“Settled in yet?”

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when a new role feels natural—especially when it involves a jump to management or leadership. And while you wait for the dust to settle, imposter syndrome can creep in.

“Self-doubt often spikes when we stretch ourselves into something new and big,” says Kellogg’s Ellen Taaffe in a recent LinkedIn article. But there are steps you can take to reduce the feeling of being in over your head.

Plus: how job security may inspire innovation.

When in doubt…

As an author and leadership coach, Taaffe often advises women on building their self-confidence and seizing career opportunities. But the struggle doesn’t end after they’ve made that leap, she writes in Swag-HER!, her LinkedIn newsletter.

“When it comes to new jobs, new industries, or new roles, we often get this crazy notion that we should have all the answers,” Taaffe says. “Somehow, we think we should already know how to do something we’ve never done before.”

It’s a common phenomenon, particularly among women—75 percent of female executives report feeling imposter syndrome at some point in their careers.

Taaffe has four suggestions for those experiencing a crisis of confidence. The first is to give yourself a reality check: be objective about your performance, ask others for feedback, and look at how people in similar positions perform.

Second, recall why you were hired for that exciting new job in the first place.

“You’re where you are for a reason, so remind yourself what you bring and what they want,” Taaffee says. “Ask yourself: how can you ease your organization’s pain points? What strengths and expertise can you contribute to your organization’s growth and culture?”

Next, ask yourself whether you are holding yourself to unrealistic expectations that can be harmful to your job performance.

And finally, Taaffe recommends taking stock of your trajectory. “Realize where you are and where you’re going,” she writes. “Clarify what you want to do and where you want to be in the first 90 days and the first six months.”

Read more on LinkedIn.

The golden age of tenure

Receiving tenure is one of the major milestones of an academic career. Not only is it an acknowledgement of early-career success and future potential, tenure provides crucial job security that allows for deeper, more exploratory scholarship.

That’s the theory, anyway. To test this claim, a team led by Kellogg faculty members Benjamin Jones and Dashun Wang, along with postdoctoral research fellow Giorgio Tripodi, looked at the pre- and post-tenure publications of 12,611 faculty members at U.S. universities across 15 disciplines.

They found that professors’ publication rates rose consistently before tenure, peaked just before they received it, then generally plateaued after they had been granted tenure. Yet despite this leveling off, professors almost always published their single most novel or innovative research article after they received tenure.

“Tenure, it seems, is more than a professional milestone—it appears to mark an inflection point that influences how scientists contribute to scientific advancement more broadly,” Wang says.

The correlation between increased job security and novelty may be applicable to other settings as well, the researchers note. Other employment models, such as long-term appointments or guaranteed contracts, could have a similar effect.

“If you want to incentivize innovation,” Tripodi says, “a certain degree of security should be provided, because people need that freedom in order to explore and push the frontier in directions that are potentially riskier.”

Read more at Kellogg Insight.