All by Myself? Executives’ Impostor Phenomenon and Loneliness as Catalysts for Executive Coaching With Management Consultants

The Impostor Phenomenon

The various definitions of the impostor phenomenon (IP) share the self-perceived intellectual fraudulence often experienced by high-achieving individuals (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011). Identified initially by Clance and Imes (1978), the IP referred to strong feelings of intellectual and professional fraudulence experienced by highly successful women who attributed their achievements to external factors even in the presence of evidence to the contrary. The core components of the IP have been described as (1) the intense experience of having fooled others into an overestimation of one’s ability, (2) the attribution of one’s success to factors other than intelligence or ability, and (3) the anxiety of being exposed as a fraud (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011).

As opposed to the ample research on the IP in the disciplines of personality (Bernard, Dollinger, & Ramaniah, 2002) and mental health (McGregor, Gee, & Posey, 2008), fewer studies have empirically examined it in the workplace. Accumulating evidence suggests that the IP in organizations is associated with dysfunctional attitudes and behavior. An inverse relationship has been found between the IP and self-efficacy as well as between the IP and perceived organizational support (McDowell, Grubb, & Geho, 2015). Another recent study (Vergauwe, Wille, Feys, De Fruyt, & Anseel, 2015) found that employees with strong IP tendencies reported less satisfaction with their jobs. These employees had also reported less organizational citizenship behavior, which is important for effective organizational functioning. Neureiter and Traut-Mattausch (2016, 2017) have found that the IP might lead to dysfunctional coping and behavior by decreasing career planning and occupational self-efficacy. The IP also has a negative effect on the work–family conflict (Crawford, Shanine, Whitman, & Kacmar, 2016).

Despite the importance of understanding the IP particularly among executives, few studies have addressed this issue empirically. In an online study of 242 practitioners in leadership positions, in different sectors, the IP was found to be associated with higher levels of affective instability, anxiety, a negative self-evaluation, and perfectionism (Rohrmann, Bechtoldt, & Leonhardt, 2016). In an article titled, “The Dangers of Feeling Like a Fake,” Kets de Vries (2005) described cases demonstrating the consequences of dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors of senior executives and CEOs characterized by impostorism. These include setting unrealistic goals for oneself and others, poor decision making, workaholic tendencies, lack of work–life balance, risk of early burnout, and self-destructive behavior in work and non-work settings. Unsurprisingly, all these have negative effects on their subordinates, including rising turnover rates and low office morale. In sum, “Impostors can, and do, damage the organizations they try so hard to please” (Kets de Vries, 2005, p. 113). Hence the importance of deepening our understanding of the IP with regard to positions of significant responsibility and influence. Another underexplored dimension of the executive position is executive loneliness, to be introduced next.

Executive Loneliness

Ample psychological research has been generated regarding human loneliness (e.g., Cacioppo & Patrick, 2009). Loneliness can be defined as “a complex set of feelings encompassing reactions to the absence of intimate and social needs” (Ernst & Cacioppo, 1999, p. 1). Koch (1994) differentiated between the relatively close experiences of loneliness, solitude, isolation, privacy, and alienation. Each has its unique attributes, although these are not necessarily distinct concepts. Although loneliness may be linked to virtues such as freedom and self-attunement (Koch, 1994), it causes psychological pain and severe health deficiencies (e.g., Lynch, 2000), which are widely documented in the scholarly literature.

Loneliness has been studied in various work settings (Peng, Chen, Xia, & Ran, 2017), including managerial positions. Aspiring managers climbing the organizational ladder are typically unaware of the experience of loneliness awaiting them at the top (Kets de Vries, Loper, & Doyle, 1994). After entering executive positions, top managers may discover that their former organizational relationships with peers and superiors have changed, given their inability to connect with organization members like they used to. Moreover, as authority figures, executives are the focus of organizational criticism and the unfulfilled yearnings of individuals and groups. Thus, the experience of executive loneliness might evolve and sustain itself (Cooper & Quick, 2003).

While the link between leadership positions and loneliness has been theorized (Pratt, 2001; Rokach, 2014), the thin empirical evidence reveals an ambiguous picture. On the one hand, some untangle the link between high-ranking positions and loneliness. For example, in a sample of private and public organizations, Wright (2012) found that managerial status did not affect loneliness. On the other hand, leadership positions have been associated with loneliness and solitude (Bell, Roloff, Van Camp, & Karol, 1990), as was found in studies of school principals (Cubbit & Burt, 2002; Kelchtermans, Piot, & Ballet, 2011). In addition, Sims (2003) highlighted the vulnerable position of middle managers who typically contend with contrasting organizational pressures, which arouses experiences of loneliness.

Managerial loneliness, other than being a painful emotional experience, could result in self-defeating behavior, such as unrestrained action, depression, stress, and distress (Cooper & Quick, 2003). The latter might be detrimental to executives’ performance. For instance, Yilmaz (2008) found that school principals’ loneliness was negatively correlated with identification and internalization, both of which are contributors to organizational commitment.

In light of the centrality and importance of top management in organizations, it is thus vital to broaden our understanding of executive IP and loneliness—two intense phenomena that are detrimental to work performance and well-being (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011; Yilmaz, 2008). The dearth of evidence regarding the IP and loneliness among executives, however, is surprising. It is perhaps another expression of the dominance of the rational discourse in the scholarly management literature (Tengblad, 2012a), which may account for the knowledge gap regarding managerial distress. By delving into executives’ perspective regarding their experience as clients of individual consulting relationships with management consultants, this study has the opportunity to explore the executive IP and loneliness.

Sample

The participants are 46 Israeli executives (23 men, 23 women) who are clients of individual consulting relationships with external management consultants, interventions termed as executive coaching by the participants. All participants have a Master’s degree in their professions, which include, law, medicine, economics and finance, engineering, education, psychotherapy, and industrial design. A third of them have a PhD or an MD. in their discipline. Participants’ ages ranged from 37 to 64 years, with an average age of 48 years. Their average executive experience in their current rank (either in their present or former organization) is 9 years. The individual executive coaching relationships in the research sample varied in their duration from 4 months to 3 years, with an average of 18 months. The executive coaching relationships in the sample consisted of timely meetings between the executives and the external management consultants, typically on a weekly basis.

The sample was a convenience snowball sample (Silverman, 2013) assembled as follows: the author contacted by email a large group of executives who had participated in a series of practitioner conferences in the field of organizational change. The email invited senior executives who are currently engaged in individual consulting relationships with an external management consultant to participate in a study on this type of intervention. Twelve respondents contacted the author, referring to their ongoing consulting relationships with their management consultant as executive coaching and expressing their consent to be interviewed regarding this intervention. A face-to-face interview with each of them was scheduled. At the end of each interview, the participant was asked to refer relevant colleagues to the author. This procedure yielded additional interviewees. All participants provided their informed consent and were promised anonymity. The names used in the findings section to cite the interviewees are pseudonyms.

The organizations in which these executive coaching relationships took place represent the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. The business organizations of the participating executives include hi-tech companies, technological startups, a venture capital fund, banks, retail companies, a pharmaceutical company, an industrial factory, and a hotel. The public organizations represented by the executives in the sample include municipalities, schools, public hospitals, and academic institutions. The nonprofit organizations of the participating executives were NGOs in the areas of the environment, informal education, and religion.

Procedure

The author conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews individually with each participant. The purpose of each interview was to gain an understanding of the participant’s perspective regarding their experience as a client of individual consulting relationships labeled as executive coaching. The main research questions of this study are the following:: Why do executives engage in executive coaching relationships with external management consultants? Consequently, what do executives experience as the main benefits of this intervention? Several standard predetermined questions, which were developed with regard to these research questions, were presented to the participant. Several predetermined questions were presented to each participant:

The participants were asked to describe in detail relevant situations in reply to each question. Additional topics raised by the participants, such as their views on the complexity of the executive role, prompted further inquiry. The interviews lasted about 90 minutes on average. All interviewees gave their informed consent to participating in the study and were assured confidentiality.

A “grounded theory” approach was used in the analysis (Charmaz, 2006). The analysis, guided by Creswell and Poth (2017), consisted of three phases of coding—open, axial, and selective. The analysis started with line-by-line open coding of each transcript. An initial list of codes was developed and gradually revised along the progress of the analysis of subsequent interviews. Codes that related to a common theme were grouped together, a step which yielded subcategories and categories. For example, codes in the “the executive role” subcategory included, among others, outputs, skills, and effectiveness. The next stage in this process was axial coding in which the data is put back together in new ways by making connections between a category and its subcategories. Each category was developed and deepened by looking across incidences of occurrence and identifying relevant codes and subcategories. For example, the subcategories included in the “managerial distress” category were depletion, isolation, and agitation. After developing broad categories of information, based on words and phrases used by the interviewees (open coding), and following the stage of interconnecting these categories (axial coding), a framework that relates the categories into a united “story” was selected (selective coding). As this process progressed, the analysis narrowed down the categories into a small set of major themes which encompass the two phenomena under study—the executive IP and loneliness. Finally, a rereading of all the interviews was conducive to a more complete understanding of the emergent findings. For each emerging theme, representative quotations were selected as illustrations. This circular process progressed until data saturation was reached, that is, until further analysis did not elicit any additional codes or categories.

The Explicit Rationale for Executive Coaching With Management Consultants: Lack of Managerial Knowledge and Skills

Despite the variance among the participants in factors including age, gender, occupation, organization type, and years of executive experience, their declared rationale for engaging in executive coaching was remarkably similar. The executives perceived themselves as ill-equipped to contend with the difficulties of their executive role given a deficit of executive training, knowledge, and skills. While the executives expressed professional confidence in the occupations in which they had developed their careers (e.g., engineering, law, medicine), they reported feeling significantly less competent as top managers. The executives in the study had all been promoted to senior managerial positions in light of their high occupational achievements. None of them had studied management, business administration, or a related discipline.

The executives in this study stressed their self-image of incompetence when faced with the demands of the executive position. They described numerous examples of daily situations they had encountered in which they were hesitant as to the suitable managerial response or the right practice to use. Their difficulties included typical managerial challenges at the micro and macro levels, such as the management of their staff, strategic resource allocation, and contending with external organizational threats and crises. The participants shared the attribution of their role difficulties to shortcomings in their knowledge of the managerial models and methods as taught in business faculties. The following is a typical quotation. Sara, a surgeon and director of a surgical ward in a large public hospital, said,

Directors of hospital wards have earned an M.D. We haven’t studied management at all! Management has become a profession, yet we were promoted to top management based on medical skills and research achievements. I don’t have enough tools to manage my staff and handle work crises like I have the tools to be an excellent surgeon. This is why I wanted a management consultant who would help me acquire management practices.

Another illustrative quotation comes from David, a social worker and the executive director of an NGO. Despite many years in this position, David reported recurring self-doubts regarding his executive competence:

I have no idea what “top management” is and how it should be correctly defined and practiced. I never studied it. Fifteen years ago I came to this NGO to provide supervision for the social workers. After a while the former ED left and suggested that I replace him. Often I wake up very early because of many dilemmas in my role, like how to handle problematic staff members or how to better serve stakeholders given budget limitations in this bad economy. I realized I need guidance to improve my executive skills.

These executives had assumed, it emerges, that acquiring the necessary managerial expertise via executive coaching with management consultants would improve their executive performance. For these executives, their deficit in executive training served not only as an explanation of their role difficulties, but also as the rationale they presented to others as accounting for the individual intervention with management consultants, given the latter’s popular image as management experts.

The Intertwined Experiences of Executive Loneliness and Impostorism as the Implicit Catalysts for Executive Coaching and Its Main Foci of Benefit

The explicit reason that the executives reported for engaging in executive coaching was their experience of insufficient managerial training and knowledge. Given this finding, which supposedly answers the first research question, it was to be expected that executives would describe the main benefits of this intervention in terms of acquiring managerial knowledge and skills that enhanced their performance. While the participants in this study did indeed attribute to their consulting relationships an overall improvement in their managerial performance, managerial knowledge and skills were not the reasons for this benefit. Rather, two intertwined experiences emerged from the participants’ narratives as the major phenomena which were addressed in their individual consulting relationships: executive impostorism and executive loneliness. These interrelated phenomena, which were experienced by the participants as distressing factors in their executive function, were reported by them as having been relieved by their management consultants. This is depicted in Figure 1.

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Figure 1.

Executive coaching relationships with management consultants relieve executive emotional distress.

Figure 1 illustrates the main mechanism proposed in this study: Executive coaching relationships with management consultants moderate the association between executive loneliness and the IP triggered by the executive position and relieve its emotional distress.

Impostorism

The executives’ self-reporting of their managerial incompetence was not merely a cognitive self-assessment. A deeper analysis revealed that perceiving themselves as incompetent managers was just the tip of the iceberg, an expression of a notable painful experience of self-perceived fraudulence. The executives in this study described an experience of often feeling like “fake” executives who should not necessarily have been promoted to senior positions that demand intricate management skills. In other words, the executives assumed that they had somehow misled other organization members into an overestimation of their managerial abilities. As opposed to their confidence in the occupations in which they were professionally trained, the participants perceived that filling roles of significant managerial responsibility, supposedly “without a complete executive toolkit,” as some of them put it, was de facto an unintended fraud on their part. This experience of impostorism was prevalent even when executives’ performance was deemed satisfactory by organization members and relevant stakeholders, or even by the business press.

In their daily practice, this experience of executive fraudulence expressed itself mainly in recurring self-doubts regarding their appropriate actions in various complex situations, dilemmas, and crises. These are the very same self-doubts that the executives had assumed resulted from a “lack of managerial skills” and hence had become the explicit rationale for seeking support from management consultants. Gradually, the experience of impostorism, which had been felt for years by some of the executives in this study, had become a notable emotional burden. The executives had assumed that it was only a matter of time until their managerial incompetence would be exposed to others, much to their disgrace.

Consequently, the executives had suffered from high levels of anxiety with regard to making managerial mistakes which might harm the organization. Anxiety was also felt for fear of being exposed. The following exemplary quotation is from Shirley, an esteemed economist and an executive in the banking industry:

Executives are just ordinary people who were put in charge of enormous projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you have any idea what kind of responsibility that is, and the kind of stomachaches it gives me? ² Sometimes I felt that I just couldn’t fill this executive role anymore. I invested unbelievable efforts in denying my self-doubts and pretending to be a great manager, so I was constantly anxious. This anxiety was wearing me out.

Executive Loneliness

The terms loneliness and isolation cropped up frequently in the participants’ narratives, from which emerged two distinct categories of affect: isolation and agitation. These affects appeared frequently and intensely in the executives’ accounts of their daily role distress prior to engaging in consulting relationships, and are presented in adjunct to the respective support they had received during the consulting relationships with management consultants.

Implications for Practice

This study has adopted the perspective of a practice theory of management (Tengblad, 2012a), which focuses on the daily practices of managers rather than on management as prescribed by classic rational–normative models. Accordingly, the following practical implications stem from the findings.

Top management and human resource professionals, especially those in business partner positions (Ulrich, Kryscynski, Ulrich, & Brockbank, 2017), should acknowledge the existence of executive impostorism and loneliness. Both experiences need to be more fully addressed in work settings. The limited organizational awareness of the executive loneliness and executive impostorism, which have surfaced in this study, implies that some organizations might be ill-prepared for them. While the IP literature has mostly tended to focus on personality traits, the findings suggest that the executive role itself might trigger impostor tendencies as well as executive loneliness. While engaging in various helping relationships with external practitioners like management consultants has long become commonplace, organizations should adjust their internal infrastructure to address executive impostorism and loneliness, given that both pose a serious threat to executive well-being and performance. A practical focus on context rather than personality traits can manifest, for example, in cultivating organizational cultures which minimize the tendency to perceive oneself as a fraud by offering praise when it is due and allowing mistakes (Kets de Vries, 2005). Tolerance of mistakes (Weinzimmer & Esken, 2017) in particular is vital for encouraging all organization members, including management, to learn from practice and to value mistakes as opportunities and not as cause for shame and self-exclusion.

Another implication concerns management educators and trainers in various executive development programs. Acknowledging the possible emergence of executive role distress should become an integral part of management education and training. Preparation for executive positions, which is offered at times to middle managers who are being promoted, should include not only executive knowhow but also an open discussion of the emotional burden in senior roles, which might manifest in negative and painful feelings such as solitude, agitation, and depletion that could harm their well-being and performance. Furthermore, managers should be presented with available coping mechanisms. The latter may include various consulting relationships as well as other organizational outlets supplied by human resource professionals within organizations. This recommendation may be especially vital for training programs offered to the numerous promoted executives who were not educated in business schools, and are thus more susceptible to perceiving themselves as lacking managerial skills. This is an example of applied management knowledge which is not elusive (Baldwin, Pierce, Joines, & Farouk, 2011) and can readily be translated to coping tactics on the individual and organizational level.

Limitations and Avenues for Future Research

This study has several limitations. First and foremost, the executives in this study had chosen to engage in a supporting intervention. Even though lack of management expertise and the need to address complexity in the executive role do not cause the IP, they had been fertile ground for subjective experiences of fraudulence among the participants in this exploratory study. This group might therefore be a biased sample, in the sense that these executives were more susceptible than other executives to the emotional difficulties of their role and hence their need to use executive coaching for emotional support. In addition, these managers had agreed to participate in a study regarding executive coaching. Hence, these participants might be biased also in the sense that they may view this intervention more favorably than managers who did not agree to share their experiences as clients of executive coaching. Second, this research is based on a medium-sized sample of participants. Third, quantitative data, which was not gathered in this qualitative exploratory study, may be a valuable source for enriching the findings. Using various loneliness scales in executive samples may yield compelling data. Fourth, the data was based on an Israeli sample of executives. Given that the Israeli context may exacerbate the pressures in the executive role given significant labor market changes such as growing neoliberalization (e.g., Grinberg, 2017) its generalization may be somewhat limited also in this respect. Despite these limitations, the findings may highlight intriguing topics which bear implications for scholars and practitioners alike.

Prospective research may overcome these limitations. Future studies are needed to more fully assess the scope and breadth of executive impostorism and loneliness, both together and apart. Many questions have yet to be answered. For instance, it would be fascinating to inquire as to which cultural, contextual, and organizational factors might exacerbate or soothe experiences of executive loneliness and impostorism. In the same vein, it is imperative to check whether these experiences may be assessed in early stages of executives’ careers so they are supported early on, thus improving well-being and performance alike. It is also vital to explore the narratives of clients of executive coaching whose experiences of this intervention are perhaps less favorable than those described in the current study. These queries are just the tip of the iceberg, as much is yet to be revealed in our quest to decipher the inside of the executive role.