The Top-Most Pressing Issue For First-Time Managers & What To Do About It
Just got promoted to your first managerial role in your career? Feeling like you don´t belong there? Feeling like a fraud waiting to be found out?
Welcome to being human!
You may have the classic case of ‘Imposter Syndrome’.
This post deals with this subject from the purview of being a first-time manager in an organization.
Note: The post is divided into the “My story” section (in Italics) and the “Gyan” section.
The former section briefly describes my personal struggle with the topic and how I overcame it.
The latter sheds light on the subject in general and the ways to overcome it without needing to go into my personal life story.
I segregated the article into these two sections to be sensitive to the reader´s time constraints.
The TL;DR types can directly check out the ‘Gyan’ section while others are invited to go through the post in its entirety.
Step 1: Know Thy Enemy
Knowing your enemy is half the battle won.
What is Imposter Syndrome?
My Story
When I got promoted to be the leader of a team of 14 young and talented data science graduates 2 years ago, I was ecstatic.
It was a great promotion from a technical role into the management cadre. I was waiting for this kind of opportunity to prove my mettle.
However, during the first month on the job, I started having the feeling that I was wrongly promoted! I felt like a fraud who was about to be found out.
At times I cursed myself for having gone out of my comfort zone and having accepted this role since I felt like a sure-shot failure. This feeling waxed and waned. I felt I had no control over how I felt.
I wanted to go to my manager and inform him of my wrong decision of accepting this managerial role. Although a tiny part of me was excited about this new role, a bigger part of me wanted to regress to doing my previous work.
What the hell was I dealing with?
Gyan
When you worry excessively about not being good enough at what you do and you believe that you´ve attained success and reached where you have in your life due to sheer dumb luck, you may be dealing with Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter Syndrome can affect anyone in any walk of life.
Classic Signs That You May Have It
- You excessively worry that you´ll fail at any moment
- You worry that your incompetence will be found out by your team
- You worry that you will not live up to the expectations of your superiors who believed in you and promoted you to take up higher responsibilities
- You worry that even the smallest of mistakes is more than enough to disappoint your management
- You are unable to truthfully assess your talents and skills
- You don´t give yourself enough credit for your and your team´s successes
- You try to overcompensate for your feeling of incompetence by working longer, setting challenging goals, being everywhere, doing everything
Helpful Statistic: 70% of the general populace deal with Imposter Syndrome at some point in their lives.
See? You are not a special snowflake. Billions before you had it. Billions after you will have it.
Armed with the right knowledge, it is just a matter of time before you overcome it.
Step 2: Study The Enemy´s Methods
What Causes Imposter Syndrome
My Story
I am a through and through Operations/Supply Chain guy with a business background. I lead a team of hardcore data scientists who eat, sleep, dream data science.
I was not ‘one of them’. Data science was not ‘my thing’. I was not yet competent in that field as they were. I did not write code as well as they did.
I was promoted for my market knowledge, business knowledge, communication skills and other skills that would help me succeed in this role. But I did not know this back then.
To compensate for the lack of my technical knowledge, I almost overworked & over-worried myself to burnout at one point in time.
I read a lot on the subject. I completed online courses in data science. However, I always had this nagging feeling inside me that I was ill-equipped and that they would see through the sham that I was.
I always had this feeling of powerlessness although I had levelled up in the organigram.
Thinking back and researching on why I had undergone this experience, I came across some interesting discoveries.
Gyan
There can be multiple causes of Imposter Syndrome. The 3 main ones are:
- Transitioning To New Roles: When you are well settled in a role and are viewed as the ‘James Bond’ in that role, you feel a sense of accomplishment and pride. Being placed out of the comfort zone when taking up a new & challenging role that you´ve not been exposed to in the past can be quite unsettling and can trigger this syndrome.
- Family & Cultural Upbringing: If you come from a family or culture where achievement is valued over simply being, it can create in a person, a mindset wherein their inherent value of self is inextricably linked to their achievements.
- Perfectionism: For a perfectionist, a job is well done only when all the ‘I’s are dotted and the ‘T’s are crossed. A small deviation to the norm can cause sleepless nights. Mistakes are viewed as blemishes on their personality and a chinks in their shiny armour. They will have them at no cost.
Step 3: Step In For The Kill
Deliver the finishing blow; Hammer the final nail in its coffin.
How To Overcome Imposter Syndrome
My Story
The first thing I needed was a change in my way of thinking. I needed to understand my role. It dawned on me that I need not be an expert in Data Science.
My role was that of a leader, a people-enabler who had to ensure smooth, efficient and effective operations with minimum error rates.
My role included goal setting, target setting, getting the best out of my teammates.
The skills required of me were not that of coding but more of high-level thinking, strategy setting, team building, creating an atmosphere where people could bring their best each day.
Knowing this helped me get the ‘imposter syndrome’ wrench out of my bum (as Alex Mathers puts it so comically and succinctly in one of his many brilliant writings. Do check out his writings. Helps me a ton!)
Don´t get me wrong, I still need to know tons of data science. But knowing that I am not competing with my team for knowledge on data science, but rather collaborating with them to bring out our best to our roles, helped reduce the imposter syndrome.
Setting realistic goals helped. This is linked with the above point. Initially, when I was new to the role, I was still fixated on my old way of working. I could not unplug the ‘technical’ and plug in the ‘managerial’.
I set more realistic and meaningful goals that were apt for me. I was less fixated on writing the perfect code and more on getting things done and presenting my team´s excellent work to the leadership teams.
This way of SMART goal setting helped me reduce the impact of Imposter Syndrome.
I networked with people I trusted and asked for their advice. Knowing that people have undergone the same thing and overcame it successfully helped me put my issues in perspective and gave me the courage to face my challenges head-on.
As I gained more experience and things became more clearer, I settled in and started outperforming in my role.
Gyan
Let´s get straight to them.
1. Stop Resisting. Start Accepting
When you are stuck in your comfort zone and unwilling to change, ‘resistance’ builds up within you. It acts up in various ways — one of them being Imposter Syndrome.
Your superiors believe that you have inside yourself, what it takes to succeed in this role. They have most likely sailed on the same boat and have likely experienced the same things that you are going through now.
Accept the new reality staring you in the face. Know that you are ready for it.
2. Figure Out Your Exact Role & Assess Your Skills
What exactly is your job description? Do you know it? If unclear, have a One-on-One with your manager.
Although the above point seems ridiculously basic, a first-time manager most likely needs some degree of hand-holding. Being promoted from an operational role to a manager post is a big transition and without guidance many fail.
Next, there will be things you know and things that you have no clue about. Acknowledging what you know and what you don´t is the first step to success. This helps you identify your areas of focus which leads us to our next point.
3. Set Realistic Goals
Next, chart out realistic short, medium and long-term goals based on your focus areas. Again, take your manager´s help if need be.
Rather than trying to devour the elephant whole, eat it one bite at a time. Check off your goals one by one.
You will surely make mistakes and encounter failures. But each time you trip and your mind berates you for a shabby job, remind yourself that you are on a path of growth.
Success doesn´t come overnight. It takes time.
4. Believe That People Want You To Succeed
If you believe that everyone out there is out to get out and waiting for you to fail, it puts unnecessary pressure on you. This negative frame of mind can keep you from achieving success.
Regardless of how things might look from the outside, you have to choose to believe that your team trusts you, that you manager trusts you, people are rooting for you to succeed.
This kind of thinking takes the unnecessary pressure off you and let´s you focus on achieving success in your new role.
5. Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable & Ask For Help
You will not know many things in your new role. It takes time (months) to settle in.
Be OK with asking for help.
You might have been the go-to guy/girl in your previous role. Now you might be starting from scratch. It is OK.
Set your ego aside and find help. Talk to people who have been-there-done-that. This kind of help needn´t necessarily come from within your team. Talk to others whom you trust.
6. Celebrate Little Wins
In the rat race named career, we forget to stop once in a while and acknowledge the little wins that we´ve achieved along the way.
It is very easy for person with Imposter Syndrome to push aside these mini-successes and instead blow up the tiniest of mistakes in the elusive quest for perfection.
This is a classic trap that you must avoid falling for at all costs.
So, go out and have a nice celebration each time you achieve something small. It is the achievement that matters and not its size.
7. Comparisons are Futile
We always compare, even though we very well know that it is a game we can never win.
There will always be someone who is better than us in one way or another. Thus this useless activity is inherently designed to cause mental stress & fatigue. Imposter Syndrome is an outcome of this activity.
If you are indeed hell-bent on comparing, then compare yourself to a version of yourself from the previous day.
Have you grown by a tiny bit? If yes, it is a success. After all that is the most apt and useful comparison that you can do.
Above are some of the tips that helped me during my journey to conquer my mental demons. Hope you find them useful too.
Would love to hear your experiences with Imposter syndrome and how you tackled it?