Despite clear indicators of success, many leaders experience persistent feelings of inadequacy, question themselves, and fear exposure as being frauds because of something deemed the Impostor Phenomenon. This experience could impact the well-being of leaders and organisations. Thus, the present study explores academic leaders’ lived experiences of the impostor phenomenon in mathematics and statistics contexts to understand them better, contributing to the normalisation and alleviation of adverse encounters. Existing research has relied mainly on quantitative approaches to decipher the prevalence of impostor phenomenon in large samples, often overlooking subtle contextual factors that may shape leaders’ experiences. Similarly, individuals have received much scholarly attention, meaning that inherent traits have received more light than contextual factors. Leaders frequently experience the impostor phenomenon, but little work has occurred to understand why. Increased popularity in the subject has also decreased the term’s conceptual clarity. Therefore, this study adopts an inductive, qualitative research design to explore the lived experiences of the impostor phenomenon among participants in tertiary contexts across New Zealand to address these gaps in the literature. I conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with professionals who hold or previously held academic leadership positions in mathematics and statistics. Qualitative coding and thematic analysis revealed three themes associated with the impostor phenomenon experience. These themes effectively represented the impostor phenomenon as having 1) an essence, 2) some critical contextual considerations, and 3) some alleviating factors. This study meaningfully contributes to the literature on IP by thoroughly exploring lived experiences, providing a more nuanced understanding of the ‘impostor phenomenon’ construct. Further, the study provides valuable insights into how academic leaders can mitigate the impostor phenomenon in practice.