Grounded
Level 4. Scores 76 to 100. The feeling is quiet and the record is in view.
The feeling is quiet and the record is in view. You do not feel that you are performing leadership, praise lands, you give yourself a fair share of credit and blame, you ask the question in the senior room, and there is someone you tell when you do not know. This is a Grounded result, and once the benchmark publishes you will see how rare it is.
Two checks before you accept it. The first is the Feeling versus Record gap. If it is negative, meaning your confidence is running ahead of your record, Grounded may be describing certainty rather than groundedness, and certainty without a record is the thing your team and your board are worried about, whether or not they have said so. Look at your Record bar on its own. If it is under 50 and your Feeling bar is over 75, take that seriously.
The second check is item nine, comparing your inside with other people's outside. Grounded leaders sometimes score well because they have stopped comparing, which is healthy, and sometimes because they have decided the comparison always comes out in their favour, which is not.
Assuming the result is real, the work at this level is about other people. Grounded leaders are surrounded by people who are not, and the single most useful thing a Grounded leader can do is say, in a room, that they once felt it. Leaders who have never heard a senior person say that assume nobody senior has ever felt it, and the concealment continues down the line.
I do not think it fully goes. It gets quieter, and it gets shorter. A step up, a new room, a loud failure, and it is back for a while. The difference is that a grounded leader knows what it is when it arrives.
What you owe the people below you is the sentence. Say that you have felt it, and say what you did. Say it in the meeting when you do not know something, out loud. In the culture I come from, a leader saying I do not know, or I am worried, is not weakness. It is information, and it gives everyone under you permission to stop covering. Your team should never have to guess what is going on with you. The guessing is where their own doubt grows.
One thing to do this quarter. Ask your direct reports, one at a time, whether they ever feel they are performing the role rather than doing it. Then listen, and if it is true for you or was, say so. You will find out which of your best people are at Overshadowed and telling nobody.
This is not a diagnosis and a Grounded score does not mean the feeling cannot return. It usually does, after a step up. The record is what you read when it does.
Next step: a grounded leader with a clear record is usually ready to ask other people how they see them. Run the 360 feedback tool.
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.
- Finding FootingYou have doubt and a record, and the record mostly wins.
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.