I thought, if I work hard every day, it definitely will be recognized and one day, I will be rewarded. How naive I was.

good friend of mine

I knew her for almost ten years and I witnessed her working really hard, being very passionate about her job and doing countless overtime. It was so obvious, that with no doubt, her supervisors must have recognized how diligent she was, that she was actually doing a great job and made a significant contribution to the success of the company. The last time I saw her, it was her last week before retirement. At that time, she was doing the same job, as when I met her, while most of her less talented colleagues made a fast and successful career.

Don’t sell yourself short

Just to work hard won’t get you anywhere, if you are not able to claim the glory of your hard work. I had a manager who referred this skill of making your contribution visible to other people as the ability to “make fog”. If you don’t learn this skill early in your career, you won’t get far, because you are surrounded by imposters, who will be greedily waiting to steal your work.

Unmasking imposters

Hence, this is why you need to learn how to protect your work and how to deal with imposters. An imposter is a person, who’s only skill is to claim other people’s work as their own. They often invite you to secret bilateral discussion and pretend to be your friend. But the very next day, they will present your ideas on fancy power point slides, of course without mention your name at all.

Another common strategy applied by them, when faced with a task they are not qualified for, is to be the host of an important meeting. They then invite as many subject matter experts as they can find. They might start the meeting with greeting everyone and then introducing into the topic. But after that they will be silent and leave it to the real experts to discuss and solve the complex issue. After the issue is solved, they will summarize the findings and close the meeting. A similar approach they often take is to draft a word document. They just blindly copy anything related that topic into a document and then send it to the experts to review. Then they collect the qualified feedback and amend the document accordingly.

Finally, without mentioning the assistance of the subject matter experts, they claim everything as their own unique contribution in the next board meeting. So, without really doing anything substantial, they are able to shine and move up the career ladder very fast.

Run, if you are outnumbered

If you work in an organization, where you are outnumbered by imposters, then run as far and fast as you can. Successful imposters are often also very skilled in blaming other people for their mistakes. You won’t win this fight and even if you would win, you would have wasted so much of your valuable time an energy.

Fight, if you can

However, if you are facing only a few imposters and you think it is worth staying in your current organization, then you need to find strategies to unmask them.

A simple but effective strategy is to avoid participating in their meetings, discussions or anything else they are involved in. That way, they cannot steal your ideas and work. Also, as they are not able to create anything meaningful themselves, they then often end up empty handed and with nothing to shine.

Another way is to ask them to provide detailed answers or solutions to a specific problem related to your current project in front of others. The imposter will try to eloquently distract to another topic, as he cannot answer. The key here is to be persistent and demanding him to answer the question until it is clear to everyone in the meeting that he has no clue what actually the issue is. The more you unmask the imposters in front of the team, the more he will loose respect and authority.