You're Not an Imposter. You're in Transition.
The liminal space of leadership nobody warned you about, and the reframe that changes everything.
Congratulations! You earned it. The sun streams in the window and illuminates the engraved nameplate on the edge of your walnut desk, the backlight exposing a few plastic shavings still clinging to the edge of the nameplate. You’ll tidy that later. Your years of hard work and dedication have finally paid off; you outlearned the role before anyone expected it and delivered more than you’d promised. People trusted you with bigger problems because you never dropped the ball.
Now, as you unpack your office accoutrements and style your artwork, you can’t help wondering why you still feel like a fraud.
It was only earlier this morning that you were in an executive meeting, and instead of contributing, you were calculating how long until someone realizes you don’t belong there, never mind your professional track record has clearly earned you a seat at that table. You’re still re-hashing a decision you made six hours ago for the fourteenth time. Your to-do list tells on you: you’re still doing work you should have handed off, because at least then you know it’s done right.
People around you see a capable, accomplished leader. You see someone who’s about to be found out. And thus, the story you’re telling yourself colors how you see yourself, and by extension, how you lead.
Here’s what I want you to consider: that feeling isn’t evidence that you’re a fraud. It’s evidence that you’re growing past the identity that got you here.
You’re not an imposter. You’re in transition.
Throughout my career, I have navigated this exact moment many times and from every possible angle. Most commonly, I’ve been the youngest person around; like when I was so young that people couldn’t see me over the grand piano lid as I played public performances, or from being the youngest in a boardroom of wealth management officers, suppressing the intimidation of being surrounded by collective decades of expertise. I’ve been praised in public for high-impact, community-facing projects while my thoughts spiraled internally about all the other things still in progress. I’ve received public recognition and accolades from one group, only to receive feedback I didn’t know how to hear the next day from another group. I’ve sat in roles that demanded things that weren’t clearly articulated to me in the first place.
The thing that finally cracked it open for me wasn’t a promotion, a new job, or a better strategy. It was actually more pain. As my external accomplishments grew, my internal pain intensified.
I knew logically I wasn’t crazy, but I had to figure out why I felt crazy.
I started exploring the questions that came from the mindsets of people who appeared to have it together. Looking intently beyond behavioral assessments, personality profiles, and performance reviews, I discovered there are even deeper questions I’d never thought to ask, like: What’s actually driving me underneath all this performing? What’s my biggest fear? What is my strongest emotional need that I don’t know how to voice?
Those questions changed everything by leading to even deeper identity work, and I believe it can change things for you, too.
Here’s what most people get wrong about imposter syndrome: they treat it like a flaw in their identity. Something to fix or something to overcome. After all, leaders grit their teeth, fake it till they make it, and eventually the feeling goes away, right?
No. It won’t. At least not that way.
In fact, imposter syndrome isn’t a malfunction. It’s a signal. I love the way Adam Grant frames imposter syndrome in his book Hidden Potential. He says that the paradox of imposter syndrome should give you reason for pause. If others believe in you, but you don’t believe in yourself, why do you believe in your faulty self-assessment instead of them?1
Reframing imposter syndrome as a signal lets you turn that feeling into an opportunity. It’s a sign of hidden potential. It’s your psyche’s way of telling you that the expert version of yourself that succeeded in the past needs to expand to support your leadership future. The playbook that made you the expert you are today doesn’t work in a role that requires leadership presence, delegation, and strategic complexity.
You became a leader because you were great at A Thing. You could see how systems should work. You could solve problems others couldn’t name. You built a reputation on delivery and mastery. Then someone handed you a title and said, “Now, lead people.” Or “Now, make strategic business decisions.” Nobody told you that leading people or business is a fundamentally different skill than being great at The Thing. It requires a fundamentally different identity and approach to those skills. The fact that you feel imposter syndrome should be an exciting indicator that your identity is already bending in a new direction.
Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill also spent fifteen years studying this exact transition and concluded that new leaders consistently underestimate the degree to which the role demands a fundamental psychological shift, not just new competencies.2
This is where the tension lives. The habits that built your career — the relentless work ethic, the obsessive attention to detail, the inability to let subpar work go out the door — aren’t liabilities. They’re strengths, for sure. But they become liabilities when they’re the only tools you have. If they’re the only tools you are comfortable wielding, then attention to detail becomes micromanagement; work ethic becomes over-functioning; “I’ll just do it myself“ becomes an over-working identity. Ultimately, your value as a leader collapses into your output as a producer.
Marshall Goldsmith calls this the success trap3, and it’s exactly where most leaders get stuck. If you’ve started believing what imposter syndrome is screaming at you, that’s why you feel like a fraud. Part of you already knows that producing more isn’t the answer. But the other part of you that built a career on production doesn’t know what else to do.
And so, you’re caught between two versions of yourself: the expert you’ve been, and the leader you’re becoming. That space in between is disorienting and exhausting. It’s a space where leaders are no longer who they were but not yet who they will become.
And yes, it feels exactly like being an imposter. But it’s not.
Leaving this liminal space requires something from you, and it’s not what you’d expect.
It requires you to do something most high performers have never been taught: stop and look inward, probably for the first time, with real honesty. This isn’t something you can power through. You can’t read just one more book, attend another conference, or grind one more quarter’s worth of tactical execution and resolve the gap. The shift that needs to happen isn’t behavioral. It’s not about doing more, doing less, or even doing better.
It’s about seeing more. Specifically, developing the ability to see what’s been running your show for years, without your knowledge or consent, and being honest about how it’s shaping the leader you’re presenting to the world. It’s about changing your lenses so you can see yourself in a new light. It’s about developing what I call Radical Awareness: the ability to finally see what’s been running you.
Harvard researchers call these unconscious patterns that keep even the most motivated leaders stuck ‘hidden competing commitments.4’ Some coaches map these patterns through emotional needs. Others through personality architecture. The language varies, but what’s true is that every leader I work with has an invisible operating system, typically built through childhood and reinforced in early professional days, that still dictates how they lead, react, and protect themselves as adults. It shows up on the high side as high-performing expertise, skill, and reputation, while presenting on the shadow side as over-functioning, defensiveness, stress, and frustration. It creates the tension between being an expert and being a leader.
The good news? Once you learn to see it in yourself, you cannot unsee it. You’ll never lead the same way again. This is the type of discovery I coach clients through.
I’ve learned that the feeling of being an imposter isn’t something to crush. It’s something to listen to. It’s gently telling you that you’re outgrowing an old identity. It’s whispering that the version of you that earned this seat has done real, meaningful work, but now it’s time for a new version: a version that doesn’t need to prove anything. A version that leads from who you are, not just what you know.
You’re not an imposter. You’re in transition.
You’re not broken. You’re becoming.
You’re not stuck. You’re in between.
If this landed somewhere true for you, I write about the expert-to-leader transition every week on Substack — the identity shifts, the hidden patterns, and the moments leaders rarely talk about out loud. You can subscribe below.
If you’re ready for more than a newsletter, I’d love to talk. It will be a conversation between someone who’s been where you are and someone who’s ready to stop performing and to start leading.
Your invitation into the future is now.
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Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition across consulting, performing arts, and construction technology. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re not a fraud — you’re in the most important career transition nobody prepared you for. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit leader, author, and writing coach.
Further Reading
The ideas in this article aren’t just experiential. They’re supported by a body of research on leadership transitions and identity psychology.
On why smart, successful people resist change: Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential (2023) reframes imposter syndrome as evidence of growth rather than inadequacy, and Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change (2009) provides the psychological framework for why these patterns persist even when leaders desperately want to shift.
On the surprising upside of imposter syndrome: Basima Tewfik’s award-nominated research at MIT Sloan (”The Impostor Phenomenon Revisited,” Academy of Management Journal, 2022) found that employees with more frequent impostor thoughts were rated by supervisors as more interpersonally effective, not less.
On what leaders get wrong about their first transition: Linda Hill’s landmark study of new managers, published in Harvard Business Review as “Becoming the Boss” (2007), remains one of the most comprehensive examinations of why technical experts struggle to lead and what the transition actually demands.
On the identity gap between expert and leader: Herminia Ibarra’s work on “provisional selves” (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999) explores how professionals navigate the disorienting space between identities during career transitions.
Adam Grant, Hidden Potential (New York: Viking, 2023).
Linda Hill, “Becoming the Boss,” Harvard Business Review, January 2007.
Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (New York: Hyperion, 2007).
Kegan, Robert, and Lisa Laskow Lahey. “The Real Reason People Won’t Change.” Harvard Business Review, November 2001.