Employees Overcome Imposter Syndrome Be a hero to your team by creating a culture that helps them fight the feeling they don't deserve their success.
By John Boitnott Edited by Jessica Thomas
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Be honest with yourself: Do you sometimes struggle with feeling like you're a fraud? Do you sometimes feel as if you've somehow duped the world into thinking you belong, when you secretly know you don't? If so, then welcome to the imposter syndrome club.
It's a big group, with a number of high-profile members, including many CEOs and entrepreneurs. These feelings of inadequacy can affect anyone, no matter how much they've achieved, how much they know, or how qualified they are. When it strikes, many of those who struggle with imposter syndrome try to drown out the derisive voices in their head with substances like alcohol, drugs, or food. Others try to outrun it, leading to burnout and exhaustion.
Feeling like an imposter isn't restricted to business leaders and founders. Many of your employees probably struggle with it, too. That should concern you, because team members who are suffering under this heavy psychological burden are likely to stumble under the weight of it. Help your employees conquer imposter syndrome with these five strategies.
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1. Recognize the symptoms
It's sometimes tricky to diagnose yourself with imposter syndrome. How do you know when other people on your team are struggling with it? There's no single, foolproof checklist, but there are some signs to watch out for in your employees and team members. Look out for any of these behaviors or language:
- Disconnect between performance and evaluation: Does your employee consistently downplay recent successes or their own skill levels?
- Self-castigation: Do you ever catch your employee, either in speech or in emails or Slack messages, berating themselves about their performance or contributions?
- Overachieving behaviors: Does your employee constantly seek more and more success, volunteering for challenging projects, seeking spots on special teams or programs, entering professional competitions or seeking awards?
- Downplaying success: When congratulated for performance or success, does the worker usually respond by pointing elsewhere, either to external circumstances or other people's (superior) contributions?
- Jokes to cover up self-doubt: Watch out for the worker who's gained that reputation as the workplace comedian. Make sure their jokes aren't really just a coverup for those imposter feelings of being a fraud or not belonging.
- Consistent bragging: On the other hand, many folks who struggle with imposter syndrome compensate with brave talk about themselves, focusing on their accomplishments and skills. This apparent self-confidence can even sound like bragging. "Sure, I can handle that in my sleep!" might just be code for "I really don't know if I can handle this at all."
The purpose here is not to diagnose an employee with mental health issues. Rather, you simply want to identify high-achievers who might benefit from some more support.
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2. Create a more supportive environment
One of the best ways to help both yourself and your employees in the fight against imposter syndrome is to create a work environment that acknowledges the risk and seeks to minimize it. Show your workers that you understand by being open with your own struggles with it. Acknowledge that you feel the same way sometimes.
Create a space of validation that's psychologically safe where workers can express their struggles without fear of any consequence, rejection or retribution for admitting to feelings of insecurity. Train managers to encourage all of their team members to work hard, strive for improvement and welcome the ability to grow from mistakes. A workplace that welcomes failure and seeks to learn from it doesn't leave any fertile soil in which doubts can grow.
3. Reward progress instead of perfection
Perfectionism is the habitual striving for something that's unachievable. No one can attain a state of perfection and maintain it forever. The inability to recognize the futility of perfectionism results in delay, procrastination, rushed work and shoddy or nonexistent results.
Instead, embrace the prospect of steady, consistent progress and help coach your managers and team members to do the same.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks that imposter syndrome creates in your workers is an internal tsunami of fear. Ironically, that fear can make it really difficult for people struggling with feelings of self doubt. Fear paralyzes people and complicates everything. Aiming for progress is the best way to help everyone move forward.
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4. Celebrate and reward accomplishments
Anyone who's constantly struggling with imposter syndrome is feeling that they don't belong — in your company, on your team, with you and their fellow team members, or really anywhere at all. How can you overcome that sensation and replace it with something more productive?
The answer is simple: Create a corporate culture that quickly and enthusiastically recognizes and celebrates progress. When any worker achieves a new qualification, certification or successful completion of a project, let the kudos flow.
Obviously, you want to match the acknowledgment to the level of the achievement. Throwing a wild party for even the most minor achievements will soon devalue every success. Keep it proportional, but recognize and reward every single win. This is the best (and perhaps the only) way to show your employees that as far as you and your company are concerned, they are absolutely worthy of your praise.
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5. Welcome and value open input
You can tell your employees that they're valued members of your company's team, and you absolutely should do so. But if you really want that message to land and "stick," you need to show them how much you value their input and work.
How do you do that, exactly? Make it company policy to seek and give attention to input in a wide variety of circumstances. Whether that's at an all-hands meeting, one-on-one, or in some other context, get in the habit of asking what others think, and then listening to their input. Prohibit any offensive, dismissive or disrespectful reactions to someone else's input. Instead, take it seriously. You don't have to adopt any and all ideas from your employees, but simply listening and taking their input seriously will go much further towards convincing them they're valued team members.
When you welcome their creative energy, their passion and their suggestions, you help them defeat the demons of self-doubt and low self-esteem. They feel valued, because they are valued. And once they've experienced what it feels like when their employer, managers and other team members consistently demonstrate that value, it's much harder for negative self-talk to take hold. They might even finally conclude that all that imposter syndrome stuff really doesn't have a lot of evidence behind it.
Be the support your employees need
As an entrepreneur and the leader of your team, you're in the best possible position to adjust the corporate culture to support your employees and help them improve their self-worth. By taking them seriously and demonstrating their value to your company's mission, you give them the substantive proof they need to quiet the negative self-talk and contribute to your entire team's success — as well as to their own.
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