Imposture Syndrome is when you stand badly, right? (Seriously, I once mis-spelt that too - on some slides I had in a talk at a top conference. Man, I was crushed. People came up to me afterwards and apologetically told me they didn't get the joke.).
So in my mid-forties, I've come to embrace impostor syndrome. I really do not know what I'm doing, much of the time. Yes, there are some things I know about pretty well, for sure. But there's a lot of things I really don't, and I have to feel my way through.
And working with a lot of other folks over the years has taught me three things very well:
Feeling your way through is a skill all of its own.
Any decision is better than no decision.
There's really nothing worse than someone explaining something to you that you know better than them.
That latter has been "popularised" as Mansplaining, and it's probably even worse then because of the implications. But basically, hire smart people and then let them be smart.
As for the first two, that's what "Lean" is for. "Lean" isn't so much about keeping costs down - although it happens to do that - as much as it's about risk management. "Fail Fast", they say - if you're unsure how a decision is going to pan out, take a step back and figure out what the quickest path is to a point where you can say "Yes, that decision was good" - or not. Lean talks about Hypotheses that you'll test.
Once you've figured out how to do that, then take the decision - and make it clear that you don't know if it'll work or not. But push forward, validate, and only then revisit. If it fails, then that's awesome, because you now know what the right decision should be - and besides, you said it might. Failure, it turns out, really is an option.
Embrace your impostor syndrome - if you acknowledge that there are unknowns, that there'll be wrong turns, then your entire team won't be so invested in proving themselves right, and instead they'll invest in seeing if they were.
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Imposture Syndrome is when you stand badly, right? (Seriously, I once mis-spelt that too - on some slides I had in a talk at a top conference. Man, I was crushed. People came up to me afterwards and apologetically told me they didn't get the joke.).
So in my mid-forties, I've come to embrace impostor syndrome. I really do not know what I'm doing, much of the time. Yes, there are some things I know about pretty well, for sure. But there's a lot of things I really don't, and I have to feel my way through.
And working with a lot of other folks over the years has taught me three things very well:
That latter has been "popularised" as Mansplaining, and it's probably even worse then because of the implications. But basically, hire smart people and then let them be smart.
As for the first two, that's what "Lean" is for. "Lean" isn't so much about keeping costs down - although it happens to do that - as much as it's about risk management. "Fail Fast", they say - if you're unsure how a decision is going to pan out, take a step back and figure out what the quickest path is to a point where you can say "Yes, that decision was good" - or not. Lean talks about Hypotheses that you'll test.
Once you've figured out how to do that, then take the decision - and make it clear that you don't know if it'll work or not. But push forward, validate, and only then revisit. If it fails, then that's awesome, because you now know what the right decision should be - and besides, you said it might. Failure, it turns out, really is an option.
Embrace your impostor syndrome - if you acknowledge that there are unknowns, that there'll be wrong turns, then your entire team won't be so invested in proving themselves right, and instead they'll invest in seeing if they were.