All by Myself? Executives’ Impostor Phenomenon and Loneliness as Catalysts for Executive Coaching With Management Consultants

Abstract

The scholarly literature regarding executive consulting relationships, typically labeled as executive coaching, tends to focus on the issue of its effectiveness. The fundamental question regarding executives’ desire to engage in this kind of intervention, whose benefits are considered ambivalent, has been mostly overlooked. Addressing this theme was the purpose of this exploratory study, in which in-depth interviews were conducted with 46 Israeli executives. Despite the executives’ explanation of executive coaching in rational terms of knowledge acquisition, the findings shed light on two phenomena that, surprisingly, have received limited attention: executive loneliness and impostorism. These intertwined experiences have been executives’ implicit catalysts for seeking help from management consultants. The study highlights the significant role of executive coaching as a means of emotional support for executive impostorism and loneliness. A major implication is the importance of providing managers promoted to senior positions with preparation for the emotional distress associated with their role.

Keywords

management consulting executive coaching executive loneliness impostor phenomenon

Introduction

The executive role in contemporary organizations faces an unprecedented volume of pressures for immediate action and responsiveness to multiple demands in paradoxical settings (e.g., Fredberg, 2014). Top managers are conceptualized as crucial catalysts for organizational performance amid complex demands, yet in delivering the expected high performance they run into the increasing difficulty of measuring up to such expectations in highly intricate organizational settings (Stacey, 2010; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007).

Since the early 20th century, various avenues have evolved in order to help modern management with the hardship of the executive position (Shenhav, 1999). A plethora of consulting practices nowadays includes, among others, organizational development (e.g., Cummings & Worley, 2014), management consulting (e.g., Armbruster, 2006), and mentoring and coaching (e.g., Joo, 2005). Each of these intricate arenas has received and continues to receive ample scholarly attention as well as popular media coverage.

The current study focuses on executives as clients of individual interventions labeled as executive coaching and conducted by management consultants (e.g., Bennet & Bush, 2013). Management consulting typically is considered a crucial link which “translates” knowledge from management science into practice, thus supporting economic growth in organizations (Sturdy, Handley, Clark, & Fincham, 2009). Executive coaching, which is a diverse practice, has been defined in many ways. In the context of management consulting, Bennet and Bush (2013) view executive coaching as a collaborative consulting relationship in which a professional facilitator helps an executive to improve his/her effectiveness.¹

Management consulting and executive coaching alike have become increasingly popular despite limited empirical evidence of their respective contributions and recurring calls for extensive studies (Feldman & Lankau, 2005; Jones, Woods, & Guillaume, 2016; Sturdy, 2011). Management consultants have been portrayed as knowledgeable yet susceptible to fads, as well as being limited in their professionalism (Furusten, 2013; Greiner & Ennsfellner, 2010; Kipping, 2011; Sturdy, 2011). The effectiveness of coaching has also been debated. On the one hand, executive coaching has been associated with benefits (Markus, 2016), such as a positive influence on vision, goal-directed energy, and resilience (Mosteo, Batista-Foguet, Mckeever, & Serlavós, 2016). On the other hand, the coaching practice has also been critiqued (Hodgetts, 2002; Sherman & Freas, 2004), mainly for its obscure contribution to performance measures.

Given the longstanding debates regarding the effectiveness of management consulting and executive coaching, as well as the abundance of avenues for leadership learning and development (Edwards, Elliott, Iszatt-White, & Schedlitzki, 2013), senior managers’ choice of executive coaching with management consultants is intriguing. Surprisingly, the issue of executives’ motivation to engage in executive coaching largely has remained unexplored. The executive coaching research has typically concentrated on coach behavior and techniques, coach–coachee relationships, client behavior, and coaching impacts (Passmore & Fillery-Travis, 2011; Wasylyshyn, 2003), thus neglecting the basic question regarding executives’ desire to engage in it to begin with. In the same vein, management consulting studies have provided only a limited understanding regarding clients (Nikolova & Devinney, 2012), other than their aspiration to acquire managerial knowledge.

Perhaps the rational drive for effectiveness, which has systematically characterized the managerial ideology (Shenhav, 1999), has been taken for granted as the obvious motivation for participating in executive coaching, thus prompting studies to focus on the query: “Does it work?” (e.g., Theeboom, Beersma, & van Vianen, 2014). While scholars’ and practitioners’ shared interest in the outcomes of executive coaching is germane, attempting to assess it yields but a partial picture. The lack of evidence regarding executives’ drive to engage in helping interventions reflects a twofold knowledge gap in the management consulting and executive coaching literatures. This gap may stem from the dominance of the rational discourse in the scholarly management literature as well as in the popular business press (Shenhav, 1999; Wilhelm & Bort, 2013). The latter stress an ultimate image of executive rationality and effectiveness despite the growing awareness of the challenges facing contemporary management (Tengblad, 2012a; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007) as well as recurring evidence that managerial work is hectic, fragmented, subject to high performance pressures, operates in dynamic environments, and involves uncertainty and emotional intensity (Tengblad, 2012b). This rational image was aptly presented by Tengblad (2012a): “The common expectation among scientists, the public and even managers themselves is that managers should be enlightened, deliberate, rational and always in full control” (p. 4). This expectation may account for the dearth of empirical evidence regarding managerial distress, an experience that may drive executives to engage in helping interventions such as executive coaching.

This study addresses this twofold knowledge gap. For fully understanding the contribution of interventions aimed at supporting executives, it is imperative to comprehend the experiences which lead them to engage in them in the first place. This study adopts the perspective of a practice theory of management, which rather than focus on management as prescribed by classic rational–normative models inquires into the daily practices of managers (Tengblad, 2012a). By adopting this perspective as well as a grounded theory interpretive approach, this exploratory qualitative study seeks to address this knowledge gap by delving into executives’ will to engage in executive coaching with external management consultants, and to understand the benefits that they attribute to these individual change processes. The main research questions of this study are the following:

Research Question 1: Why do executives engage in executive coaching with external management consultants?

Research Question 2: Consequently, what do executives experience as the main benefits of this intervention?

This article is organized as follows. The next section suggests a theoretical framework which has emerged in the grounded theory interpretive analysis as relevant for deciphering the experiences described by the interviewees as the source of their executive distress as well as the focus of their consulting relationships: the impostor phenomenon and executive loneliness. Next the methodology is outlined. Then the findings are presented, beginning with a description of the executives’ explicit rationale for executive coaching, followed by their implicit catalysts for seeking it. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion offering theoretical considerations and practical implications. The latter include specific recommendations for different audiences.

The Impostor Phenomenon

The various definitions of the impostor phenomenon (IP) share the self-perceived intellectual fraudulence often experienced by high-achieving individuals (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011). Identified initially by Clance and Imes (1978), the IP referred to strong feelings of intellectual and professional fraudulence experienced by highly successful women who attributed their achievements to external factors even in the presence of evidence to the contrary. The core components of the IP have been described as (1) the intense experience of having fooled others into an overestimation of one’s ability, (2) the attribution of one’s success to factors other than intelligence or ability, and (3) the anxiety of being exposed as a fraud (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011).

As opposed to the ample research on the IP in the disciplines of personality (Bernard, Dollinger, & Ramaniah, 2002) and mental health (McGregor, Gee, & Posey, 2008), fewer studies have empirically examined it in the workplace. Accumulating evidence suggests that the IP in organizations is associated with dysfunctional attitudes and behavior. An inverse relationship has been found between the IP and self-efficacy as well as between the IP and perceived organizational support (McDowell, Grubb, & Geho, 2015). Another recent study (Vergauwe, Wille, Feys, De Fruyt, & Anseel, 2015) found that employees with strong IP tendencies reported less satisfaction with their jobs. These employees had also reported less organizational citizenship behavior, which is important for effective organizational functioning. Neureiter and Traut-Mattausch (2016, 2017) have found that the IP might lead to dysfunctional coping and behavior by decreasing career planning and occupational self-efficacy. The IP also has a negative effect on the work–family conflict (Crawford, Shanine, Whitman, & Kacmar, 2016).

Despite the importance of understanding the IP particularly among executives, few studies have addressed this issue empirically. In an online study of 242 practitioners in leadership positions, in different sectors, the IP was found to be associated with higher levels of affective instability, anxiety, a negative self-evaluation, and perfectionism (Rohrmann, Bechtoldt, & Leonhardt, 2016). In an article titled, “The Dangers of Feeling Like a Fake,” Kets de Vries (2005) described cases demonstrating the consequences of dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors of senior executives and CEOs characterized by impostorism. These include setting unrealistic goals for oneself and others, poor decision making, workaholic tendencies, lack of work–life balance, risk of early burnout, and self-destructive behavior in work and non-work settings. Unsurprisingly, all these have negative effects on their subordinates, including rising turnover rates and low office morale. In sum, “Impostors can, and do, damage the organizations they try so hard to please” (Kets de Vries, 2005, p. 113). Hence the importance of deepening our understanding of the IP with regard to positions of significant responsibility and influence. Another underexplored dimension of the executive position is executive loneliness, to be introduced next.

Executive Loneliness

Ample psychological research has been generated regarding human loneliness (e.g., Cacioppo & Patrick, 2009). Loneliness can be defined as “a complex set of feelings encompassing reactions to the absence of intimate and social needs” (Ernst & Cacioppo, 1999, p. 1). Koch (1994) differentiated between the relatively close experiences of loneliness, solitude, isolation, privacy, and alienation. Each has its unique attributes, although these are not necessarily distinct concepts. Although loneliness may be linked to virtues such as freedom and self-attunement (Koch, 1994), it causes psychological pain and severe health deficiencies (e.g., Lynch, 2000), which are widely documented in the scholarly literature.

Loneliness has been studied in various work settings (Peng, Chen, Xia, & Ran, 2017), including managerial positions. Aspiring managers climbing the organizational ladder are typically unaware of the experience of loneliness awaiting them at the top (Kets de Vries, Loper, & Doyle, 1994). After entering executive positions, top managers may discover that their former organizational relationships with peers and superiors have changed, given their inability to connect with organization members like they used to. Moreover, as authority figures, executives are the focus of organizational criticism and the unfulfilled yearnings of individuals and groups. Thus, the experience of executive loneliness might evolve and sustain itself (Cooper & Quick, 2003).

While the link between leadership positions and loneliness has been theorized (Pratt, 2001; Rokach, 2014), the thin empirical evidence reveals an ambiguous picture. On the one hand, some untangle the link between high-ranking positions and loneliness. For example, in a sample of private and public organizations, Wright (2012) found that managerial status did not affect loneliness. On the other hand, leadership positions have been associated with loneliness and solitude (Bell, Roloff, Van Camp, & Karol, 1990), as was found in studies of school principals (Cubbit & Burt, 2002; Kelchtermans, Piot, & Ballet, 2011). In addition, Sims (2003) highlighted the vulnerable position of middle managers who typically contend with contrasting organizational pressures, which arouses experiences of loneliness.

Managerial loneliness, other than being a painful emotional experience, could result in self-defeating behavior, such as unrestrained action, depression, stress, and distress (Cooper & Quick, 2003). The latter might be detrimental to executives’ performance. For instance, Yilmaz (2008) found that school principals’ loneliness was negatively correlated with identification and internalization, both of which are contributors to organizational commitment.

In light of the centrality and importance of top management in organizations, it is thus vital to broaden our understanding of executive IP and loneliness—two intense phenomena that are detrimental to work performance and well-being (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011; Yilmaz, 2008). The dearth of evidence regarding the IP and loneliness among executives, however, is surprising. It is perhaps another expression of the dominance of the rational discourse in the scholarly management literature (Tengblad, 2012a), which may account for the knowledge gap regarding managerial distress. By delving into executives’ perspective regarding their experience as clients of individual consulting relationships with management consultants, this study has the opportunity to explore the executive IP and loneliness.

Method

Sample

The participants are 46 Israeli executives (23 men, 23 women) who are clients of individual consulting relationships with external management consultants, interventions termed as executive coaching by the participants. All participants have a Master’s degree in their professions, which include, law, medicine, economics and finance, engineering, education, psychotherapy, and industrial design. A third of them have a PhD or an MD. in their discipline. Participants’ ages ranged from 37 to 64 years, with an average age of 48 years. Their average executive experience in their current rank (either in their present or former organization) is 9 years. The individual executive coaching relationships in the research sample varied in their duration from 4 months to 3 years, with an average of 18 months. The executive coaching relationships in the sample consisted of timely meetings between the executives and the external management consultants, typically on a weekly basis.

The sample was a convenience snowball sample (Silverman, 2013) assembled as follows: the author contacted by email a large group of executives who had participated in a series of practitioner conferences in the field of organizational change. The email invited senior executives who are currently engaged in individual consulting relationships with an external management consultant to participate in a study on this type of intervention. Twelve respondents contacted the author, referring to their ongoing consulting relationships with their management consultant as executive coaching and expressing their consent to be interviewed regarding this intervention. A face-to-face interview with each of them was scheduled. At the end of each interview, the participant was asked to refer relevant colleagues to the author. This procedure yielded additional interviewees. All participants provided their informed consent and were promised anonymity. The names used in the findings section to cite the interviewees are pseudonyms.

The organizations in which these executive coaching relationships took place represent the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. The business organizations of the participating executives include hi-tech companies, technological startups, a venture capital fund, banks, retail companies, a pharmaceutical company, an industrial factory, and a hotel. The public organizations represented by the executives in the sample include municipalities, schools, public hospitals, and academic institutions. The nonprofit organizations of the participating executives were NGOs in the areas of the environment, informal education, and religion.

Procedure

The author conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews individually with each participant. The purpose of each interview was to gain an understanding of the participant’s perspective regarding their experience as a client of individual consulting relationships labeled as executive coaching. The main research questions of this study are the following:: Why do executives engage in executive coaching relationships with external management consultants? Consequently, what do executives experience as the main benefits of this intervention? Several standard predetermined questions, which were developed with regard to these research questions, were presented to the participant. Several predetermined questions were presented to each participant:

Describe your role as an executive and what it entails on a daily basis.

Describe the circumstances that have prompted you as a manager to contract an external management consultant in order to engage in executive coaching.

What did you conceive of as issues which needed executive coaching?

What do you experience as the main benefits of executive coaching?

The participants were asked to describe in detail relevant situations in reply to each question. Additional topics raised by the participants, such as their views on the complexity of the executive role, prompted further inquiry. The interviews lasted about 90 minutes on average. All interviewees gave their informed consent to participating in the study and were assured confidentiality.

A “grounded theory” approach was used in the analysis (Charmaz, 2006). The analysis, guided by Creswell and Poth (2017), consisted of three phases of coding—open, axial, and selective. The analysis started with line-by-line open coding of each transcript. An initial list of codes was developed and gradually revised along the progress of the analysis of subsequent interviews. Codes that related to a common theme were grouped together, a step which yielded subcategories and categories. For example, codes in the “the executive role” subcategory included, among others, outputs, skills, and effectiveness. The next stage in this process was axial coding in which the data is put back together in new ways by making connections between a category and its subcategories. Each category was developed and deepened by looking across incidences of occurrence and identifying relevant codes and subcategories. For example, the subcategories included in the “managerial distress” category were depletion, isolation, and agitation. After developing broad categories of information, based on words and phrases used by the interviewees (open coding), and following the stage of interconnecting these categories (axial coding), a framework that relates the categories into a united “story” was selected (selective coding). As this process progressed, the analysis narrowed down the categories into a small set of major themes which encompass the two phenomena under study—the executive IP and loneliness. Finally, a rereading of all the interviews was conducive to a more complete understanding of the emergent findings. For each emerging theme, representative quotations were selected as illustrations. This circular process progressed until data saturation was reached, that is, until further analysis did not elicit any additional codes or categories.

Findings

The Explicit Rationale for Executive Coaching With Management Consultants: Lack of Managerial Knowledge and Skills

Despite the variance among the participants in factors including age, gender, occupation, organization type, and years of executive experience, their declared rationale for engaging in executive coaching was remarkably similar. The executives perceived themselves as ill-equipped to contend with the difficulties of their executive role given a deficit of executive training, knowledge, and skills. While the executives expressed professional confidence in the occupations in which they had developed their careers (e.g., engineering, law, medicine), they reported feeling significantly less competent as top managers. The executives in the study had all been promoted to senior managerial positions in light of their high occupational achievements. None of them had studied management, business administration, or a related discipline.

The executives in this study stressed their self-image of incompetence when faced with the demands of the executive position. They described numerous examples of daily situations they had encountered in which they were hesitant as to the suitable managerial response or the right practice to use. Their difficulties included typical managerial challenges at the micro and macro levels, such as the management of their staff, strategic resource allocation, and contending with external organizational threats and crises. The participants shared the attribution of their role difficulties to shortcomings in their knowledge of the managerial models and methods as taught in business faculties. The following is a typical quotation. Sara, a surgeon and director of a surgical ward in a large public hospital, said,

Directors of hospital wards have earned an M.D. We haven’t studied management at all! Management has become a profession, yet we were promoted to top management based on medical skills and research achievements. I don’t have enough tools to manage my staff and handle work crises like I have the tools to be an excellent surgeon. This is why I wanted a management consultant who would help me acquire management practices.

Another illustrative quotation comes from David, a social worker and the executive director of an NGO. Despite many years in this position, David reported recurring self-doubts regarding his executive competence:

I have no idea what “top management” is and how it should be correctly defined and practiced. I never studied it. Fifteen years ago I came to this NGO to provide supervision for the social workers. After a while the former ED left and suggested that I replace him. Often I wake up very early because of many dilemmas in my role, like how to handle problematic staff members or how to better serve stakeholders given budget limitations in this bad economy. I realized I need guidance to improve my executive skills.

These executives had assumed, it emerges, that acquiring the necessary managerial expertise via executive coaching with management consultants would improve their executive performance. For these executives, their deficit in executive training served not only as an explanation of their role difficulties, but also as the rationale they presented to others as accounting for the individual intervention with management consultants, given the latter’s popular image as management experts.

The Intertwined Experiences of Executive Loneliness and Impostorism as the Implicit Catalysts for Executive Coaching and Its Main Foci of Benefit

The explicit reason that the executives reported for engaging in executive coaching was their experience of insufficient managerial training and knowledge. Given this finding, which supposedly answers the first research question, it was to be expected that executives would describe the main benefits of this intervention in terms of acquiring managerial knowledge and skills that enhanced their performance. While the participants in this study did indeed attribute to their consulting relationships an overall improvement in their managerial performance, managerial knowledge and skills were not the reasons for this benefit. Rather, two intertwined experiences emerged from the participants’ narratives as the major phenomena which were addressed in their individual consulting relationships: executive impostorism and executive loneliness. These interrelated phenomena, which were experienced by the participants as distressing factors in their executive function, were reported by them as having been relieved by their management consultants. This is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Executive coaching relationships with management consultants relieve executive emotional distress.

Figure 1 illustrates the main mechanism proposed in this study: Executive coaching relationships with management consultants moderate the association between executive loneliness and the IP triggered by the executive position and relieve its emotional distress.

Impostorism

The executives’ self-reporting of their managerial incompetence was not merely a cognitive self-assessment. A deeper analysis revealed that perceiving themselves as incompetent managers was just the tip of the iceberg, an expression of a notable painful experience of self-perceived fraudulence. The executives in this study described an experience of often feeling like “fake” executives who should not necessarily have been promoted to senior positions that demand intricate management skills. In other words, the executives assumed that they had somehow misled other organization members into an overestimation of their managerial abilities. As opposed to their confidence in the occupations in which they were professionally trained, the participants perceived that filling roles of significant managerial responsibility, supposedly “without a complete executive toolkit,” as some of them put it, was de facto an unintended fraud on their part. This experience of impostorism was prevalent even when executives’ performance was deemed satisfactory by organization members and relevant stakeholders, or even by the business press.

In their daily practice, this experience of executive fraudulence expressed itself mainly in recurring self-doubts regarding their appropriate actions in various complex situations, dilemmas, and crises. These are the very same self-doubts that the executives had assumed resulted from a “lack of managerial skills” and hence had become the explicit rationale for seeking support from management consultants. Gradually, the experience of impostorism, which had been felt for years by some of the executives in this study, had become a notable emotional burden. The executives had assumed that it was only a matter of time until their managerial incompetence would be exposed to others, much to their disgrace.

Consequently, the executives had suffered from high levels of anxiety with regard to making managerial mistakes which might harm the organization. Anxiety was also felt for fear of being exposed. The following exemplary quotation is from Shirley, an esteemed economist and an executive in the banking industry:

Executives are just ordinary people who were put in charge of enormous projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you have any idea what kind of responsibility that is, and the kind of stomachaches it gives me?² Sometimes I felt that I just couldn’t fill this executive role anymore. I invested unbelievable efforts in denying my self-doubts and pretending to be a great manager, so I was constantly anxious. This anxiety was wearing me out.

Depletion

As the quotation above implies, the major emotional component in participants’ experience of impostorism was that of depletion in the sense of exhaustion and loss of vigor. Depletion resulted from the anxiety associated with perceiving oneself as an “executive fraud” and constantly attempting to hide it. Interestingly, the vigor with which participants in this study described the fatigue associated with impostorism was inversely proportional to the psychological attrition that was caused by it. The following quotation from Sandra, an executive in a high-profile venture capital fund, is characteristic with regard to the experience of depletion:

This executive role demands that I always look and behave like a strong, energetic and omnipotent leader. I give and give and give to people here all day long. And I do get very tired at times, you know, so I also needed to get strength from someone. And my management consultant gives me so much! An hour with him literally fills me up inside. I feel much less anxiety since I started meeting him regularly. I no longer bear this role on my own.

The Consulting Relationship’s Help in Coping With Executive Impostorism

Whereas before their engagement in consulting relationships, the executives had reasoned that they would use this intervention for knowledge acquisition, their main concern within the change process was deciphering their feelings of executive fraudulence, which they had kept to themselves until that point. In fact, for all the executives in this study, the exclusive outlet for role distress was their individual consulting relationship. As opposed to their own affect of depletion, the executives highlighted their management consultants’ function as a trusted pillar of vitality, as is also apparent in Sandra’s remarks above. Furthermore, the executives described the benefit of learning to cope with impostorism. This was made possible within the individual change process, which lasted until the executives had been relieved of their image of self-fraudulence and its associated anxiety. The executives reported learning to grasp recurring difficulties as inherent to senior positions and not as a sign of managerial inadequacy. With the encouragement of their management consultants, the executives had also realized that managerial knowledge and skills, important as they may be, cannot substitute for their cultivation of an emotional capacity to contend with role distress, which is nowadays part and parcel of executive roles. Consequently, all the executives described the individual change process they had undergone with their management consultant as a valuable experience which had improved their well-being and executive performance. The following quotation from Tom, the principal of a prestigious metropolitan high school, is characteristic with regard to the experience of improved well-being and performance:

No one prepares you for the volume of pressures in this position. Without my consultant I would have broken down. Today, following a year of executive coaching, I can breathe again. I no longer consider my self-doubts as a personal failure or as a sign of fraudulence. I’m confident and focused, so my overall managerial achievements have improved significantly.

The managerial impostorism experienced by the participants in this study was embedded in a related phenomenon of executive loneliness.

Executive Loneliness

The terms loneliness and isolation cropped up frequently in the participants’ narratives, from which emerged two distinct categories of affect: isolation and agitation. These affects appeared frequently and intensely in the executives’ accounts of their daily role distress prior to engaging in consulting relationships, and are presented in adjunct to the respective support they had received during the consulting relationships with management consultants.

Isolation

The executives reported frequent perceptions of isolation resulting from their structured segregation from organization members. They claimed that executives are utterly lonely even though their schedule is often so busy they can hardly spare a moment for actually being alone. Don, an executive in a municipality, described his feeling of isolation as well as the relief supplied by his management consultant Iris:

In City Hall many things are going on which I really don’t want people to know, like the problems I have with the newly elected mayor. This position is lonely, because I’m required to make on my own meaningful decisions in terms of finance and media attention. I often feel very lonely as an executive. I can consult my wife and my friends, but these sensitive organizational matters are not exactly topics for Saturday night chats. In contrast, my management consultant Iris was definitely someone I could freely talk to without fearing that it would harm me. With her by my side I was able to find my own way out of problematic situations.

The executives reported that timely meetings with their management consultant had mitigated loneliness as well as prevented loneliness from further evolving. In addition, participants who discussed perceptions of loneliness with their consultants reported that merely learning to acknowledge this phenomenon as an anticipated and even integral part of managerial positions strengthened their ability to cope with it.

Agitation

Perceptions of frustration, restlessness, and anxiety—part of the affect of agitation—were highly common in the participants’ stories of the conflicts which they had encountered frequently in the executive role, such as troubling incidents with subordinates or upsetting political disputes with board members. The negative emotions triggered by these situations further exacerbated executives’ feelings of isolation. Sam, a senior engineer and an executive in a production plant, described his frustration with such incidents as well as the comfort he had received from sharing his agitation with his management consultant Rebecca:

My consultant functions as an emotional safety valve for me. For a long period of time, the executive team I’m a member of had been postponing the change of an out-of-date technological system which I was in charge of. I was frustrated with my job, both technically and politically. Knowing I’d meet my consultant weekly provided a source of great relief. I knew I’d share my burdens with her, so I wouldn’t be alone in this frustrating affair.

In particular, agitation was characteristic of executives’ accounts of their routine interactions within the organization. The executives said that before engaging in executive coaching they had been constantly anxious throughout the day and dissatisfied with their own managerial performance regarding their subordinates and peers. Shelly, the CTO of a hi-tech company, describes the turbulent setting of this industry as the context which preserved her agitation toward others and exacerbated feelings of executive loneliness. In this respect, her management consultant provided a safe outlet for her agitation. Furthermore, coping with her experience of agitation via the consulting relationship had allowed her to direct her internal resources to improving her managerial function:

The stress here is crazy, and it drives people mad. My consultant is extremely important, as I lack the managerial tools to deal emotionally with this anxiety. My consultant John is my island of sanity. He provides me with the opportunity to learn from situations I would have ignored had I experienced them alone, burning with agitation. Thanks to consulting sessions I feel more relaxed and much less agitated.

The Consulting Relationship’s Help in Coping With Executive Loneliness

In sum, the consulting relationships with management consultants stand out in the participants’ narratives as a unique emotional outlet in the executives’ organizational life. Having experienced organizational isolation and agitation, the executives had realized the importance of their consultants as a legitimate and safe outlet for their emotional role distress. By doing so, executives’ loneliness had gradually faded away. This emotional relief had cleared the way for the executives to discuss with their consultants managerial topics that baffled them. Thus, the executives viewed the emotional support provided by this intervention as a prerequisite for their improving their managerial performance.

Discussion

This exploratory qualitative study is aimed at deciphering executives’ explicit and implicit needs and motivations to engage in executive coaching with management consultants and understanding the benefits that executives attribute to these individual change processes. Despite the executives’ choice to explain their need for executive coaching in the rational terms of knowledge acquisition, the findings reveal that two interrelated experiences acted as implicit catalysts for engaging in this type of intervention: executive loneliness and the IP. These manifested in affects of depletion, isolation, and agitation, which negatively influenced the executives’ well-being and performance. This study highlights the valuable moderating role of executive coaching with management consultants as a means of emotional support for executives’ role distress associated with these two experiences. The contributions to the literature offered by the findings are discussed herewith.

First, the findings shed new light on two intense experiences on which there is surprisingly limited empirical evidence: the IP and executive loneliness. Given the limitations of prior research on the IP, scholars have stressed the need for studying it in actual working contexts (Vergauwe et al., 2015). Two of the three core components of the IP (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011) have been described by the executives in this study: the intense experience of having fooled others into an overestimation of one’s ability—in this case, managerial competence—and the anxiety of being exposed as an executive fraud. The third component of the IP, the attribution of one’s success to factors other than intelligence or ability, did not surface in the participants’ narratives. A possible explanation is that the executives’ significant confidence as professionals in their occupations may have buffered any such attribution. These executives have already learnt that their abilities can yield occupational success. Possibly, this realization led them to attribute their managerial “incompetence” to a lack of managerial knowledge and skills, both of which can be acquired via various interventions.

This article not only provides evidence of the IP in executive roles, but also illustrates the experience of executive loneliness. Defined also as “the unpleasant feeling of longing for some kind of human interaction” (Koch, 1994, p. 31), loneliness is associated with high levels of anxiety and social alienation (Ernst & Cacioppo, 1999). This study contributes to our understanding of the loneliness experienced by executives which, as the findings show, is prevalent across senior positions regardless of executive age, gender, occupation, years of managerial experience, and organization type. Despite the variance between them along these characteristics, the executives in this study shared the painful affects of agitation, depletion, and isolation which are associated with the IP and their loneliness. These three affects, together with dejection, are the four factors composing The Loneliness Rating Scale (LRS; Scalise, Ginter, & Gerstein, 1984). The latter affect, however, was not expressed in the participants’ narratives. Possibly, dejection was either unfelt by the participants or was overshadowed by significant anxiety—a dominant affect in the participants’ accounts of the hardship that they had experienced prior their relationships with management consultants.

Furthermore, the vicious circle of the IP and loneliness is intriguing. It validates Kets de Vries’ (2005) assertion: “Impostors feel more fraudulent and alone than other people do” (p. 110). Loneliness is an emotion, a construct of belief, and evaluation. The IP is an internal (false) perception of one’s performance. As these two subjective experiences were reported by the participants in this study as being intertwined, it is not possible to know whether the anxiety characterizing the IP had caused executives to shun organization members and thus feel lonesome, or vice versa: perhaps the burden of loneliness that characterizes senior positions is detrimental to some executives’ self-perceptions as competent leaders and hence their experience as managerial frauds. One way or the other, it appears from the findings that these two intertwined emotional experiences exacerbate one another, thus sustaining a vicious circle of painful affects which negatively affect executives’ well-being and performance.

Second, an intriguing finding is the gap between the rational conceptualization that the executives had constructed and presented as a reason for entering into consulting relationships and the emotional benefit which they derived from this intervention. It appears that the rational discourse is still dominant in management discourse (Shenhav, 1999; Tengblad, 2012a). Wilhelm and Bort’s (2013) study of German top managers’ own accounts of how they understand and use popular management concepts stresses that executives are expected to display decisive leadership and practice managerial control, an omnipotent stance critiqued by some as “managerial hubris” (Gabriel, 1998). As Tengblad (2012a) asserted, “The common expectation among scientists, the public, and even managers themselves is that managers should be enlightened, deliberate, rational and always in full control” (p. 4). This is so, he claimed, despite recurring observations which over the years have illustrated managerial work practices as different from those prescribed in management models.

The ultimate image of executive rationality and effectiveness is perhaps so powerful and overriding, it seems, that executives may be ashamed of feeling emotional role distress: “I’m not a poster CEO like those guys in business magazines,” as one participant in this study put it bitterly. This may explain why executives in this study chose to explain and present their role distress in terms of “insufficient managerial skills.” The latter are a common concept in the managerial discourse which legitimizes proactive rational activities like knowledge acquisition. Given that management consultants are acknowledged as agents of managerial expertise (Sturdy et al., 2009), they are conceived of as a model for executives aiming to improve their managerial function. In contrast, the emotional hardship which had emerged in their managerial role was not acknowledged by the executives in this study as legitimate. Thus, executive emotional distress remained an implicit catalyst for seeking consulting interventions. Only within their individual supporting relationships with external management consultants did the executives realize that their emotional distress is recognized as a germane role difficulty which can be overcome.

Third, this study highlights the significant emotional benefits attributed by the participating executives to their management consulting relationships, termed by them as executive coaching. The executives described this intervention as their main and at times exclusive organizational source of emotional support for coping with their role distress. The executives viewed the dissipation of their managerial loneliness as a vital benefit of their consulting relationship. At the same time, the executives have benefited significantly from deciphering their feelings of fraudulence and gradually learning to renounce them. Given the relief that executives have experienced after foregoing painful affects of agitation, depletion, and isolation, it should come as no surprise that external management consultants were described by their clients as an essential source of comfort, using inspiring metaphors such as “my island of sanity,” “a rare pillar of strength,” and “a not taken for granted gift.” While social support as a relief for loneliness is well-established in the social psychology literature (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2009), this study highlights the importance of organizational agents in providing such emotional support in work settings, particularly in executive positions.

This emotional support may be particularly vital for executives in dynamic labor markets. The Israeli context may exacerbate the typical pressures in the executive role given various shifts in Israel’s economy, including growing neoliberalization, the influx of migrant labor, the rise of non-union labor organizations as well as the longstanding conflict with the Palestinians and other security threats (Grinberg, 2017; Preminger, 2018). This turbulent context may possibly expedite the pace of role transitions, including the promotion of professional to executive position without an acquisition of relevant managerial education and training.

In light of these findings, this study may also contribute to the scholarly debate with regard to the benefits of individual management consulting relationships, which are commonly termed as executive coaching. This study highlights the benefit of management consultants in assisting executives with the emotional distress associated with their role. Processes of management consulting have been conceptualized as liminal spaces, in which managers acquire the necessary new repertoires of cognitions and behaviors (Czarniawska & Mazza, 2003). This study echoes the metaphor of liminality and expands it by stressing the vitality of the emotional support provided in the liminal space of consultation. In addition, given that the evidence regarding the impact of executive coaching on objective performance measures remains obscure (Passmore & Fillery-Travis, 2011), the findings also illustrate this intervention’s benefit as portrayed in executives’ narratives.

Implications for Practice

This study has adopted the perspective of a practice theory of management (Tengblad, 2012a), which focuses on the daily practices of managers rather than on management as prescribed by classic rational–normative models. Accordingly, the following practical implications stem from the findings.

Top management and human resource professionals, especially those in business partner positions (Ulrich, Kryscynski, Ulrich, & Brockbank, 2017), should acknowledge the existence of executive impostorism and loneliness. Both experiences need to be more fully addressed in work settings. The limited organizational awareness of the executive loneliness and executive impostorism, which have surfaced in this study, implies that some organizations might be ill-prepared for them. While the IP literature has mostly tended to focus on personality traits, the findings suggest that the executive role itself might trigger impostor tendencies as well as executive loneliness. While engaging in various helping relationships with external practitioners like management consultants has long become commonplace, organizations should adjust their internal infrastructure to address executive impostorism and loneliness, given that both pose a serious threat to executive well-being and performance. A practical focus on context rather than personality traits can manifest, for example, in cultivating organizational cultures which minimize the tendency to perceive oneself as a fraud by offering praise when it is due and allowing mistakes (Kets de Vries, 2005). Tolerance of mistakes (Weinzimmer & Esken, 2017) in particular is vital for encouraging all organization members, including management, to learn from practice and to value mistakes as opportunities and not as cause for shame and self-exclusion.

Another implication concerns management educators and trainers in various executive development programs. Acknowledging the possible emergence of executive role distress should become an integral part of management education and training. Preparation for executive positions, which is offered at times to middle managers who are being promoted, should include not only executive knowhow but also an open discussion of the emotional burden in senior roles, which might manifest in negative and painful feelings such as solitude, agitation, and depletion that could harm their well-being and performance. Furthermore, managers should be presented with available coping mechanisms. The latter may include various consulting relationships as well as other organizational outlets supplied by human resource professionals within organizations. This recommendation may be especially vital for training programs offered to the numerous promoted executives who were not educated in business schools, and are thus more susceptible to perceiving themselves as lacking managerial skills. This is an example of applied management knowledge which is not elusive (Baldwin, Pierce, Joines, & Farouk, 2011) and can readily be translated to coping tactics on the individual and organizational level.

Limitations and Avenues for Future Research

This study has several limitations. First and foremost, the executives in this study had chosen to engage in a supporting intervention. Even though lack of management expertise and the need to address complexity in the executive role do not cause the IP, they had been fertile ground for subjective experiences of fraudulence among the participants in this exploratory study. This group might therefore be a biased sample, in the sense that these executives were more susceptible than other executives to the emotional difficulties of their role and hence their need to use executive coaching for emotional support. In addition, these managers had agreed to participate in a study regarding executive coaching. Hence, these participants might be biased also in the sense that they may view this intervention more favorably than managers who did not agree to share their experiences as clients of executive coaching. Second, this research is based on a medium-sized sample of participants. Third, quantitative data, which was not gathered in this qualitative exploratory study, may be a valuable source for enriching the findings. Using various loneliness scales in executive samples may yield compelling data. Fourth, the data was based on an Israeli sample of executives. Given that the Israeli context may exacerbate the pressures in the executive role given significant labor market changes such as growing neoliberalization (e.g., Grinberg, 2017) its generalization may be somewhat limited also in this respect. Despite these limitations, the findings may highlight intriguing topics which bear implications for scholars and practitioners alike.

Prospective research may overcome these limitations. Future studies are needed to more fully assess the scope and breadth of executive impostorism and loneliness, both together and apart. Many questions have yet to be answered. For instance, it would be fascinating to inquire as to which cultural, contextual, and organizational factors might exacerbate or soothe experiences of executive loneliness and impostorism. In the same vein, it is imperative to check whether these experiences may be assessed in early stages of executives’ careers so they are supported early on, thus improving well-being and performance alike. It is also vital to explore the narratives of clients of executive coaching whose experiences of this intervention are perhaps less favorable than those described in the current study. These queries are just the tip of the iceberg, as much is yet to be revealed in our quest to decipher the inside of the executive role.

Conclusion

This exploratory study has broadened our comprehension of the executive role distress emerging from the interrelated experiences of executive impostorism and loneliness. The emotional burden associated with these experiences was reported by the executives as having been relieved successfully during interventions of executive coaching with external management consultants. Consequently, this study may contribute to our understanding of the emotional needs of executive roles as well as avenues of support which may address them.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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