“Holiday Inn Express Syndrome, Imposter Syndrome’s dangerous cousin”
“Are you a brain surgeon? No but I slept in a Holiday Inn Express last night.”
Holiday Inn Express Surgeon commercial - youtube.com
Holiday Inn Express Syndrome … the opposite of imposter syndrome. Sufferer’s “perceived capabilities exceed their actual capabilities.” They think they know, but they don’t know.
This behavior belittles everyone in the workplace and is often easy to point or call out.
How Holiday Inn Express Syndrome is impacting tech. Now that you know about Holiday Inn Express Syndrome, you won’t be able to unsee it and will notice it more easily, but first a little about how it’s manifesting in the tech sector.
This syndrome is not exclusive to technology, but in this space, it is on the rise. Because technology is really hard to understand, it is easy for those in powerful positions to leverage the knowledge gap, override dissent, dissuade the knowledgeable and ultimately hold technology captive and increase their corporate power.
In technology related discussions, this syndrome is prolific. Every CFO, Transformation leader, VP of sales or finance, and anyone who once managed people that worked in tech are now experts, and the more they read the worse it gets. These self-professed and empowered people are undermining the credibility and value of those that actually understand how all this technology works and are pushing personnel and resource decisions to support their narrative.
This syndrome is more prevalent than ever before, and especially at the senior leadership levels of business verticals where service providers have developed or acquired significant technological capabilities.
How did this syndrome take hold in tech?
Ironically, in an effort to make technology simple and accessible and to easily secure funding, we catered to the lowest common denominator for tooling and technology and pushed the narrative that “technology is easy”. Basically, we the technology engineers did it to ourselves.
What now? Engineers - remember you are way smarter than others in this space, so stop telling everyone how “easy” everything is, and start explaining with a little more detail, not just the simple version, even if they give you the glazed-over look. You need the audience to understand what you are saying and to understand that it is complicated and hard to do.
Finance - you get what you pay for, and YOU are not qualified to run engineering, even if you managed IT for a week. Stop trying to push out the leaders that are knowledgeable just to boost the bottom line.
Leaders - understand the value of good technologists and appreciate them as exceptionally smart and valuable problem solvers, not just expensive line items you can cut at will.
Transformation leaders - Implementing digital transformation by adding shrink-wrapped tools, especially where there were no tools before, is not rocket science. Stop marketing it as such. Parts of your organization developing software or hardware is seriously difficult. Take that into consideration.
Everyone - most people have special skills and knowledge, regardless of how they got them. Stay in your lane and just because you are smart, doesn’t mean you can do their job better than they can. Just appreciate that they are doing their job so you can do yours.
Now that you know, call it when you see it, no matter how it manifests.
And here is an additional real-world example of this syndrome at work. A transformation by Wall Street mentality going wrong - Boeing. as described in this Forbes article:
forbes.com - Let The Engineers Lead: America Needs Boeing To Be Great -