Why do ops suffer from imposter syndrome?
Are you in the same camp as us?
I thought it was just me, until I started talking to other ops people.
Why do so many of us in ops suffer from imposter syndrome?
There's been a ton of research and consequentially, an evolution of our understanding of imposter syndrome since the phrase was first introduced in 1978.
According to Wikipedia, research has shown that there's a relationship between imposter syndrome and various factors, like "family expectations", "racial identities", "anxiety", "perfectionism", and "excessive self-monitoring with an emphasis on self-worth."
OK, that's enough science. In the remainder of this email, I'm going to try to explain why I think ops folks are prone to feeling imposter syndrome based on the type of work we do.
Imposter Syndrome in Operations
So here is my completely unproven, 100% personal and anecdotal list of reasons why many ops folks tend to experience imposter syndrome, perhaps at a higher rate than other functions in tech:
Reason #1 - Lack of formal training
Not a lot of us had dreams of becoming an ops manager when we were little.
I know I never intended to. When I was in university, the course on ops was lumped together with supply chain management and not as popular as strategy, finance, marketing, or even accounting. I took it only because it was one of the mandatory courses. I actually found that I enjoyed the course material, but quickly got my head turned by the shinier jobs in banking and consulting.
This relative lack of intention to pursue ops from early on leads to many of us stumbling upon the function after a stint elsewhere. This means you'll often feel like a fraud on Day 1 in ops - and it doesn't get any easier to shake off that feeling.
I started my career as an investment banker, and the extent of my ops-relevant experience prior to just jumping in was planning a week-long a due diligence trip. So when I first started at Uber as an operations manager, I felt like a huge fraud and tried everything to not show it. Little did I know, everyone around me was feeling the same!
Reason #2 - Generalist skillset and scope
The mandate of the ops function is broad, and often defined by the lack of other functions rather than the existence of itself. What I mean is that ops often gets tasked with whatever needs to get done, even if the tasks aren't strictly "ops".
Don't have a sales team in place yet? Ops will jump in to put together a shoddy v0 sales motion. Not enough engineering resources to build an internal admin tool? No problem - ops will hack together a Google Sheets tool for now. Does this sound familiar?
Don't get me wrong - I absolutely love that ops has such a broad mandate and gets to touch every side of the business. But it does mean that we're more prone to feeling imposter syndrome, as there isn't a path of specialization that we can consistently follow and ultimately become true experts in one specific field.
We end up comparing ourselves to sales and marketing executives, who have been honing their craft for years, and feel inadequate in comparison.
Reason #3 - Pursuit of the 80/20 solution
In ops, and especially at early stage startups, we are almost always in one crisis or another, and in constant fire-fighting mode. Couple this with our broad mandate, and we find ourselves having to ruthlessly prioritize on what fires to tackle right now.
Possible cause of imposter syndrome at this early juncture → having so much on our plate and deprioritizing most of it can lead to feeling like we dropped the ball on the deprioritized issues and becoming self-critical.
And even if we successfully tackle the top-priority issue - we often have to be content with 80/20 solutions that are just good enough. This can make us feel like we're not doing the best job that we can - especially if you have perfectionist tendencies.
Reason #4 - Working behind the scene
One thing that frustrates me about the ops function is that so much of the amazing work we do is in the shadows. As an outsider, it's quite difficult to assess how good a job the the ops team is doing at any given startup.
One clear downside to this nature of our work is that the best-in-class work doesn't naturally bubble up to the surface - like it would in other external-facing functions like sales, marketing, and product design. Or even less public / visible functions like engineering - there's Stackoverflow and Github where you can learn best practices. We don't *yet* have an equivalent in operations.
This leads to most of us in ops wondering whether we're doing a good job relative to others. It's human nature to compare ourselves and get a sense of where we stand in relation to others - and when that's nearly impossible to do, it becomes challenging to get a sense of the quality of our work.
Reason #5 - Cross-functional nature of work
Lastly, the work we do is often very cross-functional. We often work with multiple teams and stakeholders to drive strategic projects or continuous improvement on key metrics.
I've found that the more cross-functional my work is, the more credit I "have to" give where it's due. This means there have been times at the end of a project where I'd scratch my head and wonder, "so what was my contribution to this project?" This can make you feel like an imposter - successful not on your own merit but thanks to the incredible luck you've had in working with exceptional colleagues.
Do any of these resonate with you? If you are prone to self-doubt like I am, hopefully this has been helpful in uncovering some of the underlying drivers.
Next week, I plan to share my thoughts on how to combat imposter syndrome. But I'd love to share how others deal with it.
So if you have good tips or an interesting take on how you manage self-doubt and feeling like a fraud - please reply to this email and let me know!
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