Imposter syndrome doesn't go away when you get more senior. It just gets better at hiding.

Ask most people to describe imposter syndrome and they'll picture someone new to a role, wide-eyed and overwhelmed, convinced they don't belong. A graduate in their first week. Someone who just got promoted beyond what they expected.

That picture is incomplete. In my experience, imposter syndrome is just as present in people twenty years into their careers as it is in people just starting out. It just looks different. And because it looks different, most people don't call it what it is.

What it actually looks like

In experienced leaders, imposter syndrome creeps in slowly. It rarely announces itself. Instead it shows up in patterns: perfectionism that's hard to explain rationally, a reluctance to ask for help, a nervous laugh whenever something has gone well.

Watch how someone talks about their own success. Leaders with active imposter syndrome consistently minimise their achievements and attribute them elsewhere. It was the team. The timing was right. We had a great culture. All of those things may be true. But somewhere in the telling, their own contribution disappears. They've stopped being able to see their own impact.

There's also something I've started calling "word salad". A person is asked a direct question in a meeting. They don't know the answer. But instead of saying so, they reach for jargon, generalities, language that sounds substantial but doesn't actually land anywhere. The room hears it. Credibility takes a hit. And the thing that needed answering goes un-investigated, sidelined until that risk materialises and derails the whole thing.

This is imposter syndrome in action. Not as self-doubt, but as performance.

Why it doesn't just go away

Imposter syndrome is rooted in the stories we've accumulated about who we are. Not the CV version. The internal one. Built from a throwaway comment at fifteen, the feedback that appeared on every school report, the slow accumulation of messages about how we're perceived in the world.

Maybe you've never looked much like the people most often in the room. Maybe you're older or younger than your peers, feel like everyone else has more qualifications, more context, more of whatever it is you think you're lacking. These beliefs sit below the conscious level. They shape behaviour without announcing themselves.

As people move into more senior roles, the support thins out. There are fewer people you can say 'I don't know' to. The expectation, spoken or not, is that you have the answers. So the pressure to perform increases, just as the stakes of getting it wrong go up.

Neuroscience helps explain why this sticks around. The brain's default mode network, active when we're not focused on a task, has a negativity bias baked in. It rehearses threat more readily than it consolidates success. Every new challenge gets measured against an internal benchmark that is, for many people, significantly harsher than the external evidence warrants.

The psychological safety problem nobody's talking about

When a senior leader can't admit they don't know something, it doesn't just affect them. It affects everyone around them.

Psychological safety, the shared belief that it's safe to speak up, ask questions and admit uncertainty, is one of the strongest predictors of team performance. Google's Project Aristotle studied hundreds of teams over several years and found it to be the single most important factor.

When leaders model the opposite, when they waffle rather than admit uncertainty, when they perform confidence they don't have, the whole group takes note. If the leader can't say 'I don't know', nobody else will either. The things that actually need investigating, the real risks, the gaps that matter, stay buried.

Imposter syndrome in a leader is never just a personal issue. It has a blast radius.

Working through it: strengths first

One of the approaches I find most useful when working with imposter syndrome is strengths-based coaching, often drawing on the OSKAR model. It works here because it's grounded entirely in what the client is already doing well, and what has worked for them in the past.

Imposter syndrome thrives on a gap narrative: everything you're not yet, don't have yet, haven't achieved yet. Strengths-based work shifts the attention. Not to bypass the difficult stuff, but to rebuild the foundation from which you tackle it.

I'm not trying to turn someone into a different kind of leader. I'm helping them see, with evidence, why they earned their place in the room. And then helping them figure out how to play to what they're good at, especially in the moments when the imposter voice gets loudest.

One of the most powerful shifts I see is when a client builds the confidence to say 'I don't know, let's explore that' in a room full of people. It sounds small. It isn't. It's one of the most credible things a leader can do, and it tends to change the whole dynamic around them.

Whether you've been leading for two years or twenty, if any of this sounds familiar, it's worth paying attention to. This is exactly the kind of thing we work on together.