Imposter Syndrome at Work: Why the Label Might Be Wrong
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
A senior professional sits down for a routine catch-up and replays a comment from a meeting three days earlier. The comment was minor. Nobody else in the room remembers it. She does, in detail, and she has already decided it proves something about her competence that fifteen years of results does not.
That scene repeats itself across offices, classrooms, and boardrooms every week, and it almost always gets the same label attached to it: imposter syndrome. Naming it that way is where most advice on imposter syndrome at work goes wrong. The danger in the label is not simply that it gets overused. It is that different problems start receiving the same solution. Self-doubt is information, but only once you have worked out what it is actually information about. Sometimes it points to a genuine skills gap. Sometimes it points to a transition still settling. Sometimes it points to an organisation that has quietly stopped giving someone what they need to succeed. Treat all three the same way, and none of them actually get fixed.
What Clance and Imes Actually Found
The term originated in 1978, when psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes studied a group of highly accomplished women who could not accept their own success as legitimate. They attributed their achievements to luck, timing, or charm rather than skill, and lived with a persistent fear of being exposed as frauds despite clear evidence to the contrary.
What is now commonly called imposter syndrome began in the academic literature as the impostor phenomenon, and that distinction is worth holding onto. Imposter syndrome is not a recognised psychiatric diagnosis. The original researchers described a phenomenon, a recognisable and explainable experience, not a syndrome requiring treatment. Yet workplace conversation has increasingly borrowed the more clinical-sounding version of the term, and in doing so it can make an entirely understandable response to circumstances sound like an individual pathology. From here, this piece uses imposter syndrome, since that is the language most readers recognise, but the more accurate description sits closer to the original phrase.
A Teacher Who Knew Her Subject and Still Doubted Herself
One client came to me a few years ago after a short introductory call, initially just looking for a general conversation about where she stood in her career. She had been teaching for around five years and had always been reliable in the classroom. The specific subjects she taught had changed over that time, meaning she had to relearn and readapt some of her material from scratch, and that adjustment period had quietly convinced her she was no longer good at her job.
Her internal script was blunt. I am the teacher, so I should know everything. If I admit I don't know something, they will realise I am incompetent and should not be teaching this class. In practice, that belief showed up as panic when a student asked an unexpected question, or a rushed attempt to bluff her way through an answer rather than admit uncertainty, or a defensive edge that crept into conversations where her authority felt threatened.
She booked in for one focused session built entirely around this issue. What became clear quite quickly was that nothing about her had actually declined. Her subject knowledge was still strong. What had changed was the material itself, and updating your knowledge when the syllabus moves is not evidence of fraudulence. It is simply what staying current in a skilled profession requires. Once she could separate "the content changed" from "I am no longer competent," the panic response had far less to attach itself to.
Imposter Syndrome at Work, or Something Else Entirely?
Not every uncomfortable moment at work is imposter syndrome, and treating every one as such does professionals a disservice. If you are learning a new system, stepping into a bigger role, or moving into an unfamiliar sector, you will have real gaps to close. That discomfort is not a psychological problem. It is what learning feels like from the inside.
There is a third category that gets missed almost every time this subject comes up. Someone can be entirely competent and reasonably well supported and still lose confidence for a period, simply because their reference point has changed. A new director, a different organisation, a bigger remit, a return after an extended absence, or suddenly working alongside people with different expertise can all produce the same temporary dip. This is not a capability gap, and it is not imposter syndrome in the persistent sense described below. It is recalibration, and it tends to resolve on its own once the new reference point becomes familiar.
Genuine imposter syndrome looks different again. It persists after the evidence has already arrived, long past the point where recalibration would normally settle. A teacher who has successfully readapted her material and received good feedback from students should feel that confidence return over time. When it does not, when success gets quietly explained away as luck or good timing rather than absorbed as proof, that is the signal worth paying attention to. The gap has closed on paper, but the belief about yourself has not moved to match it.
Why Experienced Professionals Are Particularly Prone to This
One of the more frustrating things about this kind of self-doubt is that it can sit alongside an exceptionally strong track record. Skilled professionals tend to hold themselves to demanding standards, notice their own errors quickly, and care deeply about the quality of what they produce. Those traits serve them well for most of their career, right up until they start turning inward as constant self-surveillance rather than useful quality control.
A conscientious manager may replay a difficult conversation for days, convinced it revealed some failing in how she leads people, while someone with less awareness of their own impact would simply file the same conversation away as a normal part of the job. The problem is not the reflection itself. Reflection is valuable. The problem begins when reflection tips into rumination, and every imperfect outcome starts to feel like a verdict on the person's fitness for the role rather than one data point among many.
Certain situations tend to intensify this further. Being new to a senior team, returning from an extended period of leave, or changing direction into an unfamiliar sector all raise the stakes and sharpen the internal scrutiny, usually for the recalibration reasons described above. Being one of very few people from your background in the room can add another layer entirely, and it deserves to be named honestly rather than folded into the same explanation. That situation can involve real bias, heavier scrutiny, or being expected to prove yourself repeatedly in a way colleagues are not. None of this reflects a lack of ability, and what it actually reflects will differ from person to person. It deserves a more specific conversation than a general reminder to feel more confident.
When the Problem Sits With the System, Not the Person
Here is the part that gets skipped in most advice on this subject. Calling persistent self-doubt a syndrome puts the fault entirely inside the individual. It suggests they are broken and need to fix their mindset, which conveniently draws attention away from the conditions that produced the doubt in the first place. Vague expectations, inconsistent feedback, unrealistic workloads, and a culture that rewards visibility over quiet, solid contribution will produce exactly this kind of response in otherwise skilled people, and no amount of positive self-talk resolves a structural problem.
PwC's 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears survey found that just 51% of non-managers globally felt they had the resources they needed to build new skills, compared with 72% of senior executives. That statistic does not prove that a lack of development support causes workplace self-doubt. What it does show is that employees do not experience development support equally across organisational levels, and that gap is wide enough to matter. Where someone is expected to adapt and perform at a high standard without the same support their more senior colleagues take for granted, the self-doubt that follows deserves to be read as a reasonable response to a real shortfall, not simply as evidence of a fragile mindset.
This does not mean individual work is pointless. It means the individual work should sit alongside a clear look at whether expectations are realistic, whether feedback is specific enough to act on, and whether the person has actually been given what they need to succeed. Asking someone to think more positively about a genuinely unsupported situation is not a solution. It is a way of avoiding the harder conversation about what the organisation owes its people.
Building Evidence Instead of Waiting for Reassurance
Reassurance from a manager or colleague feels good for a day and then fades, because it does not change the underlying belief driving the doubt. What holds up over time is evidence, examined with the same fairness you would extend to a colleague rather than the harshness you reserve for yourself.
Take a recent piece of work that triggered self-doubt and interrogate it properly. What was the actual situation? What did you do, what decisions did you make, and what was the outcome, including the parts that were not perfect? What does that example genuinely demonstrate about how you operate under pressure? Done honestly and repeatedly, this builds something far more durable than a mood on a difficult afternoon. It builds a case file you can return to when the doubt resurfaces, which it will.
It also helps to separate fact from interpretation, since the two get tangled together far too easily. "The head of department asked three follow-up questions" is a fact. "The head of department thinks I don't know what I'm doing" is an interpretation, and one that rarely survives a direct conversation once you actually ask for clarification instead of assuming the worst.
Understanding your own strengths in detail sharpens this evidence-gathering considerably, because it gives you specific territory to test your work against rather than a vague sense of whether you did well. A structured strengths assessment such as the Strengthscope Standard Profile can help with this, by mapping where you create the most value and where a strength tends to get overused under pressure, so the evidence you collect has something solid to sit against.
This matters for managers too, not only for the person experiencing the doubt. When someone on your team appears hesitant, over-prepares for every small task, or reacts defensively to reasonable questions, a vague reminder to be more confident rarely changes anything. A more useful conversation asks what they believe is expected of them, what evidence they are using to judge their own performance, and where the role feels genuinely unclear. Often, a specific conversation about priorities and decision rights does more good than several rounds of encouragement, because it addresses the actual source of the doubt rather than papering over it. Some organisations choose to bring in dedicated, one to one internal development support for a specific person going through exactly this kind of transition, rather than leaving the conversation entirely to a manager who may not have the time or the distance to run it well.
What This Means for You
The teacher who came to me a few years ago did not need reassurance that she was good at her job. She needed to see clearly that the ground had moved under her, not that she had failed to keep up with it. Once that distinction became clearer, she had a much more useful way of responding when uncertainty appeared.
Before reaching for the imposter syndrome label on yourself or on someone you manage, work out what you are actually dealing with. A genuine gap to close, a transition that has not yet settled, a belief that has stopped listening to evidence, or an organisation that has not given someone what they need will each call for a different response, and only one of the four is really about confidence at all. That question is usually more useful than another reminder to believe in yourself. For senior professionals who recognise this in themselves and want a more structured, evidence-led route through it, Ascent is built around exactly that kind of clarity.
By Paula Donnan
Strength at Work | Better judgement. Stronger leadership. Higher performance.
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