809.B Discussion 6

Use the readings listed in Moodle and lecture notes to answer each of the following questions with supporting details. Please do not use AI tools (ChatGPT, Course Hero, etc.) to answer discussion forum questions because they will not help you personalize your answers and have been known to give misinformation. Use first person language (I, me, my, etc.).

1. Maxwell and Hale (2018) suggest that when things go wrong and a teammate fails to deliver, the leader should first ask themselves, “What role did I have in allowing this team member’s mistake to go unnoticed or uncorrected?” Do you agree or disagree and why?

2. In the article, The Right Way to Hold People Accountable, Bregman (2016) shares 5 areas of clarity in which a leader needs to be consistent. As you consider your leadership journey, which area of clarity would you like to continue to develop and enhance? Please explain.

3. If you ask Amy Gallo (2013) How to Manage Someone You Don’t Like she would say spend more time with them. What are your thoughts about that?

4. As you consider Yohn’s (2021) assertion that Company Culture is Everyone’s Responsibility, where do you “sit” in your company/organization (i.e., Board of Directors, CEO, senior management, middle manager, HR, employee, etc.) and how would you rate your ability to positively influence the company culture?

5. Use the Kaiser Case Study: What effects did the changes that Dr. Pearl made have on the organization and organizational performance? Please explain.

6. Use the Kaiser Case Study: How did Dr. Pearl Sustain this Progress (step 7) and Institute and Anchor Change (step 8) as a part of the Kaiser culture moving forward? Please explain.

Organizational Culture
Company
Culture
Is
Everyone’s
Responsibility
by Denise Lee Yohn
February 08, 2021
HBR Staff/Galaxy/vitalik19111992/Getty Images
Summary. A top down approach to building company culture no longer works for several reasons. For
one, Covid-19 has upended how leaders interact with employees and how coworkers connect with each
other. Next, company culture has grown in importance, thanks to recent high-profile crises at big name
companies. A new culture-building… more
Here’s how organizational culture might have been handled in the
past: The CEO commissions the Human Resources department to
produce an effective company culture. HR designs a campaign to
tout a mission statement and core values that the CEO and senior
management developed. HR also implements some employee
perks like free snacks in the break room or monthly birthday
celebrations. Maybe they also field an annual employee
engagement survey and report results back to the CEO. And then
with their culture-building to-do lists completed, the CEO and HR
move on to other priorities.
This approach no longer works for several reasons. For one,
Covid-19 has upended how leaders interact with employees and
how coworkers connect with each other. The need to adapt
quickly and remain flexible during the pandemic has also
revealed the ineffectiveness of a top-down leadership approach.
Next, company culture has grown in importance, thanks to recent
high-profile culture crises such as those at Uber and Wells Fargo,
the intensified push for DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and
the continuing battle for talent. Culture has become a strategic
priority with impact on the bottom line. It can’t just be delegated
and compartmentalized anymore.
A new culture-building approach is already in place at some
organizations, one in which everyone in the organization is
responsible. Importantly, this model doesn’t relegate culturebuilding to an amorphous concept that everyone influences but
no one leads or is accountable for. Shared responsibility for
culture throughout an organization involves different people and
functions within the organization playing different roles in
developing and maintaining the culture.
In this context, culture can be defined as the ways people in the
organization behave and the attitudes and beliefs that inform
those behaviors (i.e., “the way we do things around here”) —
including formal, stated norms as well as implicit ways people
work and interact. At many organizations there is a gap between
the existing culture and the “desired” culture — the culture
needed to support and advance the company’s goals and
strategies. In a new culture-building model, everyone is
responsible for cultivating the desired culture.
This approach assigns different roles in defining and developing
the culture. This happens through formal roles as well as informal
spheres of influence and reflects how organizations actually
operate these days. It also establishes clear accountabilities for
results. While the actual implementation of this approach may
vary based on the type, size, age, and structure of the
organization, the general distribution of responsibility is like this:
1. Board of directors: Guide the definition and development of
the desired culture, ensuring that it aligns with business goals
and meets the needs of all stakeholders.
2. CEO and senior management team: Define the desired
culture and cultivate it through leadership actions including
setting objectives, strategies, and key results that prioritize
culture-building; and designing the organization and its
operational processes to support and advance the company’s
purpose and core values.
3. Human Resources department: Design employee
experiences that interpret and reinforce the desired culture.
Also, implement strategies and programs that enable the rest of
the organization to fulfill their culture responsibilities, such as
offering training programs that develop leader capacity for
culture-building and employee engagement; and developing
culture guidebooks, processes such as performance
management, and systems such as rewards and recognition
programs that nurture the desired culture.
4. Compliance, Risk, and Ethics department: Provide input to
the CEO and senior management team on the definition of the
desired culture from the perspective of ethics and risk. Also,
ensuring that execution on the desired culture across the
organization aligns with the company’s risk management
strategies through tools such as ethics decision trees, processes
such as a whistleblower program, and systems such as
compliance monitoring that align with the desired culture.
5. Middle managers: Deliver employee experiences that
interpret and reinforce the desired culture. Also, implementing
culture-building strategies, cultivating employee engagement
with the desired culture, and fulfilling the culture-building
responsibilities of employees.
6. Employees: Provide input to the CEO and senior management
team on the definition of the desired culture and culturebuilding programs and tactics by providing insights on how the
desired culture aligns with or differs from the actual culture,
customer perspectives, and employee needs and expectations.
Employees should provide feedback on existing culturebuilding efforts and ideas for new ones. Also, creating,
adhering to, and enforcing routines and norms that interpret
the desired culture; and aligning their attitudes and behaviors
with the desired culture.
The Roles of Boards and Middle Managers
In this new distribution of culture-building responsibilities, let’s
look at two groups that may be less well-understood: the board of
directors and middle managers.
Board of Directors
Culture can be an asset as well as a risk to an organization. As Sir
Adrian Montague, former Chairman of Aviva plc, says, “Culture is
the glue that binds an organization together. It has a very
significant impact on the firm’s effectiveness, ethics, and
governance. How could a board not have a view on the fitness for
purpose of the firm’s culture?” And yet, according to the Financial
Reporting Council, boards of directors are often not actively
engaged in culture-building.
What’s more, the average CEO tenure has decreased relative to
board member tenure and is now approximately five years (vs.
over twice that length for board members), according to an article
in HBR and CGLytics. So, boards have a greater longitudinal
perspective to inform the purpose of the company and to assess
the organization’s delivery on it. And strategy+business reports
that boards of directors are increasingly expected to enforce
accountability on issues such as purpose, mission, and core
values.
So, the board must play a more active role in culture-building. It
should guide the definition and development of the desired
culture, ensuring that it aligns with business goals and meets the
needs of all stakeholders. The board carries out this responsibility
by:
Designating culture as a regular agenda item during board
meetings
Engaging ongoing conversations with the CEO/owner and the
leads of Human Resources and Compliance, Risk, Ethics, and
DEI about culture priorities, strengths, gaps, and challenges
Commissioning culture audits and assessments and reviewing
results and indicated actions
Considering culture leadership capabilities in succession
planning and senior officer recruitment
Vetting and approving public statements about the
organizational culture
At the nonprofit WaterAid, the board has been highly
instrumental in ensuring the organization’s performance is
aligned to its values. Board members regularly engage in
conversations — with executives, among board members, and
with staff in seminars on particular issues — about the changing
context of the organization’s work and what it means for
achieving its vision and strategy.
TalkTalk, the British telecom, provides another example of how a
board exerts culture-shaping responsibilities. After a data breach
crisis prompted widespread culture change at the company, board
members began asking questions about risk differently. Instead
of narrowly focusing on their technical responsibilities and
simply asking, “Are we safe?” directors adopted broader oversight
for the organization’s culture and enhanced influence on risk
management. By asking “What risks are we taking and how can
they be minimized?”, directors are able to make more informed
judgements about the level of risk the company embraces.
Middle Managers
Leaders in the middle layers of an organization’s hierarchy, such
as department managers, store managers, and program leaders,
wield the most influence on employees’ daily experiences, so they
play a critical role in company culture. But middle managers in
many organizations are not usually empowered to influence
culture to the degree that higher-level leaders are — and they’re
often overlooked in culture-building efforts.
Middle managers can and should play a critical role in cultivating
the desired culture by:
Ensuring the tools, environment, and intangible aspects of
employees’ day-to-day worklife represent the company’s
employee experience strategy
Applying the organization-wide culture-building objectives,
strategies, and key results to the context of their group or
function
Conducting coaching and training with employees to cultivate
their engagement with the desired culture
Communicating and role-modeling the desired culture
I was struck by the critical influence of middle managers on
culture-building in a case study on a major oil producer presented
in a paper published in Organization Science. While a corporate
culture-change initiative met with resistance from employees for
whom the old culture and processes were ingrained, one
operating unit successfully adopted the new culture thanks to its
savvy management team. These managers established
accountabilities for certain actions, sanctioned other behaviors,
and devised and enforced new metrics in support of the new
culture. They were able to get traction where the organization’s
senior leaders weren’t because their methods for culture-building
were commensurate with their roles as middle managers.
Produce Results Through Shared Responsibility
With each group or function embracing its culture-building
responsibilities, a healthy, well-aligned, effective culture
improves business performance results. That’s what Old Mutual
Wealth found back in 2012. In its efforts to recover from the
financial crisis, the firm’s board drove the redefinition of the
corporate purpose and mandated the senior management team
pursue it.
To cultivate a customer-centric culture, executives set a new
strategy to bolster customer experience, created a new group
customer director role, and identified organization-wide
customer-first behaviors that were incorporated into employee
performance reviews, manager feedback systems, and an allemployee survey. To further operationalize the values of the new
culture, they rolled out a new group operating model and new
governance models were created.
The widespread changes spawned a new culture throughout the
organization in which everyone took responsibility for their
decisions, starting with the CEO who made clear that nobody
would be blamed for giving him bad news. Within 12 months, 90%
of the firm’s UK and European insurance books were replaced by
new products aligned to the board’s vision. And Old Mutual’s
share price more than doubled in five years.
Embrace the Changes and New Requirements of Culture
The shift to a culture-building approach based on sharedresponsibility both reflects and requires changes in the nature of
organizational culture and its impact on the business.
The new approach shows that organizational culture has become
less a code established by leaders and more of a toolkit for all to
draw from and input to. As the authors of a recent Stanford Social
Innovation Review paper observe, “Culture persists only because
people act in ways that uphold its principles and codes.” As
employees engage with the culture as a resource from which to
shape their skills and habits instead of a mandate decreed by top
managers, culture becomes “expressed and reified through
practice.”
A company’s culture needs to be adaptable. There are many
external factors exerting pressure on any business as well as
internal changes such as leadership transitions and expansions.
The culture needs to change to keep up with these changes.
Attempts to lock in a certain type of culture over the long term at
best will fail; at worst, they will hinder the organization’s
competitiveness and sustainability.
This points to a key requirement of the shared-responsibility
approach to culture-building. Changes to the culture must be
explicitly communicated and vetted by all. Everyone may not
agree with the changes, but they must understand them and agree
to support them.
To achieve the desired culture, everyone must have a clear,
consistent, common understanding of it — and everyone must
work together in a deliberate and coordinated effort to cultivate it.
While each person or group is accountable in their own way,
everyone shares accountability for achieving the desired culture.
The new job of the CEO and senior management team is not to
hand company culture down from on high but to prioritize it and
allocate the resources to ensure it.
Denise Lee Yohn is a leading authority on
positioning great brands and building
exceptional organizations, and has 25 years of
experience working with world-class brands
including Sony and Frito-Lay. Denise is a
consultant, speaker, and author of What Great
Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building
Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest
and the new book FUSION: How Integrating
Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest
Companies.
Diversity And Inclusion
Don’t
Just
Mentor
Women
and
People
of
Color.
Sponsor
Them.
by Rosalind Chow
June 30, 2021
Image Source/Getty Images
Summary. Understanding the difference between sponsorship and mentorship is
key to ensuring that women and members of historically marginalized communities
(HMCs) are fully supported in their careers. Mentorship involves direct support of a
protégé, while… more
Mike Smith, president and COO of Stitch Fix, has long been
committed to recruiting and developing a diverse workforce. His
impetus for doing so came from his mentor, Ken Coleman,
chairman of EIS Group, Inc. and a Silicon Valley veteran, who told
him, “Be successful, hire, mentor, and sponsor those people of
color that come behind you.”
Although Coleman’s words of advice, given from one Black
executive to another, were offered pre-pandemic, they’ve taken
on a new urgency in the wake of a national reckoning over racial
inequity following George Floyd’s and countless others’ murders.
One of the most common recommendations on how to be a better
ally to members of historically marginalized communities (HMCs)
is to sponsor them.
But what is sponsorship, exactly? Many define it as spending one’s
social capital or using one’s influence to advocate for a protégé.
This definition seems intuitive at first glance, but if you ask
people to unpack what that actually means in terms of concrete
behaviors, most struggle to do so. Many leaders believe that
they’re sponsoring someone when, in fact, they’re providing
mentorship. Mentoring is important, too. But the confusion
between sponsorship and mentorship is dangerous — an inability
to differentiate between the two makes it more likely that leaders
will believe they’re supporting their HMC workers to their fullest
extent when they’re actually only giving one form of support.
To clarify what sponsorship is and how it’s different from
mentorship, I zero in on a key word: influence.
Sponsorship vs. mentorship
Sponsorship can be understood as a form of intermediated
impression management, where sponsors act as brand managers
and publicists for their protégés. This work involves the
management of others’ views on the sponsored employee. Thus,
the relationship at the heart of sponsorship is not between
protégés and sponsors, as is often thought, but between sponsors
and an audience — the people they mean to sway to the side of
their protégés.
Whereas mentorship focuses on help that a mentor can provide
directly, such as guidance, advice, feedback on skills, and
coaching, sponsorship entails externally facing support, such as
advocacy, visibility, promotion, and connections. Seeing
sponsorship as a three-way relationship between sponsors,
protégés, and an audience clarifies the difference between it and
mentorship.
The ABCDs of sponsorship
Understanding sponsorship in this way, we can identify specific,
concrete behaviors for sponsors to use to lift up others. Here, I
take tactics that are typically studied as forms of impression
management and translate them into their sponsorship
equivalents.
Amplifying. Amplifying is the sponsorship equivalent of selfpromotion. When sponsors amplify, they share protégés’
accomplishments with others in a bid to create or increase an
audience’s positive impressions of them.
Consider the story of Sal Khan, the founder of the education site
Khan Academy. Khan Academy was struggling to make ends meet
until Bill Gates used an interview to declare that it had the
potential to change the world. After this unsolicited endorsement,
Khan was inundated with funding offers from Google and
Microsoft, among others. Note that sponsorship doesn’t require a
close relationship with the protégé. Bill Gates didn’t know Sal
Khan personally, but he believed in his product.
To advance in our careers, we need others to know about our
achievements and accomplishments. But most people don’t like
braggarts. When a sponsor trumpets a protégés’ achievements,
they sidestep the self-promotion and its potential downsides. This
is particularly important for women since female stereotypes
dictate that they be self-effacing and humble.
Boosting. Boosting is the sponsorship equivalent of selfassurance. When people put themselves forward for
consideration for a position or opportunity, they’re in effect
making promises about their future performance. But most of us
know that people are motivated to make themselves look good in
these situations and may not present an accurate view of their
own capabilities. These claims, then, may not hold as much
weight as when they’re made by a third party who presumably has
a more objective opinion on how the protégé will actually
perform. Here’s where boosting comes into play: When sponsors
boost their protégés, they stake some portion of their own
reputation on an implicit guarantee about the protégé’s future
success. They underwrite it.
If you’ve received a letter of recommendation from a teacher or
benefited from a referral made by a friend, you’ve experienced
boosting. Boosting is a particularly important form of sponsorship
for women and members of HMCs. Due to biases in how quality is
evaluated, many of them receive lower performance ratings and
are given lower-quality feedback, making it even more difficult
for them to improve and advance. Given their relative lack of
representation in many white and male-dominated industries,
they are especially in need of sponsors who can lend them the
legitimacy they need to be seen as worthy of investment.
Connecting. Connecting is the sponsorship equivalent of
impression management through association — that is, claiming
a relationship with a highly regarded individual or group so that
some of the positive feeling others have toward them is
transferred to the person claiming the association. This is often
referred to as a “halo effect.”
When a high-status sponsor connects, they claim the association
with the protégé, rather than the other way around. This
enhances others’ impression of the protégé because the sponsor
has already been “vetted” by the community. Likewise, the
protégé has passed the sponsor’s standard for inclusion into their
network. Connecting can also involve actively facilitating new
relationships for protégés, giving them access to people that they
wouldn’t otherwise be able to meet.
For example, a sponsor might invite a protégé to an exclusive
event or meeting in order to increase their visibility to important
individuals who might prove instrumental to a future career. For
example, when Annie Young-Scrivner, now the CEO of Godiva,
worked at PepsiCo, she benefitted from the sponsorship of Indra
Nooyi, then CEO, who would invite her to attend meetings in
China that proved to be valuable learning and exposure
experiences.
Connecting in combination with boosting is an even more
formidable form of sponsorship. Take ClassPass’s former CEO,
Payal Kadakia, who met David Tisch through their mutual
participation in TechStars, a startup accelerator in New York City.
Tisch recognized that, as a young woman, Kadakia might have
difficulties raising money through the traditional venture capital
processs. He therefore personally introduced her to angel
investors, many of whom went on to seed her company with
several million dollars.
Defending. Defending is the sponsorship equivalent of justifying
or making personal excuses in an attempt to change others’
perceptions of them from negative to positive. In the same way,
when a sponsor defends, they address an audience who dislikes or
dismisses the protégé and works to persuade them to change their
opinion. Defending is quite possibly one of the most effective
sponsorship tactics.
Indeed, it is critical for women and members of HMCs, again
because of the often biased ways in which they’re reviewed. As an
example, Jerry MacCleary, the former CEO of Covestro LLC, found
himself consistently defending female employees and employees
of color in evaluation meetings because he saw that white male
managers were often criticizing their interpersonal styles as too
outspoken or confrontational. MacCleary countered with
personal examples that directly contradicted the other managers’
claims. In this way, under his guidance, Covestro dramatically
increased the diversity in its leadership ranks; at the time of his
retirement, five of 11 top positions were held by women and
people of color.
Of the various forms of sponsorship, defending is the most costly
for sponsors. Because it necessitates challenging the attitudes and
beliefs of others, it can create conflicts between the sponsor and
the audience, sometimes with material costs. For example,
Kenneth Frazier, the retiring CEO of Merck, tells a story from
when he was working for a law firm in Philadelphia. One of the
firm’s clients asked that he be removed from a case due to his
race. But Frazier’s senior partner took a stand to support him,
telling the client, “You may take your business elsewhere, but we
believe in him and we’re not going to replace him.”
Using sponsorship for social equity
Most people have benefited from sponsorship in some form or
another to advance in their professional lives. The recognition of
its power leads many of us to focus on ensuring that we have
sponsors who will amplify, boost, connect, or defend us. But if
we’re truly committed to social equity, we need to start thinking
not only about how we can benefit from sponsorship but also how
we can help others who need it. To do that, we must first contend
with deciding whom to sponsor. Ask yourself: What are my
criteria for sponsoring someone? Are they accurate measures of
performance and talent, or am I using a potentially problematic
proxy for quality? Am I applying my criteria equitably across all
the people I could sponsor? Are there people I see as highperforming who seem to be consistently flying under the radar?
Once you identify a protégé, you should then be attuned to
opportunities for enacting sponsorship. If a protégé has an
achievement to celebrate, amplify it to people who might be
interested. Bragging on behalf of others is often seen as a positive
social skill. If a boosting opportunity presents itself, name the
protégé and advocate for them. Enhance the protégé’s exposure
by inviting them to a meeting or connecting them with important
people. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if others are
inappropriately impugning a protégé, stand up and defend them.
Mapping
the
ABCDs
of
Sponsorship
to
Specific
Behaviors and Goals
Examples of behaviors that fall under each sponsorship category and the intended
goal of the sponsorship tactic.
Sponsorship tactic
Amplify
Example behavior(s)
Being aware of and
talking up a protégé’s
accomplishments
Boost
Formally nominating a
protégé for specific
opportunities; writing
letters of
recommendation,
attesting to the
protégé’s future
potential
Introducing a protégé to
high-status individuals;
inviting a protégé to
exclusive events or
meetings
Connect
Intended goal
Create or increase
perceivers’ positive
impressions of the
protégé
Increase others’
expectations of the
protégé’s potential and
readiness for
advancement
Create or enhance
perceivers’ positive
impressions of the
protégé;
increase the protégé’s
visibility
Defend
Challenging others’
negative perceptions of
a protégé; providing an
alternative explanation
for poor performance;
protecting a protégé
from harmful exposure
Reverse or neutralize
others’ uncertainty or
negative perceptions of
the protégé
© HBR.org
Understanding the difference between sponsorship and
mentorship is key to ensuring that women and members of HMCs
are fully supported in their careers. Allies need to not only offer
the emotional support of mentoring but also be intentional about
identifying opportunities for sponsorship and using our social
capital to lift up those who might otherwise go unnoticed.
Sponsorship alone isn’t enough to address the deep-seated
challenges associated with systemic racism, but it is a personal
action that all of us can take to help make the world a more
equitable place.
RC
Rosalind Chow is an associate professor of
organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie
Mellon University, where she studies the power
of social hierarchy and its impact on diversity
and inclusion. She has a particular interest in
how those at the top of social hierarchies
understand their dominant position, and how
they can use their position to advance the
outcomes of those who have historically been
disempowered.
Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome
by Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey
February 11, 2021
Illustration by Marysia Machulska
Talisa Lavarry was exhausted. She had led the charge at her corporate event management
company to plan a high-profile, security-intensive event, working around the clock and
through weekends for months. Barack Obama was the keynote speaker.
Lavarry knew how to handle the complicated logistics required — but not the office
politics. A golden opportunity to prove her expertise had turned into a living nightmare.
Lavarry’s colleagues interrogated and censured her, calling her professionalism into
question. Their bullying, both subtle and overt, haunted each decision she made. Lavarry
wondered whether her race had something to do with the way she was treated. She was,
after all, the only Black woman on her team. She began doubting whether she was
qualified for the job, despite constant praise from the client.
Things with her planning team became so acrimonious that Lavarry found herself
demoted from lead to co-lead and was eventually unacknowledged altogether by her
colleagues. Each action that chipped away at her role in her work doubly chipped away at
her confidence. She became plagued by deep anxiety, self-hatred, and the feeling that she
was a fraud.
What had started as healthy nervousness — Will I fit in? Will my colleagues like me? Can
I do good work? — became a workplace-induced trauma that had her contemplating
suicide.
Today, when Lavarry, who has since written a book about her experience, “Confessions
From Your Token Black Colleague,” reflects on the imposter syndrome she fell prey to
during that time, she knows it wasn’t a lack of self-confidence that held her back. It was
repeatedly facing systemic racism and bias.
Examining Imposter Syndrome as We Know It
Imposter syndrome is loosely defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud.
It disproportionately affects high-achieving people, who find it difficult to accept their
accomplishments. Many question whether they’re deserving of accolades.
Psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes developed the concept, originally
termed “imposter phenomenon,” in their 1978 founding study, which focused on highachieving women. They posited that “despite outstanding academic and professional
accomplishments, women who experience the imposter phenomenon persist in believing
that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise.” Their
findings spurred decades of thought leadership, programs, and initiatives to address
imposter syndrome in women. Even famous women — from Hollywood superstars such
as Charlize Theron and Viola Davis to business leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and even
former First Lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor — have
confessed to experiencing it. A Google search yields more than 5 million results and shows
solutions ranging from attending conferences to reading books to reciting one’s
accomplishments in front of a mirror. What’s less explored is why imposter syndrome
exists in the first place and what role workplace systems play in fostering and exacerbating
it in women. We think there’s room to question imposter syndrome as the reason women
may be inclined to distrust their success.
The impact of systemic racism, classism, xenophobia, and other biases was categorically
absent when the concept of imposter syndrome was developed. Many groups were
excluded from the study, namely women of color and people of various income levels,
genders, and professional backgrounds. Even as we know it today, imposter syndrome
puts the blame on individuals, without accounting for the historical and cultural contexts
that are foundational to how it manifests in both women of color and white women.
Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the
places where women work.
Feeling Unsure Shouldn’t Make You an Imposter
Imposter syndrome took a fairly universal feeling of discomfort, second-guessing, and
mild anxiety in the workplace and pathologized it, especially for women. As white men
progress, their feelings of doubt usually abate as their work and intelligence are validated
over time. They’re able to find role models who are like them, and rarely (if ever) do others
question their competence, contributions, or leadership style. Women experience the
opposite. Rarely are we invited to a women’s career development conference where a
session on “overcoming imposter syndrome” is not on the agenda.
The label of imposter syndrome is a heavy load to bear. “Imposter” brings a tinge of
criminal fraudulence to the feeling of simply being unsure or anxious about joining a new
team or learning a new skill. Add to that the medical undertone of “syndrome,” which
recalls the “female hysteria” diagnoses of the nineteenth century. Although feelings of
uncertainty are an expected and normal part of professional life, women who experience
them are deemed to suffer from imposter syndrome. Even if women demonstrate
strength, ambition, and resilience, our daily battles with microaggressions, especially
expectations and assumptions formed by stereotypes and racism, often push us down.
Imposter syndrome as a concept fails to capture this dynamic and puts the onus on
women to deal with the effects. Workplaces remain misdirected toward seeking individual
solutions for issues disproportionately caused by systems of discrimination and abuses of
power.
Bias and Exclusion Exacerbate Feelings of Doubt
For women of color, self-doubt and the feeling that we don’t belong in corporate
workplaces can be even more pronounced. Not because women of color (a broad,
imprecise categorization) have an innate deficiency, but because the intersection of our
race and gender often places us in a precarious position at work. Many of us across the
world are implicitly, if not explicitly, told we don’t belong in white- and male-dominated
workplaces. Half of the women of color surveyed by Working Mother Media plan to leave
their jobs in the next two years, citing feelings of marginalization or disillusionment,
which is consistent with our experiences. Exclusion that exacerbated self-doubt was a key
reason for each of our transitions from corporate workplaces to entrepreneurship.
“Who is deemed ‘professional’ is an assessment process that’s culturally biased and
skewed,” said Tina Opie, an associate professor at Babson College, in an interview last
year. When employees from marginalized backgrounds try to hold themselves up to a
standard that no one like them has met (and that they’re often not expected to be able to
meet), the pressure to excel can become too much to bear. The once-engaged Latina
woman suddenly becomes quiet in meetings. The Indian woman who was a sure shot for
promotion gets vague feedback about lacking leadership presence. The trans woman who
always spoke up doesn’t anymore because her manager makes gender-insensitive
remarks. The Black woman whose questions once helped create better products for the
organization doesn’t feel safe contributing feedback after being told she’s not a team
player. For women of color, universal feelings of doubt become magnified by chronic
battles with systemic bias and racism.
In truth, we don’t belong because we were never supposed to belong. Our presence in
most of these spaces is a result of decades of grassroots activism and begrudgingly
developed legislation. Academic institutions and corporations are still mired in the
cultural inertia of the good ol’ boys’ clubs and white supremacy. Biased practices across
institutions routinely stymie the ability of individuals from underrepresented groups to
truly thrive.
The answer to overcoming imposter syndrome is not to fix individuals but to create an
environment that fosters a variety of leadership styles and in which diverse racial, ethnic,
and gender identities are seen as just as professional as the current model, which Opie
describes as usually “Eurocentric, masculine, and heteronormative.”
Confidence Doesn’t Equal Competence
We often falsely equate confidence — most often, the type demonstrated by white male
leaders — with competence and leadership. Employees who can’t (or won’t) conform to
male-biased social styles are told they have imposter syndrome. According to
organizational psychologist Tomas Chamorro Premuzic:
The truth of the matter is that pretty much anywhere in the world men tend to think that
they are much smarter than women. Yet arrogance and overconfidence are inversely
related to leadership talent — the ability to build and maintain high-performing teams,
and to inspire followers to set aside their selfish agendas in order to work for the common
interest of the group.
The same systems that reward confidence in male leaders, even if they’re incompetent,
punish white women for lacking confidence, women of color for showing too much of it,
and all women for demonstrating it in a way that’s deemed unacceptable. These biases
are insidious and complex and stem from narrow definitions of acceptable behavior
drawn from white male models of leadership. Research from Kecia M. Thomas finds that
too often women of color enter their companies as “pets” but are treated as threats once
they gain influence in their roles. Women of color are by no means a monolith, but we are
often linked by our common experiences of navigating stereotypes that hold us back from
reaching our full potential.
Fixing Bias, Not Women
Imposter syndrome is especially prevalent in biased, toxic cultures that value
individualism and overwork. Yet the “fix women’s imposter syndrome” narrative has
persisted, decade after decade. We see inclusive workplaces as a multivitamin that can
ensure that women of color can thrive. Rather than focus on fixing imposter syndrome,
professionals whose identities have been marginalized and discriminated against must
experience a cultural shift writ large.
Leaders must create a culture for women and people of color that addresses systemic bias
and racism. Only by doing so can we reduce the experiences that culminate in so-called
imposter syndrome among employees from marginalized communities — or at the very
least, help those employees channel healthy self-doubt into positive motivation, which is
best fostered within a supportive work culture.
Perhaps then we can stop misdiagnosing women with “imposter syndrome” once and for
all.