leadership – Sherry Bevan

Jun 21 2022 0 Comment

Narrowing The Gender Pay Gap Through Leadership Coaching

Too often, we question the impact a leadership coach can make. Is it practical, when do you need one, and will it be worth the investment? In this episode, host Sherry Bevan shares tips and important points to consider when selecting a leadership coach. Choosing the right coach can contribute to achieving your goal as a company, team, or individual. Tune in and discover how leadership coaching can work for you.

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Listen to the podcast here

Narrowing The Gender Pay Gap Through Leadership Coaching

In this episode, I’m going to share with you how leadership coaching can help strengthen your female talent pipeline and close your gender pay gap. In my years of working in technology and ten years, in particular, specializing working as a leadership coach in the technology sector, I have absolutely seen the transformative power that leadership coaching can have on individuals, teams, and whole companies. What I want to share with you is how it works, when it might be a good time to consider using a leadership coach, when it’s most effective, and what the benefits of coaching are.

How Does Coaching Work?

We’ll spend a little bit of time thinking about the pros and cons of whether or not you use an internal versus an external coach. If you are going to go external or even look at somebody internally, what to look for in that coach. I will talk a little bit about the coaching process and what else you might want to consider running alongside coaching. First, let’s think about how coaching work. What’s the point of leadership coaching? How is it going to help you strengthen your female talent pipeline, and in the long-term, how is it going to help you close your gender pay gap?

When you are working with a coach, there are a few real positives that individuals will get from the coaching process. For a start, it helps to build self-awareness and awareness of your strengths and your skills. Also, opportunities for improvement – where you have knowledge gaps and where you have confidence gaps so that you can then decide whether or not you want to fill those gaps depending on the progress that you are looking for in your career.

Building that self-awareness and getting crystal clear on your skills and your strengths so that in itself gives that individual more courage and confidence. Therefore, they will be more likely to take that next step in their career. Coaching works because of that strengthening of your self-awareness that will enable an individual to have that courage, to have that confidence, to increase their visibility so they make a bigger impact.

That means that they are able to improve and strengthen stakeholder relationships that they might have so they get more visible in the workplace. Therefore, they are more likely to be front of mind when it comes to considering candidates for new opportunities, promotion, or getting involved in other activities.

It’s that self-awareness and that recognition of your own strengths and talents that give individuals the courage to take more risks. More risks often result in more creative and innovative thinking, which can help that individual to make a bigger impact. At the end of the day, if they are coming up with more creative and innovative thinking, that can be a real benefit for your organization.

Coaching often starts with small changes, then gradually, over time, moves up to making bigger changes.

Often, when somebody is going through leadership coaching, they are more willing and open to look beyond their immediate team and their company for fresh ideas and perspectives. It can be valuable when you are looking to develop new lines or to strengthen the relationships you have with your clients.

It’s that courage to take more risks that allows them to make braver decisions. Perhaps decisions, they might be feeling a little bit tentative about making and a little bit hesitant, but having that confidence once they start to see what else they can do. Often with coaching, it starts off with small changes and then gradually, over time, moves up to taking bigger changes, which at the start might have been too big a step to take.

As time goes on and the coach will work with the individual to build their confidence and courage so that they feel they can take those brave decisions three months into a coaching relationship. Those decisions might not feel as big, scary, or as daunting because, over time, they have developed that confidence and courage in themselves.

It’s that better decision-making that will help to develop their leadership skills and confidence. The one thing that I would also point out with leadership coaching and I have seen this on occasion. When you take on a coach, whether you bring that person in from externally or you match somebody up to work with an internal coach, sometimes it might lead to decisions that you weren’t expecting.

I have seen it where somebody has gone through leadership coaching, looked at their strengths and values, how that was in alignment or not with the company’s values, and decided they don’t want to stay with the company anymore. It can lead to people leaving. That is the caveat that the more you are giving that individual, the more confidence, increasing their visibility, encouraging them to think differently and creatively, and have the courage to take more risks. One of those risks might be to leave.

When Is A Good Time To Use A Coach?

When is a good time to use a coach? Often, I see that people will bring coaching in when there’s a particular change of experience. For example, if somebody is being promoted into a new role, they are taking on new responsibilities, or they are taking the same role, but in a different department, that often can be a good time to focus on getting that person settled into their new role and hitting the ground running.

CGP 19 | Leadership Coaching — Leadership Coaching: Coaching helps to build self-awareness of your strengths and skills and opportunities for improvement.

That’s one time when you might feel it’s appropriate to bring in a coach. Another time that often sees if you are making a company-wide change management program. Perhaps you’ve gone through a restructuring, developing new service lines, or targeting a new sector. That often is a good time to bring in a coach to help and support your leaders, start to think in a different way, think more creatively, and foster that innovative thinking. That’s another opportunity for you to bring in coaching.

Another time that I often see companies bring in a leadership coach is for people who are coming back from maternity leave to help them get settled back into their roles. Often if they have taken nine months or a year out, or they have taken shared parental leave, a lot can change in an organization in that time.

Sometimes, coming back from maternity leave, you have left one job and you’ve come back, and the role has changed or maybe they have changed department or the structure of their team has changed. Having that coaching on that return can be valuable to rebuild that person’s confidence and leadership skills. Help them redevelop or create new stakeholder relationships. Coming back from maternity leave or some other long-term absence, perhaps if the person has taken long-term sickness, for example, or had to take time out for caring responsibilities.

When Is Coaching Most Effective?

Coaching itself is most effective if the individual who is being coached has a willingness and an open mind to the change and embraces new patterns of behavior. It helps if they can be humble about what they do know and what they don’t know, somebody who is curious to explore new perspectives. Coaching can be effective when somebody is willing, able, and ready to recognize and accept their strengths, challenges, and blind spots, and if they are willing to learn more about themselves. That’s when coaching can be powerful.

It’s that curiosity to explore new perspectives and to be open to new ideas and possibilities. Some of which may come from simply having that time and space to articulate their thoughts and ambitions. Some of that may come with being willing to explore further outside of the organization and get that fresh perspective and ideas from outside or in date, ideas from the coach themselves.

We know that coaching works. From your point of view and the company’s point of view, it means that more women are more likely to put themselves forward for promotion or more likely to apply for new roles, so you get more women in those leadership positions. That becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, doesn’t it? We all have heard that thing that you can’t be what you can’t see. The more women you do have in those more senior roles, the more likely it is that other women in your organization, perhaps junior talent or your future talent, will see that that is possible. That is something that I can aspire to, and at the end of the day, that is what is going to start to close your gender pay gap.

Coaching can be effective when somebody is willing, able, and ready to recognize and accept their strengths, challenges, and blind spots.

The Power And Value Of Coaching

Coaching is powerful. It’s so valuable. It develops a person in the workplace, but it also develops that individual outside of work as well. That in itself is not perhaps necessarily going to benefit you as an employer. What it does do is increase, strengthen, and build employee engagement. That, in turn, is going to help you to build a strong employer brand and an employer brand that’s going to attract the best of the female talent that is out in the market.

By strengthening your female talent pipeline, it’s going to help you to increase retention. It is reducing attrition, which means you will save money because you will no longer be going to have to go through the recruitment process on such a regular basis. It’s also going to get the absolute best out of those individuals that you put on a coaching path because it means they are going to be able to maximize their performance and productivity. It helps them to develop their leadership skills so that the team as a whole, not just that individual, will be able to increase their performance and productivity.

Working With An Internal Coach Versus An External Coach

Often, when I’m working with clients, they might not be sure at first whether or not they want to use an internal coach or an external coach. Let me take a couple of moments to think about, explore, and ask you some questions about which do you think is going to be the most valuable. When you are working with an internal coach, one of the big benefits of that is the person already knows the organization. They truly understand the culture and the values. They will understand the unspoken rules, if you like, of the organization.

That in itself can be a limiting factor because it also means they might not be as open to new ideas. They are less likely to question or challenge something that the coachee, the person being coached, an idea that they come up with because it fits into the company’s existing culture and values. From the coachee’s perspective, they might wonder whether or not that individual has an ulterior motive or a hidden agenda for being their coach.

That’s unlikely to be a conscious thing, but it might stymie or hamper conversation so much because if you are working with somebody and you are worried about whether or not what I say is going to get back to my manager or to my manager’s manager, it might mean that conversation is not as open and honest as it could be if you are working with an external coach.

There’s that potentially slight niggle of the back of the mind around confidentiality. If you go to an external coach, for example, so somebody like myself, where I come in and work with individuals in your organization or with a team of people in your organization, obviously, there are going to be some advantages in that.

I am completely independent. As far as I’m concerned, I have no hidden agenda. I don’t have a reason for wanting that person to take on a particular role or for that person to want to be more assertive or less challenging. I don’t have a reason for wanting that person to change their behavior so I can be completely independent.

Confidentiality is something absolutely that you can rely and depend upon, as can the coachee themselves. That does mean it can change the nuance of the conversation because coaching is about creating that safe, protected space for the individual to articulate their thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. If they know that it is absolutely confidential and isn’t going to pass outside of the room, they are more likely to relax and open up, which means in the coaching process, that transformation can be much deeper.

As an outsider, I bring in a fresh perspective, fresh ideas, and different ways of thinking, and that can be helpful. Particularly, if you want the person to take on coaching because you want them to be more creative and innovative in the way that they develop their team or the way that you develop your services or work with your clients.

As I’m not so familiar with your culture and values, I don’t know what the expected behavior is. I’m more likely to help the coachee question. I’m more likely to challenge the coachee if they say, “We can’t do it like that.” I’m more determined to say, “Why not? I have seen it done like that in other organizations.”

There is an advantage of bringing somebody in from outside. It can change the whole feeling around the coaching. There’s that confidentiality. It’s that fresh perspective, but on the other hand, I’m not going to know the company culture and values, or understand the intricacies of the organization and how your matrix management works, for example. However, as a coach, I would always argue. I don’t need to know that detail because I’m not coaching you about your organization. I’m coaching you about your strengths, skills, values and leadership skills, helping the individual to make decisions on how to improve their performance at work.

Having thought about the pros and cons of working with an internal coach versus an external coach, the next thing to think about is what you look for in a coach. That professionalism, integrity, and confidentiality for me are absolutely key. I would always encourage you to work with somebody that you feel you can trust.

One key skill when working in a coaching relationship is the ability to hear and recognize what’s not being said.

When you have that coaching relationship, it can be quite a powerful relationship between the coach and the coachee. Most definitely, it needs to be a good sense of rapport between the coachee and the coach. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that if you are looking to bring leadership coaching for your female talent, I might not be the right person to work with every single one of your female leaders, but I will be the right person to work with some of your female leaders.

Making The Relationship Work

There’ll be other coaches with who the relationship will be better suited for different people. One of the key things in a coaching relationship is the actual relationship like, “How is this going to work? Do you trust me? Do you have confidence in me? Do you feel that you can be open and honest when you are working with me?”

The other thing I would say when you are looking at coaches is making sure that you are finding somebody who’s got experience in coaching. It’s very difficult to be completely transparent about the people that I have worked with because often, the confidentiality follows through after the coaching relationship has finished. I couldn’t necessarily tell everybody I have worked with because not everybody is willing to share that information. Knowing that I have got that experience and worked with companies in your sector is a real bonus when it comes to selecting the right coach.

Having worked in technology all my life, having been a woman or a female leader in technology, I completely understand and empathize with the challenges that a woman brings. Also, the opportunities. I have seen how that works in lots of different organizations. I’m bringing that experience with me to the table.

The coaching process itself, let me spend a couple of moments thinking about that. One of the key things with the coaching processes is to create a safe space for the participant so that they have the confidence, the safety, and the openness if you like to be able to express their inner thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, the more that you can articulate those thoughts. For example, I have been working with somebody who, at the back of her mind, niggle about her future career prospects at her current employer.

Together, we have formulated a plan so that she can go and talk to her manager about that. That is going to free up her mind so that she can then focus and concentrate on other aspects of her work in a more authentic way. It’s about creating that safe space so that you can articulate those thoughts, beliefs, and feelings that might be nibbling away at the back of your head, and you can’t quite put your finger on why you are not happy or why this feels in conflict. It’s that safe space that is powerful and important.

What does a coach do when they are coaching? This sounds so simple. It’s crazy that people pay me to do this, but basically, the crux of it is I sit, I listen, and I ask questions. I will ask open questions, but at times I will challenge and reflect back on what I’m hearing. One of the key skills when you are working in a coaching relationship, if you are the coach, is the ability to hear and recognize what’s not being said.

That is so important because when you are working with somebody inside the organization and you are having a conversation at lunchtime. Perhaps you are stuck on a problem, or you are wondering how to tackle a particular challenge. Talk to somebody else in the organization. We all inevitably fall into the same way of thinking, in particular, company culture. You might not get that different perspective. You might not get the person questioning or challenging you. What’s making you think about doing that, or what else could you do?

It’s simple as it sounds, but it’s very powerful. Coaches listen but they also ask questions. They reflect, they challenge, but also, they hear what’s not being said. One of the fundamental parts of the whole coaching process is that the coach will always ask the client to make a commitment and be very specific about the actions that they are going to undertake before that next coaching session.

Personally, as a coach, I will always ask the person to write down the action and say it out loud to me. What I do at the end of the session is ask that person to read out what they have said. I record it as well so that when we come back at the next session, I can say, “How did you get on with X?” If they didn’t get on with X for whatever reason, “What got in the way? What can we do about that? How can we stop that blockage from happening next time?”

Coaching can be a powerful process. It sounds super simple and I talk about it in those terms, but it’s a powerful tool to develop the leadership skills in your female talent and strengthen your female talent pipeline. At the end of the day, you are going to increase retention, reduce attrition, and close that gender pay gap.

Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you found it useful to hear about how leadership coaching can work and how it can help you to close your gender pay gap. More episodes on closing the gender pay gap at SherryBevan.co.uk. If this has sparked an idea for you and your organization, or if you have been thinking about bringing in some leadership coaches, please do book an exploratory chat with me.

That will give you the opportunity to ask any questions you have about the leadership coaching that I do, either individual or team level. A variety of levels, from your future leadership candidates to heads of departments or directors. I do that coaching right now with a range of cybersecurity and technology companies to support them in staunching the female talent pipeline. If that’s of interest, please do get in touch with me by email, Sherry@SherryBevan.co.uk, to book your call. Thank you for reading. I will be back next time.

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Sherry@SherryBevan.co.uk

Oct 12 2021 0 Comment

The Impacts Of Imposter Syndrome On The Gender Pay Gap And What To Do About It With Clare Josa

Podetize HostingGender Pay Gap, Podcast

Imposter Syndrome is already an issue for leaders, but the stigma imposed by gender only amplifies it. This can manifest itself in your organization in many ways, one of which is through the gender pay gap. Today, joining your host Sherry Bevan is the leading authority on Imposter Syndrome in the UK, Clare Josa. She speaks on her landmark research study about Imposter Syndrome to clearly define the phenomena and its impacts on the gender pay gap. She also discusses concrete examples of how it affects employees and leaders in the workplace. Plus, Clare shares tips for companies on how to be more proactive in dealing with Imposter Syndrome to promote an equitable workplace and empower its workforce. Tune in to this insightful discussion to learn more!

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Listen to the podcast here

The Impacts Of Imposter Syndrome On The Gender Pay Gap And What To Do About It With Clare Josa

I’m excited, because in this episode we’re exploring how the imposter syndrome affects your gender pay gap. I’m delighted to be talking to Clare Josa. She is the UK‘s leading authority on imposter syndrome. She’s the author of eight books and an expert in the neuroscience and psychology of performance. Her original training as an engineer specializing in Six Sigma and Lean manufacturing means her inspirational approach is grounded in practical common sense, creating breakthroughs, not burnout. Naturally, we’re going to be talking about imposter syndrome and I hope you get something valuable from this to help you close your gender pay gap. Clare, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me on the show, Sherry.

I’m delighted to have got you on because you’ve got so much experience but I’ve thought for those people reading, who maybe don’t know what we’re talking about when we refer to the imposter syndrome, perhaps you could start by giving us your definition of what it means.

Imposter syndrome is the secret fear that people are going to find out that we’re not good enough, that we’re faking it, that they made a mistake hiring us, that we don’t belong. It’s something that keeps us awake at 3:00 in the morning. I often define it with my clients, my students and my readers as the secret fear of others judging us, the way we’re judging ourselves. It’s different to self-doubt. What we found in the 2019 imposter syndrome research study is self-doubt is about what we can and can’t do. It’s about confidence, skills, and capabilities. Imposter syndrome is about who we think we are. It’s down there at the identity level, much deeper. Somebody running self-doubt might think, “I messed up that presentation.” If you’re running imposter syndrome as well, you’ll think, “What if they find out I’m not good enough?”

It’s that difference between who you are and what you think about yourself, your confidence in your skills and your experience.

I talk about the imposter syndrome gap as being the gap between who we see ourselves as being and who we think we need to be to do, achieve something or step up for a goal because sometimes we can run. That’s the self-sabotage of imposter syndrome kicking in. Sometimes we can’t. We build over that gap, what I call the bridge of coping strategies. How will I succeed despite imposter syndrome? It takes huge amounts of energy. It causes anxiety. It means that we’re hypervigilant, that’s fight-flight-freeze response is constantly engaged, looking for threats. We can cope most of the time but if something major comes up like pandemic, working remotely from home whilst juggling educating children or having to handle being the only one in the office when everybody else is remote. This thing can mean the previous dormant imposter syndrome comes out to play with gusto.

What led you to become an expert in this area?

I started out in Mechanical Engineering. My Master’s degree was in Mechanical Engineering. In Germany, you don’t get much more left-brain than that but I’d always been passionate about how people ticked. After fifteen years in engineering, I studied to become an NLP trainer. I moved to become the head of market research at one of the world’s most disruptive brands, which was great. That was the link between the engineers, the marketing team and the customers. It’s like a three-way translator. There came a point where I was studying more about how to help people change their lives, how to help them to help themselves. Looking at what I knew from Six Sigma about how to take the fluff out of those processes and make them more reliable and concrete. Back in 2003, I left, set up my own business. One of the things I was doing back then was executive mentoring.

Imposter syndrome is the secret fear of others judging us the way we’re judging ourselves.

My first client had this weird thing. They were confident. Everybody thought they had the act together and it was 3:00 the morning they were dying inside. My next client and then my next client and it got me researching what is going on. The coaching skills I’ve learned weren’t touching it. I needed something deeper. That was several years ago. The rest is they say is history. I have spent the last several years specializing in the imposter syndrome work that classic tools don’t touch.

We talked about what the imposter syndrome is but what we haven’t talked about is who experiences it. Who has it?

Everyone. There’s no it’s men, it’s women. There’s no you’re old, you’re young. We found in the 2019 research study that 52% of female respondents had struggled with it daily or regularly in 2020 alone, to an extent that it impacted their work and their home life. The figure for men was 49%. Pretty much the same. The difference was how they handled it. Women were twenty times more likely than men to go and talk to someone to ask for help. Men were five times more likely than women to turn to alcohol, drugs and medication to push on through. The other huge thing and this is relevant to the gender pay gap, the male respondents tended to do that feel the fear and do it anyway thing. Pushing it down, pushing on through, “I’m terrified. It’s causing me anxiety. I’m drinking too much but I’m going for that promotion anyway.”

They would get to that stage. When they got promoted, very often, the job title gave them the external validation they needed to mean that they could settle into it. What we found with the female respondents is they would hold back stepping up. They would even volunteer other people if they got the tap on the shoulder to go for the next role. Thirty-seven percent in 2020 alone had not asked for a pay raise they knew they deserved as a result of imposter syndrome.

Sixty percent we found were routinely not taking credit for what they’d achieved, even doing that classic, “I had but,” if they were praised volunteering self-criticism, meaning that they want not to top of mind for those promotions and opportunities. They were not letting their light shine because, for them, the emotional side of imposter syndrome was simply strong. It held them back. It caused them to subconsciously self-sabotage rather than step up to the next level and pushing on through it for them was much less of an option.

I was about to ask, what did your research tell us about how imposter syndrome affects the gender pay gap? You answered it succinctly there but what more does your research tell us about the imposter syndrome and the gender pay gap and how it has an impact?

We found that there were three hidden drivers of the gender pay gap, which most organizations aren’t aware of, they can’t address. One of them was the alpha male competitive culture at the most senior levels in too many organizations still. There comes to a point where if a woman gets promoted beyond that level, she either has to change how she behaves to become more of a man or she has to find ways to cope with being in a highly competitive alpha male environment.

Even some of the most heart-centered organizations I’ve worked with in those top couple of levels, it’s suddenly a complete culture change. Women don’t feel like they belong. They feel that fear of, “What if they realize they made a mistake hiring me or putting me in this role?” They also found at those senior levels that the spotlight that was on them for being a female in that role rather than a person in that role meant that their secret fears of, “What if they realize I’m not good enough?” It was like having a supernova shining on them. That was one aspect.

CGP 9 | Imposter Syndrome — Imposter Syndrome: Imposter syndrome is the secret fear that people are going to find out that we’re not good enough, that we’re faking it, that they made a mistake hiring us, that we don’t belong.

The second factor that was driving the gender pay gap that we found was the lack of flexible working. The expectation that at the more senior levels, you’re going to do the longer days, you’re going to do the overnight when we can travel, that you’ve got to wave goodbye to school concerts and all that thing. Many women felt they didn’t want to have to choose. Even if a company offered flexible working because you’ve got this internal dialogue where you’re judging yourself and you’re worried that others are doing it too. If you accepted the flexible working, you were worried that people were judging you and that somehow would see you as not pulling your weight not being good enough. That was factor two. Factor three was all of the self-sabotage that comes in there from imposter syndrome.

If you imagine, you’re going to step up to a leadership role, you’re going to take responsibility and you are going to be visible at that level. If it’s 3:00 in the morning, you’re lying awake and your inner critic is telling you all the reasons why you’re not good enough, it’s extremely hard to feel congruent and safe doing that. One of the other things we found is that at senior levels, women were likely to apply for a promotion externally to leave a company they love because they were scared of what they perceived as the shame of failure if it became public knowledge that they’d gone for a role that they then didn’t get.

I hear that with a lot of technology companies, where women have applied for promotion and not got it. They’ve then left the organization or they haven’t even applied internally because they’re worried about failing in their eyes. They decide to go for that promotion outside the company, which means you’re losing good female talent.

Somebody else is gaining from the hard work that you’ve put in working with that person and developing them over those years.

We’ve got these three hidden drivers that often companies aren’t particularly aware of. If they’re hidden and you don’t know you’ve got them then there’s not an awful lot that you can only manage what you can see, can’t you?

It’s one of the reasons why I’m passionate about this and my podcast that you are sharing is important because secretly, we know if we have an alpha male culture at the senior level. We will never admit it to the shareholders and we don’t have to wash our dirty linen in public but we know. Secretly, we know whether we’re expecting our leadership team to work hours. That means they’re choosing between career and children, loved ones, care, responsibilities or having a life. By raising the awareness and asking the question, if we were honest, we took our emotions and our biases out of this, are any of these three factors at play? With that third factor of imposter syndrome, there’s something that a lot of companies have been doing that is well-intentioned but it’s making it worse, which is giving women that helping hand. It will seem as quotas or positive discrimination and it’s not being phrased like that.

If you take somebody who secretly believes they don’t belong, that a mistake was made hiring them, who’s scared they’re going to be found out as not good enough and a fraud and you give them that pushups the next level then it amplifies those feelings. They can then look around. I remember when I had imposter syndrome in my engineering days, I was promoted extremely young to senior engineer. The rumor that went around the factories are, “She got the job because she’s a girl.” My imposter syndrome meant I believed it. It can undermine the integrity and respect of female leaders if you are in any way saying to have given them the advantage. I talk about equity instead of equality.

There was a fantastic meme on social media. The dad taking two children to a football match. One was older than the other they couldn’t see over the barrier. The dad got two equal boxes. One child could see over, the other one still couldn’t. Equity is giving that second child the box that they need so they can both see but this does not come in the form of quotes and positive discrimination. It comes in the form of, what does this person needs to be able to thrive? Do they need support in ditching imposter syndrome? Do they need us to put serious work into the flexibility of hours? Do they need us to create a senior-level environment and culture where anybody can thrive with God as if their gender, their ethnicity, their socioeconomic class? Looking at what you need to do to create equity so that it’s fair for everybody rather than giving people that helping hand creates this feeling of resentment.

Make asking for help with imposter syndrome as acceptable as asking for help with Microsoft Excel.

I’ve got clients where there were men who thought they were about to get the next promotion. A woman then got it out of the blue. Everybody knew it was because they’d been told they had to have a quote on the board. That woman had to leave because nobody would respect her authority, even though she might have been the best candidate. We have to be careful at how we handle this, how we communicate it and how we’re being seen to be fair.

What can companies do then in practical terms to stop that imposter syndrome affecting the gender pay gap?

One of the first things is that we need to be training leaders in imposter syndrome in being able to spot the signs. We’re good at hiding it when it’s running because we feel ashamed. It’s an identity level. It’s about who I am as a person. We put a lot of effort into hiding it. By the time we ask for help with it, it means it’s got to a stage where that bridge of coping strategies is no longer enough. It takes courage. Training managers to be able to spot the warning signs. For example, one of the things I do is I train imposter syndrome first status in an organization so they can be a point of contact because it’s removing the taboo. I’m on a mission to make asking for help with imposter syndrome as acceptable as asking for help with Microsoft Excel macros.

Nobody would think twice if they suddenly had to do something complex on Microsoft Office but saying, “I need training on that.” We need to get there with imposter syndrome because it can lead to mental health issues, anxiety, depression, stress, burnout. It can trigger all of these. Having that HR, in-house coaches, leaders, line managers, having the basic awareness, having key points of contact in the business who can help, you can do more than just offer tea and sympathy. Also, having programs that give people practical tools because not everybody needs a full-blown, “Let’s dive in and deal with imposter syndrome.” Sometimes it might be training in how to choose which thoughts to feed. How to be able to press pause on that inner dialogue? I have my Inner Critic Bootcamp program that they can study for that in six weeks, which helps to stop the cycle.

Sometimes they might want to dive in more deeply and work with somebody. You might want some in-house mentors who’ve trained in the deeper work to clear out imposter syndrome particularly if you have people who are stepping up from line management to leadership roles. What triggers imposter syndrome particularly is any shift in identity. For example, becoming a parent, returning from maternity leave. We see it a lot with university students when they graduate. Becoming a leader, a shift in identity opens up that imposter syndrome gap between who you see yourself as being and who you think you need to be. Actively putting imposter syndrome clearing programs into your leadership development strategy, meaning that anybody who is running it without shame, without taboo, without judgment can have a route they can follow that says, “I want to clear this out.” They get to fulfill their potential.

One of the things that happen if somebody gets promoted because part of them is saying, “I want to do this role.” Part of them is screaming, “What if they find me out?” They can turn into a micro-managing boss in as little as a few weeks. The symptoms, the stress, and the anxiety of imposter syndrome can be pushed on down through the team quickly. It can turn a rising star into someone that’s creating a toxic team without even realizing.

Which is another big issue for organizations because that will create other employee engagement issues and employee retention issues.

If anybody in that team was running imposter syndrome, they were at the coping stage and it was dormant then it can trigger it for them as well. In terms of the gender pay gap, having that clear strategy is yes, you would give your team members the development they need to get ready to be leaders. That is not just the practical external strategies. That also has to be the inside work so that they can let go of whatever might be holding them back from becoming a leader that inspires people to thrive and create successful, happy teams.

This is what we all want at the end of the day because it means that you improve productivity, profitability and your reputation as an employer in the workplace. I’ve enjoyed talking to you about this. I know I could talk all day on this topic because your knowledge and expertise are valuable. If people want to get in touch with you and find out more about what you do, how can they get hold of you?

The research study white paper that might be useful for readers is at DitchingImposterSyndrome.com/research. I’m on LinkedIn, @ClareJosa. There’s only one of me on normal days. My main website is ClareJosa.com. That’s where you can find all resources. I’ve got things like an advice guide that can be useful for someone who does have imposter syndrome. That’s completely free. That’s at ClareJosa.com/advice. That helps you to know what to say, to know which mistakes to avoid and to be able to start supporting that internal discussion to remove the imposter syndrome taboo and get people to support that they need.

Thank you so much to my guest, Clare. I’ve enjoyed talking to you about imposter syndrome and how this can impact the gender pay gap. I hope you, as readers, have enjoyed reading this episode, too. Thank you so much, Clare.

Thank you so much, Sherry.

If this has sparked a thought in your mind, I’d love you to come and book an exploratory chat with me to give you an opportunity to ask any questions you have about the work I do at technology companies on attracting, developing and retaining your female talents that you can close the gender pay gap. Email me at Sherry@SherryBevan.co.uk to book your call. Thank you for reading.

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About Clare Josa

Clare Josa is the UK’s leading authority on Imposter Syndrome, the author of eight books, and an expert in the neuroscience and psychology of performance.

Her original training as an engineer, specialising in Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing, means her inspirational approach is grounded in practical common sense, creating breakthroughs not burnout.