Interesting Readings #5
Every week I read about technical leadership, management and personal development and I share my notes and thoughts with you all.
This week I found myself reading a lot about imposter syndrome, so I decided to focus more on it. Funny enough, this week I experienced imposter syndrome writing this newsletter! I am on holidays now and I only worked 3 days this week. I struggled to find time to read and write. So before publishing it, I had second thoughts about the amount of content and its quality.
I am sure I will get better at this : )
Weekly focus: Imposter syndrome
Imposter syndrome affects between 30-50% of the people. This number could lead to a change of perspective to this problem. Is this only a personal problem? What can communities do to help? How can a company help?
My reading explored those aspects.
The inner part: how can we live with imposter syndrome and cope?
The community part: how can we make our teams a better place for our team members.
The company culture part: how can we foster workplace culture that reduces imposter syndrome.
Let’s start from the definition from wikipedia:
Imposter Syndrome, is a psychological occurrence in which people doubt:
- their skills
- their talents
- their accomplishmentsIt shows as a persistent internalised fear of feeling like a fraud (source)
Inner perspective
The Impostor's Guide to Tooting Your Own Horn (watch video)
Sophie Küster, shares her experience fighting the imposter syndrome. A tiny little monster that “lives” inside her ears.
At the heart of her experience was the ability to recognise her problem and learn to cope. It is not a monster we can defeat. Yet the idea of externalising the negative thoughts (e.g. with an imaginative monster) can lead to improvements.
She details a number of steps to follow in her guide:
Fake confidence, until you make it
Make self-advocacy a team sport. In other words, create a support network
know your enemy (the little monster!)
Externalise your thoughts (the negative thoughts…)
Harness the thought of good enough: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
Internalise accomplishments. Do you keep your wins in one place?
Embrace failure. We are all humans and we can fail. If we struggle to overcome failure, our support network can help us.
The little monster is a sort of over protecting parent. It doesn’t want us to get hurt! We could take peace of it acknowledging that. Yet, it is with failure that we grow and learn.
The community part
Winning With Imposter Syndrome: A Community Effort ( Read more )
This article made me reflect on how much is important to establish an agreement on feedback. I never thought about a praise to be a potential trigger for imposter syndrome. It does make sense. How many times when receiving praise we diminish it or we don’t accept it.
For starters we could make sure people are in the right state to receive feedback. Here below are my main highlights from the article.
When someone expresses admiration or appreciation for her, she said, it feels undeserved, and like it is an impossible task to live up to the expectations that this compliment seems to have set. Rather than praising or criticising colleagues or employees, we might change to just thanking them for their work. Hereby we normalise appreciating the time and effort people put in, without directly linking that appreciation to skill or performance. The focus shifts from the individual, to the individual’s contribution.
Let’s stop making each other feel stupid (watch video)
Imagine a world where you never have to worry that you don’t know enough. This is how Clare Sudbery starts her talk.
I was lucky enough to watch it in the Simply Business self organised yearly Tech Conference.
Being an effective IT professional is not about what you know. We care more about the aptitude and attitude of our people. The range of knowledge in our industry is so vast. It should not be about what we know but how fast we can learn new skills.
Clare covers a lot in this talk.
We can embed lots of these in our team's ways of working.
As leaders our role is to encourage our people to adhere to those principles. Here is a list of the main points.
But I encourage you to watch the full video!
Feeling judged
When we hear people talking behind other people's back, we internalise the judgement.
This will affect us as well. We will wonder about ourselves.
What to do instead? Encourage people to share feedback.
Laughing at people
We confuse personal knowledge with common knowledge.
The issue is, in the way we react when we find out people having gaps in their knowledge.
Let’s use these opportunities as ways to share our knowledge in a positive way.
Talking in jargon
Sometimes we use acronyms to feel that we belong to a group of people.
It took a while for us to learn them and now we can finally use them.
Are we also feeding a vicious circle? Remember, imposter syndrome relates to the feeling of belonging and new starters will go through the same journey.
Aiming for an inclusive language that is understandable for everyone is the way to go.
Being reluctant to train juniors
The pool of people we can hire from it is small. There is a shortage of skills. Yet, I have met many people that are reluctant to hire less experienced engineers.
Hiring people that are more junior can brings lots of benefit to our teams:
Deepen expertise. By teaching less experienced people, we improve.
Question the status quo. Less experienced people can ask questions about things we give for granted. It can be a refreshing experience.
Pair programming. Less experienced people need more support. Pairing is very beneficial. While teaching we can improve as well.
Gatekeeping
Does our job spec match reality?
What things are crucial and what things can be learnt on the job? Let’s remember that our range of knowledge in the industry is very wide.
We can increase the pool of potential hires if we are more open to this. For example we could ask what people know instead.
Can that add to the team's knowledge?
RockStar Developer
When I was an individual contributor I never identified myself as one. In fact, I suffered a lot from the notion of rock star developers. I felt guilty that I was not spending my free time coding for example. I always treated it as a job.
Nowadays I do feel things have improved. But I am happy to hear from you as well.
As a leader, I appreciate working with very experienced engineers. Yet, this should not come at the cost of collaboration.
If having a rock star developer means:
increasing imposter syndrome in your less experienced engineers
creating bus factor and silos in the team
Then we should ask ourselves if it is worth it.
Hiding our ignorance
Do you remember the last time you nodded at something you didn’t know? How did you feel about it? I would assume not so good. What I would do in those cases is feeling guilty until I have spent time catching up.
A better way to do this is by asking questions instead. You may benefit your team in return by bringing more curiosity.
The company culture perspective.
The Structures that Induce the Syndrome (watch the video)
and Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome (Read more)
I like the idea of starting from diversity, equity and belonging.
Marginalised identities, have less chances to feel they belong.
This means they may feel excluded or not treated with equality.
Those identities are more affected by imposter syndrome.
The answer to overcoming imposter syndrome is not to fix individuals, but to create an environment that fosters a number of different leadership styles and where diversity of racial, ethnic and gender identities is viewed as just as professional as the current model. Ruchika Tulshyan & Jodi-Ann Burey
As leaders it is important to understand this concept and be aware of our team dynamics. We have to foster a culture that enables people to feel they belong.
More readings:
Imposter syndrome archetypes
Dr. Valerie Young, Ed.D., author of “The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It” identifies five types of “imposters” in her research:
I will add this book to my wish list. I am curious to learn more about this subject.
Do you have more readings and resources to suggest? Please comment so that other readers can have access to it.
I will come back with more content next week, covering topics about self development, people and teams, tech and delivery.
Have a good week!
Bye from Apulia!