Finding Footing
Level 3. Scores 51 to 75. You have doubt and a record, and the record mostly wins.
You have doubt and you have a record, and most of the time the record wins. The feeling shows up in specific situations, a new senior room, a visible failure, a promotion, and it fades when the situation does. You can name the hard call that turned out right, and you mostly give yourself a fair share of the credit. There is probably one person you tell. This is the level where the feeling has become useful rather than costly, and it is where experienced leaders who are honest with themselves tend to end up.
The thing to watch at this level is the situation that resets you. Finding Footing leaders often describe being fine for a year and then, after a step up or a loud failure, being back at Second Guessing for a quarter. That is normal and it is also predictable, which means you can prepare for it: the decisions list, the person you tell, the record you can read.
Look at your Feeling versus Record gap. If it is still positive by 20 or more, the record has pulled ahead of the feeling and the feeling has not caught up. That is fine as long as you know it; it becomes a problem when it stops you from going for the next role because the feeling votes no and the record is not consulted. If the gap is near zero, you are reading yourself accurately.
A VP I worked with had been steady for years as a director. The promotion reset her within a month. New peers, a board in the room, and a scope she could not yet see the edges of. She read the reset as proof she had been lucky all along. That is not what it was. It was a new room, and nobody feels at home in a new room.
What made the second time shorter was what she built during the first. A decisions list she could read. One peer outside the company she told the truth to. And a sentence she learned to say early: I have not done this before, so tell me what I am missing. When the next step up came, the doubt showed up on schedule. It left sooner, because she recognised it.
One thing to do this quarter. Tell one person more junior than you, who you think may be feeling it, that you have felt it too and what you did. Not as advice. As a fact. Finding Footing leaders are the most credible source of that sentence, because they are visibly competent and visibly still human, and it is the sentence most people at Overshadowed have never heard.
This is not a diagnosis. The note at the foot of this page is there for anyone reading it for whom the feeling is heavier than the level suggests.
Next step: a leader who reads themselves accurately is ready for the conversation about where they are going. The ADAPT framework page describes that stage.
Next step
This test is not a clinical instrument and your result is not a diagnosis. It is a score on twelve statements about leading, written by a coach, not a clinician. If the feeling has spread from work into the rest of life, if sleep, appetite or health have changed, or if the last month has held more than doubt, please talk to your doctor or to someone you trust before you read any more of this page.
A coach, a peer group and a page like this one come after that, not instead of it. When I think a client needs a doctor or a therapist first, I tell them so in those words, and we do not start coaching until they have made that call. Coaching starts where there is frustration and a wish to move. Fear, grief and a body that has stopped coping belong with a clinician, and there is nothing weak about going there first.
The other results
- OvershadowedThe doubt is loud and it is running things.
- Second GuessingThe doubt is present, not in charge, and expensive.
- GroundedThe feeling is quiet and the record is in view.
About this result
This is one of 4 results from the Imposter Syndrome Test for Leaders, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.