Imposter Syndrome & Zero Leadership

On Tuesday 7th November at 3:10pm something unusual and strange happened to me.

I got to inbox zero.   That freedom and feeling that I was on top of everything, everyone who wanted something had been served and I could breathe easy.

It lasted about thirty-five seconds.  Within the hour it was a long way from zero.  The next morning yet further away. Fun whilst it lasted.

When we look to grow into more senior leadership there are many wondering how leaders cope with the infinite task of looking after a wide world when us mere mortals are working hard to stay on top of life in our own small puddle.

Imposter syndrome is often triggered by comparing ourselves with others and that feeling of inferiority.   And in doing so we can skip over rational insight in order to continue supporting irrational belief.

This week I happened to catch a Medium article on how leadership pay as a proportion of the median salary in companies has accelerated since the pandemic.  it led to a heated debate about the monetary value of leaders. Here are some of the arguments.

·        Leaders should be paid more since they work harder.   This can lead us to believe we aren’t working hard enough.  Yet leadership pay has risen much faster than leaders' working hours.  So that can’t be it.

·        Leaders should be paid more because they take on more risk.   Yet in the last ten years the primary reason leaders are asked to step down is not for under-performance but for ethical and conduct violations.  So maybe that’s not it either.

·        Leaders should be paid more because they have to be masters of infinite detail, hold a breadth of understanding across vast oceans of insight and information. Now this one is more interesting.

Whatever your views on this, the article clearly paints a picture of leadership as being an infinite responsibility. 

When we start working, our value is often based on our knowledge, insight and experience.  Our first supervisory roles allow us to use that experience to teach, coach and manage others.   For many of my coaching clients that feeling of imposter comes when they face their first leader of leader challenge.

Leader of leader is a big step forward and the moment when our world opens up to more infinite possibilities.  Where you’re expected to figure out what is the right thing to do without being told to do it, to spot problems and opportunities without anyone even asking or sometimes caring and where people depend on you for direction.   There is never an end to this demand – it is infinite leadership.

Infinite leadership is a skill to be developed

If I can only get my inbox to zero for just a few seconds, imagine life for infinite leaders.   Ah but they have assistants and teams at their beck and call, I hear you say.   But even those people need feeding with directions.  There is no free lunch.

Surprisingly little training exists for this stage of leadership.   Time-management training isn’t enough – you can’t manage through time when there’s more than 24 hours of potential activity to be done in a day.   Resilience isn’t on the mark either.  Learning to let go?   All well and good if you can let go of the accountability as well as responsibility.

Instead of feeling inadequate, we need to learn to accept the infinite part of infinity leadership before it overwhelms us with its potential.

Infinite leadership can be helped through building divergence of viewpoints

Speak to senior leaders, as I do, and many will say they live in a paradox where at any point in time, to make a great decision there is both too little and too much data than they’d prefer.   There are more diverse opinions and over-lapping, cross-cutting allegiances and interest groups than they can keep in their heads.

A natural temptation is to close the circle, shut out the inconvenient, distracting and divergent views.  In the UK as I write this, we’re in the depths of the Covid enquiry.  You only have to look at that to understand where group think comes from.  Shutting out inconvenient viewpoints doesn’t feel the right answer.

Another temptation is to make an assumption.  Again the Covid enquiry heard ministers misunderstood the impacts of their decisions for lockdown in football because when rarely attending games – they always watched from hospitality suites, far removed from the way ordinary fans entered, used and exited stadia.

Many boardrooms still fail on divergence of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.  Almost all fail on diversity of age.   Women on boards still tend to dominate the theoretically “caring” roles of HR and CSR – seldom strategy or finance.   Even what it means to be growing up in a deprived area is different today than it might have been twenty years ago.

Infinity leadership can tempt us to be led by data rather than informed by data

With so many different possibilities, the lure of solving overwhelm comes in the form of data.  AI is accelerating our speed of both processing but also producing data.  Often we go for quantitative data because it is easy to digest, quick to read and just feels reliable.

It comes at a cost of qualitative data when in fact we need both.   We may need to understand the range of emotions through qualitative insight.  That feels too hard and cumbersome to read so someone creates a tick box and a likert scale.  

Infinity leadership requires leaders to have sufficient fluency in their understanding of how data is derived to know what’s missing, absent or biased – not just what’s present.   As AI tools make the production of data yet easier and graphics even more attractive, this is a clear danger moment for time-poor leaders.

Learn the concept of Zero

Infinity leadership also involved recognising your own place in the team.

Chris Lewis and Pippa Malmgren have written excellently on the subject of zero leadership.   Draw the figure zero.   Now imagine the dynamic of you and your team.  On the sheet of paper make a mark as to where you sit.  Make a mark for every person in your team.  Take a step back and what do you notice?

Infinity leaders practice the art of zero.   The art of zero is to observe the circle around you and ensure things are shifting in their correct orbit, identifying potential collisions and imbalances – keeping things in orbit – letting people bring their gifts and talents, connecting them together, learning when to get out of the way.

The imposter driver within you will be screaming it’s not enough.  You need to be like the satellite, hurtling around the edges, absorbing and living everything.  Not only isn’t there to time to do this but it’s not where your value lies.

Freeing time to, free time

No one can argue that leaders don’t work hard and long hours.   Zero leadership asks you to free time.  Not to sit on a yacht somewhere but to serve your team by seeing, perceiving and setting the pathway ahead.  In simple terms it is thinking.   We don’t do enough of it.  When we find time for it, it feels an indulgence, like we’re not really doing anything, so it’s the first to be filled in our diary.

But thinking is where creativity comes from.  And creativity can help us refine ideas, solving intractable problems, devise strategies to avoid unnecessary conflict.  Not thinking means we crash headlong into things that have to be resolved, expending energy resolving things that needn’t have happened in the first place.

As Lewis and Malmgren note – Albert Einstein’s boss at the patent office thought he was stupid and yet it was during this period at the patent office when some of his greatest discoveries and realisations occurred.  Not so stupid now.

Einstein realised that rational data and thinking will have its limitations and at a certain point synthesis and imagination take over.  This is right brain thinking and for that to be effect you need time and rest.

Synthesis and imagination stimulate creativity.  Creativity keeps companies at the leading edge.  Trying to judge actions by data alone inherently looks backwards.  For sure modelling can look forward but an over-reliance in your leadership style on data culturally makes you look back for certainty before a decision can be made.  

Zero leadership demands that you create space and time to think, for your brain to relax and for the synapses to be able to feel, sense and see the connections between disparate and seemingly unconnected or disconnected parts of the universe you’re meant to be leading.  

You may be looking up at the leadership clouds and feeling you’re not good enough.  Maybe you’re not good enough yet.   Maybe you need to consider a new approach.

As we near the end of this season on Imposter Syndrome

I’ve enjoyed researching and completing this arc of writing for Thriving Leader, learning more about the neuroscience and psychology behind Imposter Syndrome.   I see it in clients, I see it in myself.

The heart of Imposter Syndrome is belief.  Our belief we are less than perfect and less deserving of success than others.   What do you truly believe?   Many of us accidentally and unwittingly conspire with ourselves to sustain what we then label as Imposter Syndrome.

No one is perfect, we’re all flawed, including the leaders you look up to – they just have different ones to you.   The pain we feel of Imposter Syndrome is nearly always undeserved, but only you can shake it off.   I am not good at this is not the same as I’ve not experienced this yet.

Every time I sit and write Thriving Leader I wish for you to be successful and grow as a leader in whatever it is you’re doing.   From this season I hope you find you’re able to hold Imposter Syndrome as a concept more lightly – that what you experience is often the normal growing pains of leadership.   The mindset is something you are responsible for and you can change.

That humility, that recollection of having less, that ability to reconnect with your less privileged past is an asset that history, whether political or commercial history shows, has saved companies and countries from the hubris that might otherwise have led to downfall.   It’s your advantage, think how to use it wisely in the service of others.

Are infinity leaders more perfect than you?

Great leaders are self-aware and know their weaker spots.  They may even have the guts to tell others what they are.   Infinity leadership is here to stay.  The pace of change won’t slow.  Companies will still try to do more with less.   Humans won’t invent more than 24 hours a day.   Leaders will learn to become better at recognising, embracing and holding a healthy attitude to infinity.

And this is the point where I sign off from this season of Thriving Leader on Imposter Syndrome

As you’ll know I coach lots of individuals through this arc of their life. 

If I can help you or your team be better and make work life happier and enjoyable then drop me a message or find some time for us to chat here:

https://oncehub.com/careersredesigned

You can find more resources and my positive mindset programmes at www.ianbrowne.com

Out there are many people suffering from imposter syndrome – I’m grateful for you sharing Thriving Leader with others.