Imposter syndrome Part 2 - The commercial impact of Imposterism on IP firms

In Part 1 (found here), we explored imposterism and how the intense, zero-error environment of IP firms cultures feelings of inadequacy among its highest-achieving and most senior attorneys driven by an acute awareness of what they know they don’t know, and in particular for those with inherent tendencies of perfectionist, people-pleasing and putting others needs first.

However, viewing imposterism as a private, psychological issue impacting only on the individual experiencing it, is a commercial blind spot. Unmanaged imposterism should be recognised as a structural financial drain and a risk to the firm's succession health.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common behaviours of senior IP attorneys experiencing imposterism and how those behaviours impact the firm’s balance sheet, risk management and culture.  

Over-Servicing

When an attorney believes they aren’t good enough, they overcompensate by pouring more time and effort into case work. They spend excessive, unbillable hours endlessly tweaking drafts, over-analysing documents, or producing exhaustive, and excessively long work products that go far beyond what is actually required or indeed instructed by the client. Because these hours exceed what can be reasonably billed to clients, they are written off.

Excessive time spent on a work product also prevent attorneys from undertaking other tasks, including other billable work, or forces them to spend longer hours working than is actually needed or healthy for them, with exhausted and burned out attorneys being inefficient and error-prone.

Imposterism directly degrades realisation rates and profit-per-partner metrics, and it impacts on well-being and reduces efficiency, with a real risk of causing absences or insurance-reportable errors.

Silo’d working, micromanagement and a reluctance to delegate

When an attorney fears being exposed as incompetent, they close themselves off from collaborative working approaches. 

They hoard cases and clients so others aren’t able to see the work they are doing and that they believe is sub-standard.  They refuse to collaborate with peers because they believe that clients will release that they are not good enough and therefore prefer to work with their colleagues and they’ll lose the work they need to meet personal KPIs.

They are reluctant to delegate to junior attorneys who may turn out to better than them and believing that this would result in being found out as being inadequate and losing cases/clients.  When they are willing to delegate, they often micromanage the junior attorneys as a way of trying to prevent others from finding out that they aren’t good enough.

All of these behaviours reduce opportunities for the imposterism experiencer and their colleagues to build new skills and opportunities. Bringing in peers in other departments could open up new revenue streams and by not working collaboratively this financial opportunity is lost. Not delegating at all or micromanaging delegatees reduces opportunities for juniors to learn and practice skills they need for future autonomy (delaying increases in their fee-earning capability and making them flight-risks) and takes up time when the senior attorney with imposterism could be doing more of the high-value work.

Business development paralysis

The transition to more senior roles and a need to win business for themselves requires stepping away from the day-to-day client work and putting yourself out there. Attorneys wrestling with imposterism often avoid attending (or talking to people at) high-profile networking events, delay reaching out to prospective or existing clients to elicit new work, and they under-quote because they subconsciously feel their expertise does not warrant market rate or they believe that clients don’t rate them highly enough to justify it).

With all of these actions, the attorney experiencing imposterism impacts the firm’s bottom line by not putting themselves in a position to win new work, or only winning work at a fraction of the true value.

Negative cultural spiral

An insecure leader inadvertently creates a hyper-protective, anxious environment. As seen above they exhibit countless behaviours that are detrimental to IP firm current and future financial health.

On one hand the behaviours result in talented junior attorneys leaving the business, or indeed the IP profession entirely, resulting in wasted training costs and significantly denting future business and retirement succession planning. Financial compensation packages are increasingly less likely to be the reason for junior and mid-level attorneys leaving a firm, and instead it is the lack of opportunities, a overall poor or toxic culture and the unsatisfactory way they are treated personally that results in the best juniors moving on.

For those juniors who don’t leave because of the imposterism-induced behaviours of senior attorneys, they are seeing seniors role-modelling behaviours that are undesirable and negatively impact on profitability and culture.  Behaviours that they then replicate as they become more senior because they have been inherently taught that the behaviours are necessary parts of being a senior IP attorney, and a cycle of imposterism-induced detrimental behaviours continues to be perpetuated.

Faced with these common behaviours and impacts, it’s hard to conclude that imposterism is solely an individual problem for the individual to overcome.  Instead, it’s clear that the problem of imposterism is also a systemic one, with the organisation being responsible for providing the environment and support for each individual to effectively address and overcome their individual imposterism.

In Part 3, we’ll look at some of the ways that individuals and IP firms can address imposterism and the detrimental impacts it has.

In the meantime, if you think your IP firm is feeling the impact of imposterism in your senior attorneys, send me a DM. I work with IP firms to support their individual attorneys through 1:1 coaching, and at an organisational level through reviewing and fixing the structures and systems that are cultivating an imposterism-prone environment and hampering their growth and profitiabilty.