The Imposter Phenomenon: It’s Not You, It’s Me. Or Maybe It’s You.
Funny story.
I read this piece in the New Yorker about the imposter syndrome and I thought it was terrific and I said to my husband There is a great essay in The New Yorker you should read. It’s by…… oh. Of course.
The piece is by Leslie Jamison, who happens to be one of my favorites, and I didn’t even see her byline when I read the piece the first time. For those of you who haven’t encountered Jamison yet, she is the very brave author of, among others, The Recovering and Make It Scream, Make It Burn, and she recently did a piece in The New Yorker about Choose Your Own Adventure books that made me feel like it was back in the day (meaning, the early 80s) and she and I were hanging out in a treehouse cheating our way through Journey Under the Sea. (Note: She and I do not know each other. This is just my fantasy as one of her many fans.)
But this piece is not about the awesomeness of Leslie Jamison. It is instead my response to her piece about imposter syndrome (a concept, she informs us, that was originally and perhaps more appropriately called “the imposter phenomenon”) in The New Yorker. The essay is excellent, as her work always is, and it reminded me of a couple of stories that you, reader, might find interesting.
Jamison’s essay educates us on the provenance of the concept of imposter syndrome. It was the discovery/brain child of a couple of white female psychologists at Oberlin in the 70s who realized that they and a number of the women that they knew felt like somehow they weren’t deserving of being in the spaces they were in, and that these women all had one of two similar family of origin dynamics (being told that they were not good enough, or being told that they were perfect) that linked them. Their description of the sensation of this phenomenon (again — not, in fact, an actual “syndrome”) struck me because I, like them, am a white educated woman who has often found myself in professional places that I didn’t feel I deserved to be.
And I’ve always thought the phrase “imposter syndrome” applied to me.
The piece gets richer when Jamison brings in the perspectives of women of color in the 21st century. These women say that they don’t identify with the concept of being an imposter in spaces, and that any signals that they might experience of un-deserving-ness were likely due to systemic racism and sexism.
These women of color even suggested that they were confused about why a white woman would feel this sense of not belonging when so much in the world we live in looks like — and caters to — white people.
Interesting.
As with everything I read from Jamison, this piece struck a chord with me about my own intersectional self in various ecosystems and how it has or hasn’t caused me to experience the imposter phenomenon. And which like vs. unlike ecosystems fostered or didn’t foster this phenomenon for me.
It’s not what you think.
I’m Not Like Them
I spent the majority of my career in a global biotech company, and, in many circumstances, I was the only woman in the room. I was, indeed, white like all of the men surrounding me, but I was the only female and, often, the youngest person at the table. In addition, I was the only humanities major (better than saying “non-scientist”) surrounded by PharmDs and biology experts. One particular leadership team, full of men I still admire, spent a fair amount of time talking about golf, ski houses, and port (the booze, not the gates to our borders). I knew nothing about any of these, but I would sit and listen politely, and just felt lucky to be invited to be at the table. And I felt like a huge (or actually very small) imposter.
At one point, when I was a director running a group of around 40 people, the vice president I reported to asked me what I wanted to do next so that we could start formulating my development plan for the year. At first we talked about senior director roles. And then he said to me:
Lisa, your problem is that you’re not thinking big enough. I want you to think big. What do you really want?
He looked me right in the eye. He was serious.
We sat silently for a second or two. I thought about it. What was the biggest thing I could think of?
Well, I said, why don’t we just say that I want to be the CEO?
Perfect, he said. Write that down. And start saying it out loud. You have to believe that you are big enough for that job.
Over the next several years that I was at that large company, when my development plan came up, I would just have one answer:
CEO.
I want to be the CEO.
I was frightened at first (like, twirling stomach and foggy head fear), because I thought my managers would laugh. And I wasn’t wrong — because I often witnessed surprise in the eyes of most people when I said it early on. Sometimes, they would look uncomfortable, because they thought we were about to have a conversation about how I could someday be a vice president. But no. We were talking about a development plan to be a CEO someday — maybe of this company, maybe of another. But that’s it.
The more I said it, the more people seemed to act like it was possible.
I was invited to apply for international assignments to run country affiliates, and ended up in a global leadership job with responsibility for an entire continent’s supply chain. When I started looking for jobs outside of the company, I just said I want to be a CEO. Within six months, I was involved in three different CEO searches which then led me to be able to say to others I’ve been in a few CEO searches.
Eventually, I became a CEO.
And even better — when I left that CEO job and took a CCO job that appealed to me, the female board chair of the company said We want to hire you but I do feel bad taking a female CEO off the table for a few years.
Boom.
The point of this particular story is this: In order to change the narrative about how people were going to see me — was I an imposter in this sea of mostly older men? — I had to change how I saw myself. I had to believe that it was OK.
And, more importantly, it was prompted by a manager who basically said You are bigger than you think you are. Think big. And then, he inferred, say it.
Note: I have coached many many women — of many races and ethnicities — on this. Say that you want to be the CEO. It transforms how you see yourself and how people see you.
Another note: I’m keenly aware of how my whiteness and privilege influenced the outcome in this story. Understood. And see below for the flip side of this.
Now here is the second story:
I Am Like Them.
So I was the CEO of a women’s health-focused social venture fund when the following took place. One of the therapeutic areas in our investment thesis was the provision of abortion services. For those who are not close to it, the abortion market — pre-SCOTUS — was already fraught with clinics close to closing (or already closed) due to lack of volume, complex payment mechanisms, terrorism, lack of providers, inability to pay providers a living wage, and a host of other challenges. I had just joined the board of the largest Planned Parenthood affiliate in the country, and had hired a talented team that was learning about the investable opportunities in reproductive health, including in abortion.
I was recruited for my job by a pioneering visionary who was herself an ob/gyn and health plan executive who believed that a private sector biotech executive with experience across multiple therapeutic areas might bring new thinking or ideas to a sector that was, by nature, increasingly insular and driven (in many cases, necessarily) by what I would call a bunker mentality. I was thrilled to have the privilege (literally a privilege — I’m not just saying it) of spending my professional time working in a majority female environment, learning about how the abortion field worked and offering suggestions and ideas to experts in case something that struck me had value. I was not attached to my brainstorming, nor was I troubled by the fact that I had lots to learn. Happy to learn it! I felt like I had finally found my people.
I did not feel like an imposter. I thought I had every right to be there because we looked — and, I thought, thought — the same.
And yet…
Less than a year following our launch, our team delivered a conference that brought together start-ups and philanthropists to talk about where funding might trigger technological inflection points for the health of women. The day we closed the meeting, I was riding high on the engagement of the community and the talent of my team and the thrill I had from everything I was learning and everything I thought our nascent organization was going to contribute to the field.
And then a funder who I knew and respected approached me. She was almost exactly me — a white woman of a particular age from a particular socioeconomic and educational band. She was, I had thought, an enthusiast for our mission and had been supportive of me and of the team up to this point.
She first complimented me on the event — the organization, the goals, the execution. And then she said,
But I want to tell you that I think you all should stay out of abortion.
Your team is too new to the field, and everyone around you has been doing this for 20 years, and you’re not going to bring anything valuable to the conversation. You don’t know what you don’t know. Stick with contraception and maternal health.
I was shocked — because I trusted in the smarts and intentions of this person and I know she honestly felt that she was doing me a favor with her clarity. She was reflecting back to me what she believed to be a truth about the abortion community and how it functions.
So wait a second. Am I an imposter here surrounded by “my people”? She thought so, and her assessment had nothing to do with my gender or age or race or title. This was entirely due to my beginner’s status in a field that was uninterested in me or what I (or my extremely talented team) had to offer.
I was labeled an imposter. My entire team were labeled imposters when it came to abortion.
I brought this issue back to my board and my team and we worked through it. Like good entrepreneurs, we thought about where we could impact the abortion field using the expertise we had, and focused our efforts toward where we felt a “pull” in the market and away from signals of “no thank you.” We kept pushing forward across multiple fronts and, I’m happy to say, the organization survives and is thriving.
Reading Jamison’s piece reminded me of these two stories and how surprising the external perspectives were compared to my own beliefs. In a world where I was pretty sure that every day I was an imposter, a person with authority said to me You are not an imposter. You are the real deal. Think big. and that changed the trajectory of my life. And in a world where everyone looked pretty much like me and I thought I was brought in specifically because of who I am and what I’m good at, I was told by an important funder to lay off and stay out.
What is this about?
I think culture has a lot to do with it.
The large company I worked for believed in the value of a generalist executive, and that particular manager had the long view of a better future with me in it. To him, beginner did not equal imposter. And, as I describe above, in the view of this particular abortion policy funder (and several others I interacted with during my time working on women’s health), the abortion field did not have the wherewithal to either educate someone new for the purposes of deriving future value out of him/her/them or, dare I say it, develop or debate innovative solutions with someone bringing diverse skill sets or an alternative perspective. The field has historically had challenges finding ways to invest either time or energy into a positive future given the bunker it is trapped within.
(I don’t mean to knock the abortion field here. In fact, I spent several years following this experience on the board of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte and was able to both learn and contribute. And I’ve met some highly creative and open people working in abortion policy and provision. Also, I’ve seen surprising beginner = imposter exclusionary practices happen elsewhere, including, frequently, in small and large biotech. Not everybody at that large global corporation thought I was CEO material. Trust me on that.)
My point is that I agree with Jamison’s “both/and” thesis. Some of this feeling of not belonging is inside us.
And, in my experience, we have the opportunity to build muscles to change our own internal narratives and therefore change the narrative that others have of us.
Even more importantly, given the ecosystem point, we can determine whether the people around us feel like imposters — particularly people over whom we have power or control.
Do we say “we believe in you” to beginners? (I say this.) Or do we say “if you don’t know the answer now, you’ll never know” and push them into the imposter pile? (I don’t say this.)
Who we are certainly has an impact on our imposter sensation (our family of origin, our gender, our race and other intersectional realities) but so does an organization’s (or society’s) ability to see the value that each person brings. To the point of the women of color who disabused Jamison of the “everywoman” notion — what were the micro-signals that the white women were getting in spaces that made them feel like imposters? Were people visibly surprised by their success, therefore undercutting their confidence? Were they the only ones at the table who did not play golf or had not been with the company (or field) for decades?
Were they told “you will be big” or “please stay small?”
Throughout my career, I have had several people approach me years after we worked together and tell me that they still remember that I believed in them. And now, they make a point to believe in others. So here is what I want:
I want a system where we ask each other: What are you good at? How can we use that to further our mission? We must say: You’re not an imposter in this room just because you come from a different place or you don’t know what I know. You belong here.
Thank goodness you don’t know what I know (or don’t look like I look), because, if you did, I wouldn’t grow and learn by knowing you.
Thanks, Leslie. Keep ’em coming.
