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Other leaders felt exactly the same
A new role at speed
Ian Silber joined OpenAI when GPT-4 had recently come out, and he was intimidated, using the tools without feeling he truly understood them. He also stepped into a management role at a scale growing fast, at a company unlike anywhere he had worked, where every day brought something new.
Feeling like failing
For a long time he felt bad at it. He didn't know how to build a design team or how to hire, and it felt like failing every day while adjusting quickly. Then friends who had led very large design teams, or gone through a similar transition, described feeling exactly the same.
Finding support
Their problems turned out not to be unique. A mentor or a buddy who is impartial and outside the situation helped him, and finding that community did too.
Why do new leaders feel like impostors?
Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described the impostor phenomenon in a 1978 paper, based on high-achieving women who felt their success was undeserved. Later research found the same feeling in men and across many professions. It tends to show up at transitions, when the standards for success change faster than a person's sense of competence. The term is a description of a pattern and is not a clinical diagnosis.
Why is becoming a manager such a big shift?
Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill followed nineteen new managers through their first year for her 1992 book Becoming a Manager. She found that the change was a shift in identity and not only a change in tasks. The new managers had to move from doing the work themselves to getting results through others. Many were surprised by how little of the job resembled what they had done before.
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
