Imposter Syndrome
Impostor Syndrome
What is imposter syndrome?
- The mindset of attributing success to luck and fearing being found out
- Especially common among high performers and new leaders
- The remedy is to separate feelings from facts using a record of achievements
Applied well, this concept changes how you sort team members. People once lumped together as 'lacking confidence' and given only encouragement can now be split along a new axis: where they attribute the cause of their performance. Someone who is holding back because they truly lack skill responds to training and encouragement, but someone in an imposter pattern calculates that the more praise they hear, the higher the odds of being found out next time. The same words become fuel for one and pressure for the other.
Later researcher Valerie Young sorted the pattern into five types: the perfectionist, the expert who must meet every qualification before starting, the genius who falls apart if they don't get it right the first time, the soloist who sees asking for help as failure, and the superhuman who feels they must handle every role. The types matter because the remedies differ. Experts need learning opportunities, while soloists need a rule that 'asking questions is part of the job.' It also helps to be clear about what this is not. It is the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where lower ability leads to overestimating oneself, and it is not the same as humility. Humility is about how a person presents themselves, whereas this pattern is a state in which people can’t trust their own assessment of themselves, and it leads to avoidance behavior.
The most common misconception is believing that naming it solves it. Vague encouragement like 'you're doing great' is dismissed as groundless comfort, so it has no effect and only raises expectations. Only feedback with numbers and specific examples becomes irrefutable evidence. There is also an error in the opposite direction. Telling someone who is genuinely underprepared that 'that's just imposter syndrome' delays the training and corrective feedback they need. Once it is treated as an individual's mental-health issue, structural causes stay untouched, such as the practice of not explaining the reasons behind promotions or a climate where a single mistake shakes a reputation.
Inwoo LeeExpert in leadership, communication, and performance management
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of “B2B Marketing Design”Clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first named it the 'impostor phenomenon' in a 1978 paper. Later research confirmed it as a common experience across genders and occupations, and it became a popular term as well-known figures such as Sheryl Sandberg spoke openly about it.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a B2B software firm with 240 employees and KRW 38 billion (≈ US$28,430,300) in annual revenue, promoted 11 new team leads at once in the first half of last year. In an organizational assessment six months later, their 1-on-1 meeting rate was only 38%, and 2 of them asked HR for a meeting, saying they wanted to 'give up the team lead role.'
- After the head of HR interviewed 11 newly appointed team leads one-on-one, 9 said, 'I'm not sure I'm the right person for this role,' and they left the office an average of 1 hour 40 minutes later than their team members.
- Team Lead Kim of Development Team 2 rewrote the weekly report four times and worked past midnight every Thursday, because 'if one number is wrong, my team will look at me differently.'
- Instead of offering encouragement, the HR director showed the team lead the original promotion scorecard, unedited, and only then did Team Lead Kim learn that 3 of the 5 categories placed in the company's top 10%.
- Four senior team leads ran a 30-minute session every two weeks where they admitted, 'I couldn't even raise my hand in meetings my first year,' and 10 of the 11 attended every session.
- At a leadership meeting, the CEO made it clear that 'no one is marked down for saying they don't know,' and then actually gave quarterly review credit to team leads who shared failures.
- Six months later, the 1-on-1 meeting rate rose from 38% to 86%, both people who had asked to give up their leadership roles stayed, and the new team leads now left the office 42 minutes earlier on average.