Katy MacKinnon Hansell, of Katy Hansell Career Strategies, is an Expert Coach (Career, Executive, Leadership).
getty
Have you ever sat there smiling on Zoom while all the time feeling like you were a total fraud?
Welcome to imposter syndrome.
The truth is you are probably a highly valued employee, very committed to the success of your organization and a true team player.
But internally, we don’t always know how to quiet our voice of self-doubt. So, what’s the solution?
The solution is: Know your value.
Knowing your value is a bit different than just being confident. Knowing your value is a capability that you can develop over time by heightening your awareness of what you do well that makes your contributions unique and delivers value to your team and organization.
How do you develop the capability of knowing your value? A three-part system works well to guide you in developing this capability:
• Step 1: Identify your strengths.
• Step 2: Identify how your strengths provide value to your team and organization.
• Step 3: Create a communication plan to precisely convey your value to your team and organization.
1. Identify Your Strengths
Your strengths are at the source of your value in the workplace. What works well is to structure a self-inquiry to identify your top strengths along the following dimensions:
• Communication strengths
• Functional/technical skill strengths
• Managerial strengths
• Teaming strengths
• Leadership strengths
• Industry/market specialized knowledge strengths
For each dimension, try to identify one to three key strengths that you possess so you will end up with possibly 18 key strengths in total at the end of the exercise.
Here are some examples to help you visualize the process.
• Communication strengths: Able to communicate product value to key customers; able to persuade management to invest in a new service or capability; able to persuade investors to commit capital to enterprise expansion.
• Functional/technical skill strengths: Harness data analytics to convey product performance to senior management; design a user experience that encourages product adoption; create a branding umbrella to unify a new product launch.
• Managerial strengths: Expert facilitation of meetings to stay on agenda and reach meeting milestones and deliverables; able to deliver balanced feedback that encourages growth mindset; able to stay on budget while reaching aspirational performance metrics.
• Teaming strengths: Able to facilitate conflict resolution in a timely and amicable way; able to synthesize across team contributions to set shared goals; expertise in active listening.
• Leadership strengths: Able to match and balance resources to workflows; able to set direction and identify road maps to goals; able to communicate effectively to persuade different stakeholders to coalesce behind a chosen course of action.
• Industry/market specialized knowledge strengths: Able to understand how key regulations across global regions impact data privacy protections; how specific education/certificates/specialized knowledge you possess directly improve your ability to do your job; how your versatility in working across different providers in an industry vertical gives you an ability to identify sustainable competitive advantage for your current organization.
Step 2: Identify How Your Strengths Provide Value To Your Team And Organization
A critical component of knowing your value is the ability to pinpoint and convey how your specific strengths benefit your team and organization.
It is not enough to stop at, “Hey, I do all these things very well.”
To fully know your value, you need to be able to explain concretely how what you are good at delivers a direct benefit to your team and organization.
For example: “My ability to extract and synthesize key insights from our data analytics for our senior management team means that they are able to simultaneously understand our macro- and micro-performance and suggest real-time changes to the product suite.”
The power of this exercise lies in your ability to take the strengths you identified in step one and bridge them to how they solve the unmet needs and pain points in your team and organization, and how they enable the team or organization to capitalize on a new market opportunity set for expansion.
Step 3: Create A Communication Plan To Precisely Convey Your Value To Your Team And Organization
Once you have established a clear link between how your skills resolve problems and expand business opportunities, the final step is to figure out the best way to communicate this message to your team and organization.
Here are some tips to consider when designing your communication strategy to deliver the message of how you know your value:
• Consider your message design. You want your tone to be clear and direct. Keep the message short and relatable. Pick an unmet need or business expansion opportunity that the person you are conversing with cares about.
• Message delivery timing is everything. It is important that your communication lands well the first time, as this is not the sort of communication that you want to have to repeat often to the same audience. While a performance review or self-assessment feedback session is a natural opening, you may also be able to offer this message in other settings. You want to look for an opportunity when someone is speaking about the team or organization’s challenges and looking for a solution, or when someone is complimenting you on a job well done and wondering aloud what to assign you to next, or when you are being assigned a work stream that is better offered to a different colleague when you have a line of sight to a different role that you would be an ideal match for.
Summary
The most actionable way to counteract feelings of imposter syndrome is to have a clearly thought-out message around how you know your value. High-performers know what their strengths are and how those strengths map onto the unmet needs and business expansion opportunities of their team and organization and have crafted a compelling way of sharing their message. When you are able to share that you know your value, you are able to navigate to more work in your zone of genius and increase your value to your team and organization.
Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
