Is there anything new to say about imposter syndrome?, she asked herself, typing a post title about imposter syndrome as a new project manager anyway.
What causes imposter syndrome?
There are two “characters”, if you will, in any tale of imposter syndrome. The first character is the story you believe about the role you are meant to inhabit, and the second character is the story you believe about yourself: your skills, your experiences, your disposition.
Imposter syndrome happens when we believe there’s a fundamental mismatch between these two characters; that the gulf between them is so large that it could never be bridged.
Once this mismatch happens, our mental energy starts shifting away from “showing up to do our jobs well in our own ways”, or “growing as a professional”, and it starts moving into defensive mode. We start spending all our energy trying to either 1) resolve this “disconnect” somehow, or 2) convince other people that there is no disconnect between the two characters: the role, and our selves.
To me, that’s imposter syndrome: when that defensive energy overtakes the positive energy we bring to our work.
So now that we’ve done this initial level-setting work, let’s address the cornerstone topic here:
What solves imposter syndrome as a new project manager?
Strategy #1: Study the role and study yourself
Fundamentally, my first recommendation is always going to involve studying the roots of the two characters that star in the imposter syndrome show. For new project managers, go in this order:
- Study the role of a project manager. What does a PM do? How do projects work? How do we organize them and move them forward? How does project management add value to an organization, rather than being a bunch of paper pushers that people get angry at? When the PM role on a team really, really works, what does it look like? (My course, the Aspiring Project Manager, is free, and can help with this if you’re stuck getting started.)
- Study yourself. After you’ve understood the above really well, come back to you. The better you understand project management, the better you’ll be able to articulate how the skills and experiences you’ve had so far are applicable. You’ll also be better able to understand why some of your “best work” in higher ed might not be the most relevant example of PM work.
This will more than likely go a long way in allaying early-pivot imposter syndrome; it’s the foundational work of understanding how you and the role overlap. And for the record: everyone overlaps differently. There are a million types of project managers.
(We’ll get to that over the course of the blog but I think it’s outside the scope of this post!)
Strategy #2: Understand the norms of entering the field
Recognize that most project managers come into PM by way of either a transition or a pivot.
I’ve never met a project manager who went to college to become a PM, became one, and then had a long and happy career comprised of being a PM from the jump. Every single project manager I’ve ever met has either pivoted into the field, like me, or advanced up from being an individual contributor, like an engineer, a coder, a designer, or a teacher.
The extension of understanding how PM functions, like we were doing in strategy #1, is understanding the norms of how people enter the field. Once you understand that there is no single “path into” project management, you start to understand that there’s nothing someone could learn about your own entry in that would make you “less than”, because there’s no possible answer to the question that involves a value judgment.
If you don’t believe me, check out PMI’s Most Influential Projects list from last year. See if you can identify the single educational or career path these leaders have in common. There isn’t one 🙂
Strategy #3: Understand how meaningless titles are
My experience is that very few people care what your titles were. Or are. Or will be. It just doesn’t matter. They care deeply about what you can do, and what you’ve done in the past.
Here’s a reframe I’ve been using when I’ve been working with higher ed folks over the last few months, and it’s really landed: you do student development work really, really well. You are excellent at student development based on all your years in the field, but I can almost guarantee you’ve never had (and will never have) a title like “student development manager”.
All the same, you feel confident knowing that you’re good at it because it’s so deeply ingrained into the work that you do. How could you not be good at it? If there was a job title like “student development manager”, you might feel some performance anxiety, but you probably wouldn’t feel like the job was meant for someone else whose title matched more closely.
Project management is the exact same thing. The only difference is that because most of us don’t come into the field with formal education in it, it’s harder to recognize than student development work. That’s where strategy #1 comes in: study the role, and study yourself.
Because once you do see project management, you start to understand the ways that it’s baked into your work. And then once you see that, your alignment with it becomes less of a “thing to defend” (i.e. the thread that starts to unravel into imposter syndrome-y feelings) and more of just a fact. It’s just a thing about you: you do student development work, and you do project management work.
And once you’ve internalized that — that by virtue of your experience, you do project management work, which is just a simple fact, and no one can take it away from you — the power imposter syndrome has over you lessens dramatically.
Thank you
I have learned a lot from all the higher ed/student affairs pros who’ve worked with me in the year I’ve been running this platform. A lot of people have trusted me with a lot of stories about their fears and their blockers.
This post more or less comes from the emails, DMs, and Zoom calls I’ve exchanged with these folks while supporting them. I’m grateful that I’ve gotten to share stories and I’m also very very proud that other professionals thinking about jumping into PM will read this and be helped by the insights these helped me create.
If you are someone that has shared an imposter syndrome-y story with me in the last year: thank you, and I’m proud of you. ❤️
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