My old supervisor swore by the 'fake it till you make it' approach, but I think it backfired on me

At my last job in Chicago, the senior account manager told me to just pretend I knew the software during a client demo. I went along with it, ended up freezing up when the client asked about reporting features, and we lost a $15k contract. Now I'm not sure if that advice works for anyone or if it's just a way to set people up to fail. Has anyone else been burned by that kind of guidance or did it actually pay off for you?

2 comments

2 Comments

zarapalmer11d ago

Totally feel for you on this one. That freezing up moment is the worst, especially when you're just trying to follow someone's lead. I had a manager once tell me to "fake it" during a pricing negotiation and I ended up promising a delivery date I couldn't back up. Felt like such a fraud when the whole thing fell apart. It's like the advice works for small stuff like sounding confident in a meeting, but it's a total trap for anything technical or specific where you actually need to know your stuff. Sorry you lost that contract over it, that's a brutal lesson.

verac4011d ago

Right, because "fake it" works so great when you're promising something that actually has to happen. It's like telling someone to "act like you know how to fly a plane" and then being surprised when they crash it. That manager probably never had to clean up the mess after one of their little confidence tricks backfired, did they? I swear that advice was invented by people who never actually had to deliver anything real themselves. It's basically a shortcut to looking like a fool in slow motion. Has anyone ever actually seen faking it work out well for the person doing the faking?