The Women in Security awards earlier this month at Shakespeare’s Underglobe in London was a celebration of women’s achievement, and not only of the finalists and the winners who took to the stage. The awards have never had so many entries. Women in security have much to shout about. Why then do some speak of ‘imposter syndrome’, and a first webinar of the Women’s Security Society after its re-launch in the summer was on the subject of confidence – that is to say, how to have more of it. Mark Rowe asks.
To see at WiS and elsewhere so many enthusiastic, well-qualified, hard-working women, it seems genuinely baffling why any should feel ‘imposter syndrome’. When surely those who should feel imposters are the stereotypical men in their 40s and 50s who are former police or military now security managers, yet everything they took for granted when they grew up has been upended by the internet and wireless tech.
Shakespeare as usual had a phrase for it. All the world’s a stage; no matter how talented you are, man or woman, you can feel that you don’t belong in the room; everyone else around you seems so much more confident. Whether you argue that security management is a profession or not – and strictly speaking it isn’t – the whole point of professions is that you can gain a qualification that gives you permission to ply that trade – the law, accountancy. The gain for society is that it can have confidence in your ability to do the work, even if you’re a stranger. Human psychology, though, can come into it; the voice in your head telling you that you’re not up to it.
It needn’t. Even if on paper you are not qualified, businesses are ready to take on arts graduates, even if a degree in history does not qualify someone to do anything in particular. To take forecasting and risk consultancies, they will run the rule over such a graduate or better still someone with a masters in international relations. To hold down the job you require a knack for analysing, and communicating to a client succinctly and appealingly, the proverbial (and literal) ability to express a problem and way forward to a chief executive in the time it takes a lift to go from the lobby to his office floor.
If giving a presentation to executives on their floor, you may feel ‘imposter syndrome’ for other reasons than you are the only woman in the room. You may be from the provinces in the big city (as Shakespeare once was). Or you may not have been to Oxbridge (like Shakespeare). A reflection by a corporate security speaker at this autumn’s Consec, the annual conference of the Association of Security Consultants, applies here. The speaker was a senior man – senior enough to be an invited speaker at Consec, no small honour. Yet the speaker admitted in a room with other chiefs in his business, they are bright people; brighter than him (and to use the jargon, ‘time poor’; no boring anecdotes or rambles tolerated). Non-security executives will respond to security-risk people; if what’s said is convincing.
Consider now a remark at Wednesday evening’s gathering under the umbrella of IFPO UK, that turned into a most useful round-up of what numerous industry bodies are doing, by Dr David Rubens. Outwardly an industry stereotype; a middle-aged bloke from London, but one who has moved with the times, always learning, and his remark arose from his doctorate about (as if I can digest tens of thousands of words into a handful) the inter-connectedness of crises, that can cascade. David spoke of a ‘paradigm shift’, how the risk language of 2010 will no longer do.
Striking, from a much-travelled, self-made man, who has made the Institute of Strategic Risk Management out of nothing. The knowledge of your line of work is a process – not something attained like a climb to a mountaintop, and then you relax. Instead it’s forever on to the next summit, applying your knowledge. That’s a challenge for us all, but one that the able, self-aware and reflective can meet, and have been meeting since Aristotle. To not take on the challenge is to become out of date, out of touch with the faster than ever changing world.
If you ever feel ‘imposter syndrome’, then, it’s possible that you are indeed an imposter. If 2022 has taught us one thing, it is from the already distant-feeling Liz Truss premiership; the tolerance politics and business have for shortcomings is ever smaller, if only because of the speeding-up of communications and life.
But it’s as true in business as in professional sport, that if you’ve been invited into the room, someone thinks you belong there (and are worth paying!?). The rest is up to you. It can be sensible, then, to at least consider that you are an imposter; and if you are, ask why, and do something about it (is there an app for it?!). Doubt can be healthy; provided, you don’t let it get in your way.
Photo by Mark Rowe; bricked-up entrance, Bristol city centre.
