“Imposter syndrome” is the chronic self-doubt that - despite external evidence to the contrary - you are not fit to be “the leader.”  Many people experience this as a nagging anxiety that there is just something about them that is somehow not fit for a certain position or level of leadership.  But I wanted to shine light on the opposite problem:  what I’ll call “leader syndrome.”  And leader syndrome is the feeling or belief that there is something about me that makes me inherently fit to be a “leader.”  While it’s likely to be read as confidence, I think it’s the flip side of the “imposter syndrome” coin, and problematic for its own reasons.

The knee-jerk reaction to fix or change the people we are leading is so strong.  For most of my career, I tried to fix or change at the very first hint that someone or something was not what I felt it should be.  I might have had a 5% window into what was actually happening, and switched into action mode.  So many of the leaders we support have also been conditioned to operate this way, and often feel overt pressure to demonstrate that they’re aggressively fixing and changing anything that doesn’t meet “the bar.” There’s a BIG problem with this approach…

At some point in the next six months, is your team going to spend time stepping away from the work and focusing on “building team?” If so, I would love to make a case for team un-building. Before team “building,” spend time on team “being,” where a true opportunity is created to build awareness around what people actually experience and the only goal is honesty and curiosity.