Impostor syndrome as a new manager: your first team

Daniel is chairing his first meeting as head of a team where until last week he sat as an ordinary member. He works through the brief, hands out the tasks, and on the third item Sarah stops him. She has done that particular work six years longer than he has, she is right, and the whole table can see it.

Daniel thanks her and moves the agenda on. On the drive home, though, he replays the moment for roughly the tenth time and lands on a question he would never say out loud: who gave me the right to run people who understand this better than I do?

It sounds like a confession of weakness. It is in fact a predictable by-product of promotion with one inconvenient property: the harder you try to argue it away with performance, the more reliably it comes back.

You were promoted for work you will no longer be doing

For years you learned something specific and did it better than most people around you. That is exactly what the promotion was for. Except that the new job is made of different material: priorities, conversations, decisions nobody will check, and results produced by somebody else.

The old yardstick stays with you. A month ago a day could be judged by what was finished in the evening. Now you have six meetings behind you and nothing you could show anyone. The sense that you did not really do anything today is close to standard equipment in the first months of leading, and it says nothing about the quality of your work.

A second thing joins it. You have stopped being the best specialist in the room, and in a well assembled team you are not supposed to be: a group where the boss understands everything best has a very low ceiling. From the inside, though, that looks less like good team building and more like proof that you ended up somewhere you do not belong.

The third change barely gets named and hurts the most. A specialist got feedback almost immediately: the code either ran or it did not, the analysis was praised or somebody found a hole in it. Leadership runs on a different clock. Whether you put the team together well shows up in half a year, and even then it can be read several ways. Your head fills that silence with an assessment of its own, and it is a good deal harsher than reality.

The feeling has a name. Impostor syndrome was described by the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978 in people who have the results but cannot claim them. It is not an illness or a disorder and it does not appear in the classifications of mental disorders; it is a learned way of interpreting your own success.

How widespread it is can only be said cautiously. A review of 62 studies led by Dena Bravata in 2020 found prevalence estimates ranging from 9 to 82 percent, depending on whom the authors asked and how. Such a spread says more about measurement than about people. One thing does follow safely: among managers you are nowhere near alone with that question, it simply never comes up in meetings.

The root of the doubt is not the same for everyone, either. Some people carry a feeling like a fraud, the quiet assumption that the role belongs to somebody more capable and one day it will come out. Others are held back by discounting success, where every good result passes through a filter that takes some of its weight away. And then there is luck and circumstance: the promotion came from a coincidence, good timing and nobody better being around. Each of those three roots shows up differently in a leadership role, which is why encouragement along the lines of "believe in yourself" leads nowhere. What the sources look like in an ordinary working day is unpacked in the piece on how impostor syndrome shows up at work.

Three habits the team notices before you do

In a leadership role, doubt almost never shows up as somebody talking about it. It shows up as behaviour that reads completely differently from outside than it was meant.

That last row is usually the most expensive one. Round the clock availability is a gesture of humility from the inside and a norm from the outside. A new manager sets it within a few weeks without saying a word, and then wonders why the team dissolves into overtime nobody asked for.

The middle row costs the most nerves, because it looks responsible. Waiting for certainty can always be defended by the need for better material, except that the decision which was never made is working against you meanwhile: people are idle, deadlines move, and a reading spreads through the team in which the boss does not dare to own it. A postponed decision hardly ever ripens by itself. It only gets older.

Sarah from the opening example would put it simply: the new boss is a decent man, only decisions hang in the air around him and there is no waiting them out. Of his late night questions she knows nothing. She sees the consequences.

How many decisions from the past week are lying with you, waiting until you feel sure? The answer says more about your role than any self-assessment.

A new yardstick: the role is not the expertise

The first adjustment that helps separates two things that fused into one in your head. Expertise is what you can do. The role is what you are now responsible for. The two overlap only partly, and with every further promotion the overlap shrinks, so measuring a role by expertise is like weighing a length.

Try writing in one sentence what your job actually is. Not a list of agendas, one sentence: so that this team delivers this, and so that the people in it grow a bit. Expertise sits in that sentence as a tool, not an entry condition. And a few things work better in the first months of leading than trying to be the best in the room again:

• A ceiling on certainty. A practical rule circulates among managers in various forms: decide with roughly seventy percent of the information. It is not a research finding, more of a crutch, but it holds together, because the information missing from the remaining thirty usually costs more time than a slightly better decision saves.
• The sentence "I do not know, I will find out by Friday" is what new managers fear most, and it is exactly what lowers the tension in the room. A team does not need a boss who knows everything, it needs to know when it gets an answer.
• Hand over even the things you do better. A task done by a colleague at eighty percent of your level is still a task off your desk, and in three months it tends to be ninety.
• Find yourself a mentor outside the company. Inside, doubt is hard to talk about, because every listener either evaluates you or reports to you. A person from outside in the same field does not carry that conflict.
• Keep a record of decisions rather than impressions. Three lines once a week: what you decided, on what information, and how it turned out. After three months you hold a document of your own work that the feeling of not really running anything cannot compete with.

That last point needs patience. Notes show their worth only after several months, when a ratio emerges that memory never produces on its own: most decisions were reasonable, some neutral and a few bad. Under pressure, memory pulls up mainly the last group.

When the doubt turns into overtime

Over-preparation is the quietest and most expensive way of silencing doubt for a while. Before a meeting you go through the material a third time, rewrite the presentation and would rather write the team's handout yourself. It works reliably, only briefly, and next time it takes a bit more.

In a leadership role this mechanism has one unexpected consequence. A 2016 study by Neureiter and Traut-Mattausch showed that stronger doubts about one's own competence are connected with weaker career planning and less appetite for pursuing a leadership position. The doubt does not stop at costing you energy; it shapes where you are willing to go at all.

Rest, meanwhile, does not feel like a right in that state but like a risk. A free evening means you did less than the maximum, and the maximum is the only insurance against exposure you have. Where that road leads and where it can be stopped earlier is described in the text on how impostor syndrome and burnout hang together.

What to do about it in the people you lead

A manager going through this spots it in others sooner and more accurately than anybody else. The quiet person in the meeting, the colleague who turns down the chance to present her own result, the newcomer with triple the preparation: none of them is lazy and none is a star. Usually it is the same pattern one floor down.

Reassurance works worst of all. The sentence "you are brilliant, though" gets rewritten in the recipient's head into "the boss is a decent person" and changes nothing. Specific feedback is far more usable, the kind nobody can wriggle out of: what exactly the person did, what it caused, and why not just anyone would have pulled it off. Handing over more demanding work serves the same purpose, because trust expressed through tasks weighs more than trust expressed through praise. There is a whole separate guide on how to help someone close to you with impostor syndrome.

Share your own doubts sparingly and concretely. A remark that in your first month you also had no idea whether you could do the job gives people permission to speak. Putting yourself down in front of the team on a regular basis has the opposite effect, because a subordinate has nowhere to put the information that their boss does not believe in himself.

It is worth knowing where your own doubt comes from, because what to do with it differs accordingly. Ten minutes is enough, and the answer is offered by the Impostor Syndrome Test, which distinguishes whether feeling like a fraud, discounting success or luck and circumstance prevails in you. The result is approximate, a hypothesis to check against your own meetings rather than a label.

And one thing for tomorrow. Pick a single decision that has been lying with you for more than a week and make it with what you know now. Not because that would be brave, but because from a decision that never happened the team reads no sense of responsibility, only hesitation.