BA: How to Avoid Impostor Syndrome

In parallel with my day job, I teach an online course for business analysts on writing better requirements. Invariably, the most skilled participants of the course are the ones who seem less confident when submitting their assignments. “Please let me know if this is not what you expected”, or “I hope I understood the assignment correctly” are phrases I typically get from these participants, while the weaker BAs typically write “here’s my assignment for Lesson 3”, without any caveats.

This anecdotal experience is not surprising, if you consider the evidence that the impostor syndrome is worst among high performers. But suffering from impostor syndrome is not helpful for business analysts. Confidence (as opposed to overconfidence) is an important success factor for a BA. Regardless of their status as employees, consultants, or contractors, business analysts have clients (even if just internal ones: business and technical stakeholders, delivery team) who they need to be able to influence in order to steer their projects in the right direction. A BA who is constantly “waiting to be found out as a fraud” is unlikely to exude the necessary confidence to have his or her ideas heard.

Ok, but how do you avoid the impostor syndrome? I confess that I very rarely suffer from it, but being close friends with very accomplished people who constantly do, I got curious to understand why these professionals, with successful trajectories similar to mine, often feel like a complete fraud about to be exposed.

I’m convinced that now I know the answer: the difference between these successful professionals and me is that I’ve always used meaningful performance metrics to monitor my performance. This means that over time I was able to accumulate irrefutable evidence about my performance that tells me I’m doing well, and there’s no reason to feel like an impostor. And since most managers aren’t good at providing feedback (both my friends and I would typically get a “you are doing great” comment, without any specifics around what we should be doing more of, and which areas could be improved), my own performance measurement system became a critical tool to give me the answers I needed to continue to improve over time.

With a good set of performance measures in place, you no longer have to wonder how well you are doing, whether your work is of sufficient quality, and so on. And while greater responsibility that comes with career progression can certainly increase our internal doubt and fear of failure, having a measurement system in place can help you understand your strengths and weakness in your new role as well, and allow you to course correct much faster if something isn’t going as well as you expected.

If you tend to question your competence when starting a new job or new project, try this approach to see if it can get rid of the impostor syndrome. The key is to find a small set of meaningful measures that represent good indicators that you are doing your job well and delivering value to your organization. After all, it’s less likely you’ll start doubting your abilities if you’re consistently hitting low numbers in requirements defects found in reviews, and in change requests caused by flawed requirements, while meeting all project deadlines. These are examples of good performance metrics to track, so you can start fixing any performance issues and build the confidence that comes from delivering great results in your business analysis career.

Use performance metrics to focus on the value you bring, not on attaining perfection, and you’ll start to realize that you are worthy of the success you’ve achieved and the accolades you’ve earned.