Imposter syndrome is the persistent feeling that your accomplishments came from luck or timing rather than skill, paired with a quiet fear that someone is eventually going to “find out.” Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first documented it in 1978, after sitting down with more than 150 high-achieving women — PhDs, executives, professionals with the credentials to prove their competence — and finding that nearly all of them privately believed they didn’t deserve to be there. They called it the imposter phenomenon; today it’s better known as imposter syndrome, and it shows up just as often in the corner office as it does in someone’s first job.

Why success doesn’t cure it

Most people assume the feeling fades once you’ve proven yourself. In practice it often does the opposite — each promotion raises the stakes and the audience, which can make the fear of being found out louder, not quieter. Clance and Imes noted that high achievers tend to explain away evidence of their own competence (it was a fluke, they were just being nice) while treating any stumble as confirmation of the fear. That loop is what keeps the feeling running no matter how strong someone’s actual résumé gets.

Why it’s more common near the top, not less

Leadership roles tend to concentrate the exact conditions that trigger imposter syndrome: less feedback, higher visibility, and fewer peers to compare notes with. A first-time manager surrounded by people who’ve done the job for a decade, or a founder who is the only person who has ever held their title inside the company, has no easy benchmark for whether they’re doing it right — so the internal narrative fills the gap left behind.

A feeling, not a diagnosis

Despite the name, imposter syndrome isn’t a clinical condition and doesn’t appear in psychiatric diagnostic manuals. Clance herself pushed back on calling it a “syndrome” at all, preferring “phenomenon,” precisely because it describes a common experience rather than a disorder. That distinction matters in practice: treating it as a normal, manageable feeling rather than a personal flaw is itself part of getting past it.

How leaders actually overcome it

The fix isn’t waiting to feel confident before acting — confidence tends to follow competence, not the other way around. What actually helps is naming the feeling out loud to a trusted peer or mentor, since almost everyone else is quietly carrying the same doubt, keeping a written record of concrete wins to counter the mind’s tendency to discount them, and separating the feeling from the facts: doubt is not evidence. None of that makes the feeling disappear entirely. It just stops it from being the thing that decides what a leader does next.