Impostor Feelings at Work: What the Term Gets Right, and What It Hides

When I moved from an academic research track into industry, I spent a long stretch convinced that somebody was going to work out I did not belong there. I knew my subject. I had the doctorate. None of that touched the feeling, because the feeling was not really about competence. It was about not yet knowing the rules of a room I had just walked into.

That is the part the popular version of this topic gets wrong. The internet treats impostor feelings as a cognitive glitch to be corrected with affirmations and a list of your achievements. Some of the time that is right. Quite often it is not, and telling someone their accurate perception of a difficult situation is a distortion in their own head does real harm.

What the term actually refers to

The impostor phenomenon was described by the clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, based on their work with high-achieving women who could not internalise their own accomplishments. The pattern they identified is specific: success is attributed to luck, timing or having fooled people, and the fear of exposure persists regardless of evidence.

Two things follow that are worth stating plainly.

First, it is not a clinical diagnosis. It has never been in the DSM. It is a described pattern, measured mostly by self-report scales, and the popular usage has drifted a long way from the original construct. "Impostor syndrome" now gets applied to anything from a genuine disorder of self-perception to an entirely ordinary case of first-week nerves.

Second, the famous prevalence number is shakier than its popularity implies. The frequently quoted claim that around seventy per cent of people experience impostor feelings at some point appears in Sakulku and Alexander's review of the impostor phenomenon literature, which is a reasonable summary of the field — but the underlying estimates come from varied samples using varied instruments, not a single representative survey. Treat it as "this is common", not as a measurement.

The criticism worth taking seriously

There is a serious objection to this whole framing, and it deserves more than a footnote. Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey argued in Harvard Business Review that the impostor-syndrome label pathologises individuals for a response produced by their environment. The original research studied women in institutions that were, in fact, structurally hostile to them. Relabelling that as a confidence deficiency shifts the burden of repair onto the person experiencing it and away from the organisation producing it.

I find this persuasive, and it has a practical edge. If you are the only person of your background in the room, if your ideas get attributed to whoever repeats them, if you are interrupted more than your colleagues, then a feeling of not belonging is not a cognitive distortion. It is a reasonably accurate reading of the room. Trying to fix it with a gratitude journal is solving the wrong problem.

So before adopting the label, ask a blunt question: is this coming from inside, or is the environment telling me something? Sometimes both. But the answer changes what to do, and the standard advice assumes the first answer without checking.

The ordinary version, which is not a syndrome at all

The most common thing I see in people I mentor is not impostor phenomenon. It is the correct and unpleasant experience of being new.

If you have just been promoted, changed field, or started leading people for the first time, you are genuinely less competent at this than you were at the thing you were doing before. That discomfort is not a malfunction. It is what learning feels like from the inside, and treating it as a psychological problem to be eliminated is both inaccurate and unhelpful. The question is only whether the discomfort is proportional.

Rough test, and it is rough: can you name the specific thing you do not yet know how to do? "I have never run a performance conversation and I am dreading it" is a description of a skill gap with an obvious remedy. "They are all going to find out I am a fraud" names nothing, cannot be acted on, and does not update when you succeed. The first is information. The second is a loop.

Where it actually costs you

I want to avoid the genre convention of attaching a large invented lifetime earnings figure to this. Nobody knows that number and the ones circulating are made up.

What I can describe is the mechanism, because I see it from the manager's side. People with a strong impostor pattern systematically under-ask. They do not volunteer for the visible project. They soften the description of their own work until it disappears. They decline to apply for a role until they meet every stated requirement, which is a bar the people who get those roles routinely ignore. They redirect credit so consistently that after two years nobody, including their manager, can say clearly what they did.

The cost is real, it accumulates, and none of it looks like failure from the outside. That is what makes it hard to intervene on.

What seems to help

Cautiously, because a lot of the advice here is more confident than the evidence supports.

Keeping a record helps, but not the version usually recommended. A list of wins is easy to dismiss in exactly the mood where you need it. What is harder to argue with is a decision log: what you chose, what you were weighing, what you did not know at the time, how it turned out. It documents judgement rather than outcomes, and judgement is the thing the impostor voice claims you do not have.

Asking specific people specific questions helps. Not "am I doing okay", which invites reassurance you will discount, but "what would take this from good to excellent" or "what do you think I am worse at than I realise". Answers to those are usable, and they are much harder to dismiss as politeness.

Talking to people one stage ahead helps more than most things. The comparison that fuels this is structurally unfair: you compare your unedited internal state with everyone else's finished, public output. A senior colleague describing what the first year actually felt like corrects that asymmetry faster than any amount of self-talk.

And acting before feeling ready, in small increments, tends to work where waiting to feel ready does not. Confidence in my experience follows evidence rather than preceding it, which means the sequence most people want — feel ready, then act — is backwards.

What managers can do, because this is partly our problem

If you run a team, some of this is yours to fix rather than theirs.

Name the learning curve explicitly when someone starts something new, with a timeframe. "Six months before this feels normal" prevents a person from reading ordinary difficulty as evidence of unsuitability. Give feedback specific enough to be useful; vague praise is discounted by exactly the people who most need accurate information. Notice who is not speaking and find out why before concluding they have nothing to say. Watch for ideas being reattributed in meetings, because it happens more than people believe and it does more damage than anything happening inside the individual's head.

And be careful not to read confidence as competence when interviewing. It is the easiest mistake to make and I have made it. The candidate who says "I do not know, here is how I would find out" is usually the stronger hire.

When it is more than this

One honest limit. Everything above is about an ordinary if uncomfortable working experience. Persistent self-doubt that comes with sleep you cannot fix, dread that does not lift, or an inability to function is a different matter, and it is outside what a career article can responsibly address. If that is closer to your situation, a professional — a doctor, a therapist, or an employee assistance service if you have one — is the right place to take it, and seeking help early is not an admission of anything.

For the everyday version, the realistic outcome is not that the feeling disappears. It is that it stops being the thing that decides what you apply for.