The upsides of having imposter thoughts
There is a distinction between having imposter thoughts and imposter syndrome. In organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s opinion, imposter thoughts are that fearful feeling you experience at certain times in your career (that you’re not as smart as others believe you are, for instance), while imposter syndrome is to feel like a fraud more consistently and pervasively in all areas of your work.
Basima Tewfik, an assistant professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, found that while imposter syndrome in the chronic and debilitating sense is rare, imposter thoughts are quite common. Many seemingly confident people I know have struggled with them, including me.
Imposter thoughts can be a double-edged sword. While they are often considered negative and detrimental to our self-esteem, there are surprising upsides to people having imposter thoughts in the workplace:
1. Improve interpersonal skills.
When someone thinks they are less competent than others, they may go the extra mile to be more collaborative. They become better listeners, are more empathetic, and ask better questions.
2. Motivate job mastery.
To prove their worth, people are more likely to work harder, over-prepare and do additional research to gather more data before making solid decisions.
3. It leads to confident humility.
They’ll be assertive about what they know but also willing to acknowledge what they don’t. They don’t get stuck on their gut feel or their personal perspective.
Grant added that imposter thoughts happen when our competence surpasses our confidence. In theory, competence and confidence go hand in hand, but in practice, they often diverge. What’s actually worse is the opposite - when our confidence surpasses our competence. This is known as the Dunning Kruger Effect: where we have an inflated assessment of our actual skills, resulting in overconfidence, an unwillingness to upskill, and an inability to see our weak spots.
As leaders, it is our responsibility to help our people find their “confident humility” so that they remain curious, open-minded and willing to grow. ●