Impostor syndrome at work: meetings, promotions, praise

Hannah is sitting in a meeting where the room has spent half an hour on why the deadline is slipping. She has the answer. She has been turning it over since morning and has rephrased it twice. She does not say it. She waits to see whether somebody else will get there, and somebody does: the colleague across the table says almost the same thing, only two sentences shorter. The room nods and the meeting moves on.

Walking back to her desk, Hannah does not tell herself she should have spoken. She tells herself it obviously was not anything complicated, since he got there too. That is the pattern people call impostor syndrome, in one small gesture. It is not that a person does not know. It is that they will not let their own knowledge out, and when somebody else says it aloud, they retrospectively mark it down.

The gap between results and inner certainty was described by the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. It is neither an illness nor a disorder and it does not appear in the classifications of mental disorders; it is a widespread way in which some people interpret their own success. Where it comes from and what it is made of is taken apart in the overview of impostor syndrome. This piece goes one floor down, straight into the office.

Why it speaks loudest at work

Nobody reviews you every quarter at home. Work supplies three things that self-doubt thrives on: measurable output, uninterrupted comparison, and a role you have to fit into somehow.

Output is visible. The analysis sent, the number hit, the project that landed. But a result never carries any information about what it cost you, and that is exactly the gap doubt moves into. A finished thing looks easy even to the person who made it, because the road to it cannot be seen in it, so it gets rewritten as "anyone could have done that".

The second thing is comparison. In an office you see your colleagues' finished output, not their awkward first drafts and not the hour when they had no idea how to go on. With yourself you watch the whole process, dead ends and all. So you are comparing somebody else's stage with your own backstage and wondering why yours looks so untidy.

And third, the role. A position has a name, a description and a salary, and all of it together is a claim about what a person can do. When your inner certainty parts company with that claim, you get the feeling that you are playing something that is not yours. Anyone working for themselves has none of that scaffolding, and the doubt finds another route in; there is a separate piece on how impostor syndrome shows up in entrepreneurs.

How many people this affects in total cannot honestly be stated. A systematic review led by Dena Bravata with her team in 2020 went through 62 studies and found prevalence estimates ranging from 9 to 82 percent, depending on who was asked and how. The widely quoted "seventy percent" comes from a 2011 review by Sakulku and Alexander, where it is the authors' estimate rather than a measured figure. Nobody has the exact number. The only certain part is that this is not a fringe phenomenon.

The situations that reliably set it off

Self-doubt does not arrive evenly. It can sit quietly for months and then speak up at moments that have something in common: the ratio between what is expected of you and what you have already tested shifts.

• Starting a new job. You do not know the shortcuts, the systems or the people, so you spend the first weeks in a situation where you do not know more than you do know. Most newcomers read that as information about themselves, when it is a description of arriving.
• A promotion. The odd twist is that doubts usually get louder afterwards. You stop being the best specialist in the room and start doing something you have never done, while still measuring yourself with the old ruler. There is a separate piece on what it is like to be a manager for the first time.
• Changing field. Ten years of experience do not transfer as a block; some of it stops applying. It is easy to forget that what does transfer tends to be the part that matters.
• Presenting to people who know the subject. A conference, a client from your own industry, colleagues from abroad. At a moment like that the audience stops functioning as an audience and turns into an examining board.
• Praise from your manager. Yes, praise too. If your feeling of being a fraud is running strong, you read it as evidence that you have fooled even the person doing the praising.

That last item is where the whole thing breaks. If self-doubt dissolved in success, the first well delivered piece of work would settle it. Instead it tends to grow with success, because every step up raises the stakes and adds more people in front of whom you could fail. When did you last get praise from which nothing at all was left by the following day?

Extra preparation, overtime and other forms of masking

You cannot spot it from outside. People with this pattern usually do not come across as insecure, because they mask the insecurity with work, and the masking is so effective that everyone around files it under conscientiousness.

Marcus set aside two evenings for a presentation to the board, rewrote it five times and prepared answers to questions nobody asked. It went well. Except that in his head the success was not credited to him; it was credited to the extra preparation. Without it, he thought, the whole thing would have come out. Preparation had turned into an insurance policy that must never lapse.

Psychologically this is a neat trap. Extra preparation quiets the insecurity for a few hours, which confirms it as necessary, and you walk into the next situation with the same fear as before. Add the fact that a free evening starts to feel like an exposure risk, and you have a road you can travel uncomfortably far down. The link between this pattern and exhaustion is taken apart in the piece on impostor syndrome and burnout.

Masking has one more layer, described by Mark Leary and his colleagues in 2000: lowering expectations out loud. Lines like "I didn't really get much time to prepare" or "well, let's see how this goes" build a cushion in case of failure. They are expensive, though, because when it then goes well, the result already has an explanation ready that manages perfectly well without you.

And then there is the part that costs both the employer and the person themselves. Neureiter and Traut-Mattausch described in 2016 that this pattern is linked to lower career motivation and less willingness to go for higher positions, including among people whose qualifications would get them there. Self-doubt does not only cost you peace of mind, then. It costs fairly tangible opportunities.

What to do in the meeting, the presentation and the review

Advice along the lines of "believe in yourself" is useless here, because doubt does not argue with it, it simply does not hear it. What works better is having one rule and one sentence ready for the most common situations, neither of which depends on how you happen to feel.

One measure goes with all of this and works across situations: a ceiling on preparation. Decide in advance how much time something gets, say two hours for a presentation, and stop when it runs out regardless of how you feel. Those extra ninety minutes will not lift the quality; they only quiet your head for a while, and teach it to speak up just as loudly next time.

The last item in this chapter belongs in the kitchen rather than the boardroom: talk about it. Clance and Imes built their work with clients mainly on groups, because the sense of being uniquely incompetent dissolves the moment you hear it from somebody you consider unarguably good. Unspoken doubt grows. Spoken, it shrinks.

What a manager can do about it

A manager has more influence on this pattern than they think, and they waste most of it on reassurance. The sentence "come on, you're brilliant" gets translated inside the other person's head within a second as politeness, or as proof that this person does not know the crucial thing about you.

Being specific works better. Instead of assessing the person, name one thing they did and say which part of it was theirs. Specific feedback is far harder to shrink than general praise, because it cannot be waved away with "anyone could have done that". It has a name, a date and a decision in it.

Alongside that, what you hand people counts for a lot. Trust expressed through an assignment is a different category from trust expressed in words, and a harder thing to own is a piece of information nobody translates as a kindness. It also helps when a manager admits out loud how uncertain they felt in their own first months; a team takes more from one sentence like that than from a whole workshop on company culture. How to talk about this with a colleague, a partner or a direct report is taken apart in the piece on how to help someone with impostor syndrome.

Where your own doubts come in

It is useful to know which route the doubt takes into you specifically, because each one needs a different intervention. Three sources are distinguished, and most people have one of them noticeably stronger than the other two.

• Feeling like a fraud is the quiet assumption that your place belongs to somebody more capable and that this will come out one day. At work you recognise it by the silence in meetings and by the questions you do not ask.
• With discounting success the results are there, they just do not stay warm. Praise gets a rider attached, all that remains of a review is the one critical sentence, and the bar moves up a notch after every target you hit.
• Whoever has luck and circumstance as their strongest source looks for the cause of success outside: in the timing, in a good team, in a panel that happened to be generous. But chance cannot be trusted, so no result ever brings any peace.

The sources do not exclude one another; they are more like three sides of a single pattern, and what matters is the ratio between them. The overall level of doubt runs from minimal to strong, and it is only from the elevated level upwards that it is worth doing something about deliberately. You can estimate this without a test, it just takes longer: for two weeks, write down the first sentence that goes through your head after every good result, and the pattern shows up in those notes by itself.

A faster starting point is the short impostor syndrome test, which shows both the overall level of doubt and which of the three sources speaks loudest in your case. Treat the result as a hypothesis to check against your own meetings, not as a label, and certainly not as a diagnosis. If self-doubt has been weighing on you for a long time and is taking your sleep or your appetite for things you used to enjoy, that belongs in a conversation with a professional, not in an article.

One sentence for your next meeting

Try one single thing at your next meeting. When a thought turns up that you would normally swallow because it is not finished yet, say it unfinished. "I'm not sure about this, but it occurs to me that..." is a good enough shape for it.

Two things become obvious straight away. First, nobody registers the half-built thought as a weakness, because that is how almost everyone talks in meetings. Second, with help from the others the idea usually gets finished faster than you would have finished it alone at home that evening.

Then write down what happened. Not the feeling, the fact: who picked it up, what was done with it. Next time the sentence about not belonging here comes round, you will have something more concrete than good intentions to put against it.