The Great Strength of Our Low Rank

I’m not hardy enough to ride my bike through the winter.

So every spring when I first get on my bike, for those first few minutes, I feel a little unsteady. That first ride is always much tougher than I expect, and I think to myself, wow, maybe I’m just not as fit as I thought I was.

But what I forget, every year, predictably, is that I’m measuring my performance against the last ride of the previous season — the last ride after 5 months of steady riding, the ride when I was at the top of my game,

If I thought about it for a moment, I would measure that first spring ride against the previous year’s first spring ride. But I didn’t. I measured it against the last ride I remember.

This came to me recently because I had a conversation last week with someone who asked me if I could help them with their imposter syndrome.

I asked them why they thought they had imposter syndrome, and they said they’re now leading a new team and they don’t feel they have the same expertise as those they were now leading.

It might sound like a stretch, but they were mismeasuring their performance much in the same way I mismeasured mine. They were basing their sense of competence on their expertise in the field, rather than on their positional power, their management skills.

Their expertise got them to that point in their career, but now they needed to focus on leadership competency. Yes, of course, they need expertise in that area, but they were measuring their sense of ability solely on their expertise, and felt they came up short.

This isn’t just a measurement problem, it’s also a power problem.

There are many different kinds of powers, many ways we accrue rank. And no matter how high your position, how lofty your title, how many followers you accrue, or how much money you make, there’s somewhere else in your life that you have low rank. You just can’t be top dog everywhere.

Let’s say you graduate from a top school with an MBA and start with a great salary in a great company. But you still have zero experience, and you’re a rookie. So you walk out of school on top of the world, and then start your job as a nobody, even if you’re a 23-year-old nobody with a six-figure salary.

Or let’s say you’re a technical expert in your field and people seek out your opinion, say flattering things to you, and make you feel smart and valued. But your kid is going through a terrible time at school with friends, and you are at a loss. You feel useless and incompetent, having no idea how to console or help them through it.

Or let’s say you are a VP and get head-hunted into a new company, with a new set of cultural values, and new ways of doing things. Yet 3 months later, you still feel like an outsider, struggling to grok the culture, feeling out of step with everyone, and unable to have the influence you need to succeed.

The problem is that low rank is so damn limbic. It’s such an emotional, pronounced experience that it dominates our field of vision. It obliterates the knowledge of our higher rank elsewhere. It’s a totalizing experience that colors everything.

As a result, my client self-diagnosed himself with imposter syndrome. Like me, who felt unsteady on my bike and thought I needed to be as strong as I was on my last ride, he over-focused on his unsteadiness, on his lack of expertise compared to his team. His real challenge was learning how to manage others with greater expertise.

Accepting—and even appreciating – low rank matters. Because up and down is human. No one comes into a role fully baked and ready. No one steps on a bike after 5 months and feels ready for the longest ride of the season.

And some of the most annoying and vexing “rank fouls” happen when we cling to high rank, refusing to be a rookie, and try to use the high rank of one domain everywhere, putting our nose into everyone’s business.

Embracing low-rank moments helps us…

Learn. Acknowledging where you’re not yet good, not yet there, is humble and good for you. We’re put on this earth as imperfect beings, with lots of room for improvement. Every promotion is also a beginning, starting over from scratch. That’s a reality we need to embrace, otherwise, we’ll fail miserably, and stress ourselves out completely, along the way.
Prepare. When you acknowledge something is unknown and undeveloped, you’re prepared for the low-rank experience and the poor performance that will follow as you start out. You leave your current role at the top of your game and step into the promoted role as a rookie again. Knowing that, you can ask yourself what you need to develop— do you need to develop your network strength and work on your informal power? Do you need to put a little leg work into your expertise, and your knowledge base? Are you dealing with some high-powered people and demanding stakeholders? Do you need to up your personal power game?
Be human. Shifting constantly in and out of high- and low-ranking roles benefits your emotional and social development. Low rank socially attunes you, forcing you to develop your relationship abilities. When you don’t have easy access to resources, you rely on your connections with others. You have to ask for help, reach out, and cooperate.
Be strong. Nothing makes you more vulnerable than the inability to be vulnerable. If you cannot fail, cannot be wrong, cannot make a mistake, you are a sitting duck. Strength comes from the willingness to have nothing to lose. If you have to be right, have to be on top, the best, then you are placing your feelings of worth in others’ perceptions and values, and you are completely open to manipulation. Low-rank challenges and life struggles are the source of some of our greatest strengths and powers.
Be compassionate. Most people are in a race to gain status and leave behind their low-ranking roles in life. But just racing ahead to get ahead, you might miss having compassion for where you’ve been. When you don’t appreciate your suffering and you deny the value of your low-rank experiences, you deny the value of those with less rank as well. Furthermore, as we strive for high rank, our gaze is perpetually upward, and it’s easy to forget that we, too, have some power. Forgetting where we have rank over others is a surefire way to misuse your power.

We’re all destined to experience low rank somewhere, whether it’s due to social conditions, aging, illness, or factors out of our control. The experience we have, when that happens, depends greatly on whether or not we can embrace it.