Ignoring the Personal Stress of a Key Executive Could Cost You Millions

Who am I kidding? (Publicly Confident. Privately Unsure.)

There’s an interesting phenomenon called “Imposter Syndrome—a mindset in which smart, successful people believe that they have fooled others into thinking they’re more intelligent and competent than they really are.” [vi]

(It’s) the secret and subjective experience of feeling like a phony, despite a documented record of achievement, and the accompanying fear of being unmasked. [vii]

Get this:

Psychological research done in the early 1980s estimated that two out of five successful people consider themselves frauds; other studies have found that 70 percent of all people feel like fakes at one time or another. ‘Some people, the more successful they become, the more they feel like frauds … There’s a dissonance between self-image and external reality.’ [viii]

It’s lonely at the top

There are fewer people at the top to have a relationship with, for a start. This is as true of small and medium-sized companies as major corporations.

In the workplace, many employees — and half of CEOs — report feeling lonely in their roles.” [ix] Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy (19th Surgeon General of the United States, from 2014 to 2017

For many leaders, particularly those who don’t have a significant other they can communicate with, a large part of the stress is social isolation. We humans crave human connection. And close, personal connection on the job is almost impossible for the senior leader to achieve.

Others on the team can’t ask you, how are you doing really? They fear sounding intrusive. They are put off by the risk of offending, placing a colleague in an awkward position, or jeopardizing the relationship.

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