“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.

Have you ever gotten a piece of praise that strokes your ego but makes your heart sink?  Perhaps you get the validation you’ve been chasing after, but somehow – on some deeper level – it doesn’t feel so good when you actually get it. 

Early in my career I internalized this idea that “feedback is a gift.” And I think there’s no question that highly functional teams utilize feedback in various forms as a powerful tool. But like any tool, it can be misused. And I’ve noticed within myself - along with hundreds of leaders that we’ve worked with – how the act of feedback can become performative or even harmful.

For most of my career, I’ve been a big believer in defining your values as an organization.  In my previous role, I helped lead an organization of 2,000+ people to redefine an organizational set of values.  I’ve seen the power of values.  And I’ve also misused them.  And that’s the challenge with values:  they’re easily misused, and sometimes, even outright weaponized. 

For most of my career, I was a judgment specialist.  I equated leadership, in large part, to judging … labeling something or someone as not good enough.  Pushing.  Correcting.  I did a lot of judging and also nurtured the judgmental instincts in others. Here’s what I’ve come to understand about judgment: when we feel judgment, it just means we’re missing something.  We’re not seeing the whole picture. 

There’s a growing body of research to show that the highest functioning teams are the most honest.  They can share their actual experiences, thoughts, and feelings without fear of repercussion.  And that allows them to shed the tremendous cognitive load most teams carry by constantly thinking about HOW to say something, whether to say it, or what magical combination of words will avoid upsetting THIS person while still influencing THAT person.  Most teams spend an outrageous amount of energy doing that sort of performative “dance” with each other.  Even though our bodies and hearts hate that dance, we still do it.  We do it because of fear.  We do it because we don’t feel safe enough NOT to do it.  

For about the first two years of your life, you didn’t really know how to be dishonest.  You didn’t know how to sugar-coat a message.  You were terrible at managing your image.  You lived in a state of total emotional honesty and you were “aligned” in your behavior. In other words, the way you felt was the way you behaved. Now, as an adult, that idea might sound immature and “unprofessional”…

Visualize yourself surrounded by the people you work with.  With some of them you might feel closely connected, like you are “with” them.  While with others, you might feel more distant or even “against” them - as if there is a barrier that exists to truly understanding and connecting with them.   The more we start to understand that barrier, the more we see that it may not be between us, but inside of us.  And that barrier has a name: ego.