A designer’s guide to overcoming imposter syndrome in a new workplace
You’ve aced the interview. The feedback is amazing: the panel enjoyed talking to you, learning about your background and the projects you’ve worked on. The recruiter rolls out the offer and you’re all set to join the new organisation. You are excited and a little nervous to meet everyone on your first day. A few days pass, the initial niceties and interactions subside and the real work and your role take centre stage. The ecosystem that you’ve entered with all its well-oiled machinery of processes and rituals starts to appear overwhelming. Those around you seem to have a better grasp of their responsibilities and are generating output on time. You start feeling like a fish out of water, unable to immediately start “adding value”.
With that kicks in this sinking feeling: ‘you are not good enough’ and perhaps the version of you that you sold to this perfectly well-organised, high-performing team during your assessment was a false one. Looking at yourself you feel like a fraud who is going to be outed soon and the guilt is all too real. This is the infamous ‘Imposter Syndrome’ now engulfing you.
In January this year, I moved to a new city, in a new country, in a new continent. Not only was the physical backdrop unfamiliar, but also the domain, ways of working etc. From re-imagining the digital experience of one of the top luxury e-commerce brands, I was now delving deep into the intricacies of content management systems. The end user, the business model, definition of success — everything was different. This created the perfect milieu for Imposter Syndrome to set in.
The first few weeks I found myself grappling with extreme anxiety, loss of sleep and a constant urge to quit everything and return to familiarity, to my previous life. I feared that my take on the current system is not backed up enough with prior domain knowledge and that I may unknowingly end up disrupting a well-functioning infrastructure by my bad design decisions. This resulted in me shying away from expressing my opinions in team meetings.
Before long, without letting this syndrome get the better of me, I decided to observe my own feelings and analyse where this stemmed from. Once aware of the origin, the next thing I tried was to come up with a plan to address and resolve the inner conflict.
It’s important to mention that I’ve never found myself to be completely on the winning side of the battle with my mental health and it’s always in a constant state of work-in-progress.
Why is Imposter Syndrome common among designers?
A quick round of conversations with other design professionals in the tech space revealed that Imposter Syndrome is more common amongst us designers than we imagined. A closer look at our shared experiences revealed that it’s the milieu that surrounds us and our personas that contributes to this phenomenon:
The milieu:
Digital product design or user experience design is still an evolving field within the tech space while other roles like that of engineers, product managers are better defined. As designers, we’re still rallying for ‘a seat at the table’ in which strategic decisions are made. Additionally, most organisations aren’t well equipped to ramp up a new designer as they are with new engineers joining the team. While some are able to afford a slower immersion process, others expect new joiners to hit the ground running. The frequency of bootcamps, onboarding buddy catch-ups, first contributions and effective pair programming are common among engineers, not designers. In the absence of a well-crafted plan to integrate a designer into the ecosystem, they are left to navigate ambiguity on their own.
The milieu may also lack awareness around how race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual identities and expressions add up to a person feeling (not) heard, included and valued in a workplace. Research reveals how underrepresented groups and minorities may experience a more terrifying form of Imposter Syndrome — triggered less by their lack of self-confidence and more by the systemic and subtle discrimination that they are subjected to in their workplace. In such cases, the onus is on the organisation to self-reflect and identify how it perpetuates micro-aggressions and make significant efforts to foster an environment where newcomers, especially those coming from marginalised backgrounds feel safe enough to express themselves and grow.
In my case, multiple check-ins with my manager/mentor helped me to a great extent. His opening line would always be “So how are you feeling today?” instead of “What have you been working on?”. We would wrap up our catch-ups with him asking, “Is there something that you want me to help you with?”. This immediately established an environment of trust and I could start talking to him without inhibitions not only about the ongoing work but also navigating the organisation, people and processes.
Our personas:
One of the core traits that sets good designers apart from others is having empathy. Using the power of empathy, we understand the headspace of the people around us. This includes the end customers and users as well as the cross-functional teams who we collaborate with daily to create meaningful solutions that benefit the business and end-users alike. As a natural extension of being empathetic, we also tend to look inwards and reflect on our choices. This self-introspection in a relatively unfamiliar environment allows insecurities to come gushing in and makes us feel incompetent.
In combination with the insecurities that are induced by a new environment, our zeal for perfection only adds to the misery. We don’t tell ourselves enough that it’s alright to be imperfect during our exploratory phase and that it’s only through multiple iterations and converging of different perspectives that we arrive at more refined design solutions. It is next to impossible to start adding value without having a holistic overview of the domain and its various moving parts. This takes time and cannot be perfected within the first few weeks/months.
In my personal journey I’ve tried to fight Imposter Syndrome by consciously making a few choices. Although these are by no means exhaustive or prescriptive, I’ve observed other designers in my circle find them useful and effective:
👍 Acknowledging it:
The first step towards pulling yourself out of this crippling anxiety and feeling of falsehood is to take a moment and acknowledge that it is happening. If you feel safe with those close to you, try to express what you’re feeling to them. Once you begin expressing, chances are that others will resonate with what you’re going through, and share their experiences too. You’ll soon realise that you are not alone.
It is also important to mention here that if you feel that the self-diagnosis and efforts to reconcile these emotions are not working out, please seek professional help. You are the best judge of the situation at hand and you should not shy away from reaching out to those who are qualified to assess the situation and help you feel better.
💬 1:1 catch-ups:
The one weakness that Imposter Syndrome feeds off is lack of psychological safety. And to feel safe among our new teammates, you need to get to know them better. This goes beyond the transactional conversations about work and involves viewing them as people with aspirations, emotions, struggles, pet-peeves and more.
Try to set up a cadence of 1:1 catch-ups in your first couple of weeks to get to know their journeys and back stories. You’ll be surprised to see how willingly they speak about what inspires them about work, what led them to joining the company, the areas of improvement that they personally want to focus on etc. It’s only a matter of time that you’ll find these co-workers transforming into your allies (and maybe good friends too). Through these catch ups you’ll slowly identify those you can reach out to for future collaborations. Likewise you’ll know who’s the guru for the tech architecture, who can collaborate with you on the front-end prototyping, who’s scanning the competitor space and who is full of new ideas. The trust that you build by collaborating with your team works as an antidote for anxiety. You’ll be more at ease expressing yourself, without the fear of being judged.
🙋♀️ Show up:
In a post-pandemic world, in a home office set-up you have the liberty to disengage with the interaction happening via online calls. However, in the initial few weeks, it is essential that you continue to show up for all the interactions, preferably with the camera on to introduce yourself to your new colleagues and resist the urge to decline these meeting requests. Remember that one of the strongest weapons against Imposter Syndrome is familiarity and in my personal journey, showing up for all the important and unimportant meetings (including team bonding activities like Scribble, Geoguessr) really reduced the nervousness.
📝 Take notes:
I’ve always been an avid notetaker and my earlier experience of graphic note-taking helped me document my initial learnings in the new company. A lot of the jargon and topics were not clear initially but I made it a point to jot them down in the form of quick sketch notes. These brain-dumps over several pages were cryptic and disjointed in the beginning. These then started to form connections and the concepts started becoming clearer as I progressed further in my conversations with multiple stakeholders. At a personal level, I’ve realised that note taking takes off the burden from my shoulders of remembering the details from every meeting. Over a period of time it also became a good repository of knowledge and a record of the progress I made in terms of understanding the domain complexity.
💝 Repository of success:
If you don’t have one already, start now and create a repository of all the good feedback you’ve received. This may include appreciation emails from people you’ve worked with in your past organisation, LinkedIn recommendations, notes on small and large victories from the past. Looking back at your successes helps you garnet courage to triumph over your current insecurities. At the end of an important milestone in my projects I have tried to reach out to my stakeholders and clients for their feedback. This documentation over the years has created an archive of happy memories — ones in which I delivered impactful solutions that were recognised and rewarded. And a quick look at how relentless we were in the past instantly gives us confidence to wade through the current ambiguity and uncertainty.
🌱 Start with smaller contributions:
We’ve established how it takes time for one to feel empowered enough to start adding value in an organisation that one has recently joined. Having said that, it’s useful to look out for smaller areas of improvement within the product or service. This helps build some momentum as we shift our aim towards the bigger rocks. In my first week at work, I saw some scope to improve the Calendar widget on one of the screens that our users frequently use. I realised that it requires the user to manually navigate through different months and there was no way to instantly come back to the current date. I proposed the addition of a Today button, which is a commonly found UI element in other calendars and it was picked up for implementation immediately.
I would also like to emphasise here that the untrained eye of a new designer can be leveraged to a great extent to spot oddities in the current designs. Since you don’t have a full understanding yet of what decisions resulted in the experience being a certain way, you’ll not be biased by those constraints working in the background. This is a great phase to not only contribute in small ways and build your confidence but also create a design debt document with these observations that you can evolve as you progress.
🥁 Engineer your set-up to bring in familiarity:
As a designer do whatever is in your control to make the space around feel familiar. I fall back upon my favourite music, podcasts that instantly pull me out of gloom and doom. I also carried my tools across the continent: my stationery, notepads, pen-tablet and some of my half-used sketchbooks. As I scribble in them and fill up the pages with meeting notes and a doodle or two, it feels like a continuation of the old and the familiar instead of an abrupt new beginning.
💃 Remember, you’re in great company!
The strange thing about Imposter Syndrome is that it happens to the most accomplished and empowered individuals with a stellar track record. From Meryll Streep to Tom Hanks, Michelle Obama to Maya Angelou, the internet is full of quotes that reveal how they experienced and wrestled with Imposter Syndrome.
In addition to that, most mature companies recognise this as a common pattern. For them team members who are humble, under-confident in the beginning and slowly navigate their way into the organisation’s complex branches are valued and respected compared to those suffering from illusory superiority. So overall, we’re on the better side of the spectrum!
While trying to encapsulate my experience of battling Imposter Syndrome there’s one metaphor in particular that stands out. In the rulebook for animation principles there is one principle called “anticipation”. You’d have noticed how animated characters run in one place without moving forward and then zip fast at full speed. This preparation for an action tells us that the stronger the anticipation motion, the more fluid and effective the animation will be. In sports too there are parallels for this — the act of taking a few steps back to build momentum before you take the big jump or deliver a ball. Working with uncertainty and feelings of not being good enough are in fact a part of taking a few steps back to gain more runway. In the long run, you’ll realise how much you’ve absorbed during this phase of discomfort. Just remember to be kind to yourself the whole time and things will start to look up before you know it.
The original version of this article was published in Contentful blogs
Relevant articles:
1. Why imposter syndrome hits women and women of colour harder?
2. Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome
