In 1978, psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described the imposter phenomenon: a persistent feeling that your accomplishments are the result of luck or someone else's mistake rather than your own competence, and that sooner or later this will be exposed. They studied it on a sample of successful women with objectively strong results—and that is a fundamental detail.
From the very beginning, the phenomenon was described not in weak specialists, but in strong ones.
This is its non-obvious part. The deeper a person understands a subject area, the more clearly they see the boundaries of their knowledge and the more material they have for doubt. A beginner does not doubt because they cannot see where mistakes can be made. In essence, this is a mirror image of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the exact same mechanics, just different ends of the scale.
Usually, the conclusion that follows is that the person needs to work on their confidence. This is precisely where the conversation most often takes a wrong turn.
Because the feeling of being an imposter does not arise in a vacuum. It predictably intensifies in environments structured in a certain way: where success criteria are not formulated and one has to guess what is expected; where feedback appears only in the form of complaints, and its absence has to be interpreted on one's own; where a person happens to be the only one in the room with such a background, gender, or age; where promotions occur without an explanation of what specifically earned them. Remove these conditions—and the intensity of the phenomenon drops, without any work on self-esteem.
A practical shift follows from this. If imposter syndrome occurs systematically in a company—among newcomers after onboarding, among people after a promotion, or within a specific department—this is not a coincidence of personality traits. It is a diagnostic signal about how criteria and feedback are designed.
What helps at the organizational level: explaining promotion decisions in terms of specific observable grounds rather than general words about potential; providing regular feedback so its absence does not have to be interpreted on one's own; making level criteria explicit and verifiable—then the question "do I measure up?" stops being a matter of internal guesswork; normalizing discussions about uncertainty at the leadership level, because the first person to admit they do not know everything relieves the tension for the entire team.
Personal work on confidence helps an individual. But if the phenomenon reproduces itself in a company time and time again, it is not the people who need fixing.