Do you have impostor syndrome? Here’s how to get rid of it

Alarge number of competent professionals feel like “impostors”, experiencing the chronic self-doubt that can override any external proof of success or competence. Analysts are not the exception, but the symptoms of impostor syndrome can be particularly damaging for their career.

Let’s do a comparison here. Imagine that you are a general manager being interviewed for your first CEO job. You are aware of your accomplishments, such as quadrupling the revenue of a business unit in a short period, but you still feel like you haven’t crossed the bridge between senior executive and CEO. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. The new role isn’t just a more difficult, supersized version of the positions you’ve had in the past, and someone in that situation may need to seek out a mentor or coach to help them prove to themselves they are truly worthy of the higher role.

Now, consider instead the case of a business analyst who has been working for the same company for two years, consistently delivering successful projects. She is invited to work on a more complex project next, and hesitates to say yes, wondering if she’s ready. This is when suffering from impostor syndrome can become a career derailer.

See, analysts are known for their ability to produce comprehensive analyses of pros and cons, risks and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses of solutions under consideration. Decision-makers look for them to provide data-backed recommendations for how to solve a problem or approach an opportunity. If an analyst doesn’t show confidence in their own analytical skills to tackle more complex problems, why should others?

The good news is, while superior analytical skills can be part of the problem (potentially leading to overanalyzing and overthinking that snowballs into negative thinking, anxiety, and inability to act in challenging situations), it can also be the answer. As pointed out by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in the book The Confidence Code:

Confidence, and success, can come from understanding your distinctive strengths and values.

Back in 2019, I wrote an article for Modern Analyst titled BA: How to Avoid the Impostor Syndrome. The article offers tips for business analysts to stop feeling like a fake undeserving of a promotion or more visibility for their role. There I suggest leveraging performance measures to achieve a higher understanding of your own strengths and value-creation abilities:

With a good set of performance measures in place, you no longer have to wonder how well you are doing, whether your work is of sufficient quality, and so on. And while greater responsibility that comes with career progression can certainly increase our internal doubt and fear of failure, having a measurement system in place can help you understand your strengths and weakness in your new role as well, and allow you to course correct much faster if something isn’t going as well as you expected.

To grow your career, you need to be willing to ask for stretch assignments (or say yes when they’re offered to you). Impostor syndrome can easily get in the way — but only if you fail to gather the evidence required to build your confidence in your own skills.

The most common objection business analysts have against performance measures is that their work is not tangible, unlike the sales rep who can report selling $500K in recurring revenue, or a widget maker who can brag about their average of 3 widgets per hour. But intangibles get measured all the time. Developing the discipline to measure the outcomes of your work can be the key to exuding the confidence in your competence required to land a desired promotion or stretch assignment.

Here’s an example of what a performance measurement system can look like:

• I’m looking for evidence of: Ability to successfully deliver in challenging software requirements assignments.
• The measures that can provide such evidence include measuring, for projects that fit the definition of a challenging assignment (e.g., more than three stakeholder groups, more than cosmetic enhancements, compressed timeline):
• |— Timeliness. Complete requirements packages on time.
• |— Quality. Achieve defect density of 1:100 requirements or less.
• |— Effectiveness. Achieve zero change requests submitted during the first 2 months after deployment as a result of overlooked requirements.

I’ve been in business analyst roles in which it was very easy to track these metrics for the entire BA team simply using our issue and project tracking tool. When you are a high-performing BA ranking at the top in timeliness, quality, and effectiveness among your team members, it becomes much easier to silence your inner critic. Instead of trying to accept when your manager repeatedly tells you that you’re great (not easy for someone suffering from impostor syndrome), you can look at your track record and conclude, “Yes, I’m ready for my next challenge.”

To grow your career, you need to be willing to ask for promotions or stretch assignments (or say yes when they’re offered to you). Impostor syndrome can easily get in the way, but only if you allow the lack of performance data to get in the way of building your self-assurance.

Performance measures allow you to tell yourself, “I took my agile team from spending, on average, 30h per month on rework of poorly designed features to less than 4h. I delivered a record number of defect-free requirements packages on time during the past year. Even though I haven’t taken on a project of this size yet, no one on the team is as well-qualified as I am to take on this complex assignment.”

There are no ready-made maps to becoming more confident in one’s competence, but one thing is clear: to create value, we can’t just be competent; confidence is actually a part of value creation. You have to have confidence to be good at your job and keep growing, and a good performance measurement system will help you get there.

(Photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash)