HOw do you become a Leader?

Shifting from roles based on technical skills into leadership positions involves
not just a change in responsibilities but also an evolution of ones values and
sense of self. Herminia Ibarra, the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and
Learning at INSEAD and author of Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, talked
with Global Network Perspectives about the process.
LEADERSHIP

A collaboration with Global Network Perspectives, the online magazine of the Global
Network for Advanced Management.
Q: What is a leader?
I define leadership behaviorally. A leader is somebody who is able to set direction
for a group, and then mobilize them toward that goal. I dont get into personality
characteristics because it can vary a lot. The common factors really are big-
picture strategic thinking and the capacity to influence people.
In terms of vision, its being able to sense whats going on in the world, see the
unexploited opportunities and lurking dangers, and use that to figure out what to
focus on and what not to focus on. With influencing others, its how you get people
to see your view, how you get them to see it as their issue, not just your issue,
and how you communicate in a way that makes them feel motivated, inspired,
involved, and a part of things.
Q: How do people come to see themselves as leaders?
Thats the interesting question. I looked at it because most people dont see
themselves as leaders. They dont have that as an identity or a label. Early in
peoples careers, most peoples labels for themselves have to do with their
technical skills or their professional training. They see themselves as an
engineer, an accountant, a marketing specialist.
Leader is a big amorphous word, and its almost arrogant to attach it to yourself.
Transitioning from seeing your contribution in terms of the technical skills to
seeing your contribution in terms of being able to marshal people towards something
new is a process. Once you make an effort to influence a person or a group, and
people increasingly recognize you for that capacity, it starts to feel like its
legitimate, that you might be good at it, and over time you start to internalize
the identity.
Q: You describe a common challenge among people seeking leadership positions where
they struggle to carve out quiet time to reflect on what sort of leader they might
want to be or to think strategically about new directions for the company. And you
propose a different approach.
When you are at that juncture, try taking on new roles. Leadership isnt something
where there is a right answer or ideal model. You discover how you lead as you go
along.
With some types of learning you can use your cognitive abilities to assimilate
knowledge and then put it into practice. When what youre trying to learn is
connected to your identity, and when youre not so sure about where its going or
what the outcome of it is, instead of think-then-do, what works better is an
experiential, discovery process. Its trial and error where you are experimenting
with new behaviors, keeping what works and discarding what doesnt. Its more
iterative.
When it comes to leadership, for example, a lot of people are ambivalent about it.
They have in their minds unrealistic hero images of fantastic leaders or very
negative images of the political manipulator or the bad boss. They are not so sure
what it would really looks like for them to lead. Trying it on experientially and
getting the feedback from other peoples responses gives you the more personalized
information that you need to more clearly formulate what you want and go towards
it.
Once you have been out there doing things differently and have accumulated a range
of new experiences that may be a good time to pause and think. How do they fit
together? How does that clarify what Im trying to reach for? What are some things
I need to correct in what Im doing?
Q: Where do authenticity and values fit in?
In terms of career development, theres a tendency to hold on to a sense of
authenticity thats constraining as opposed to expanding. People end up
pigeonholing themselves more than they realize. They think the real them is the
past version, and that that basket of skills and preferences is what theyre going
to have the rest of their lives. Thats not true. We evolve and change and develop
new preferences. It doesnt mean youre not going to build on the strengths youve
had in the past, but you can discover capacities you just didnt know you had
because you were not in a role that allowed you to develop them.
And it can be a means to minimize weaknesses. It will be the pull of the more
interesting thing that actually helps you finally reduce your investment in the
former way of doing things. People who arent good at delegating, well, theyre
never going to start delegating just because theoretically its the right thing to
do. They start delegating because they have found other things they want to do, and
they dont have enough time for everything.
That isnt to say being stretched is easy. When people have to, all of a sudden,
not just have good ideas or the right financial analysis, but sell ideas to
stakeholders who are very different, who arent necessarily going to have the same
criteria to evaluate the value of a proposition, they can feel like the new role
requires them to value form over substance, to be political, and because of that it
feels inauthentic. It feels like a waste of time to be selling, not doing. You
could say that theyre staying true to their values, but those values that are very
anchored in their old roles.
Values oftentimes change with success. Im not talking about people starting to lie
and cheat. Im talking about what you think is a legitimate way to contribute and
spend your time evolves as you have experiences doing different things and
interacting with different parties. In trying to sell ideas to different
stakeholders, you may come to see, in fact, that their needs, concerns, and
questions are legitimate, given where they are.
Beyond that, we need to be somewhat careful about how authenticity is being framed.
Jeffrey Pfeffer has written about how weve gotten all caught up in this warm and
fuzzy rhetoric of leadershippurpose and meaning and soft power and collaboration.
But it is not tied to any empirical evidence whatsoever. People have to pay
attention to the political reality in every workplace. Of course, you cant always
be authentic. You cant be totally transparent. You cant say everything that comes
to your mind. Sometimes you have to act more confident than you actually feel. Its
not a lack of integrity or a lack of moral core. Its just life.
Q: Does gender play a role in developing as a leader?
Were in a transitional period where there typically isnt overt discrimination,
but there is a sense of less benefit of the doubtintangible, implicit bias. There
is a lot about gender differences that is hard to define, but the robust finding is
that the same behavior is interpreted very differently for men and for women.
Thats why women get caught in double binds. Either youre invisible or too
visible.
For example, women are sometimes more hesitant than men about taking credit or
positioning themselves individually because they know theyll pay a higher price
for self-promotion. But then theyre not viewed as the leader because they have
framed the accomplishment as a collaborative effort. What did she really do? She
just facilitated that process. Ive seen that reaction a lot.
Ive also seen a tendency for women to stick to operational results as concrete
measures of their contribution. With objective indicators you feel less vulnerable
to attacks on your authority. But that can also backfire. In one of my studies, we
saw that women were rated higher than men in all leadership competencies except
one. That one was visionary leadership, which is, of course, the defining one for a
lot of people. In part, that is the result of women framing what they do in the
measureable ways instead of the harder to define elements of vision and rhetoric.
Over the course of a career, that makes it harder to move into the strategic,
mission-critical jobs.
Another big issues is that too many women still advance through the staff-support
track as opposed to the big-client, big-market, revenue-generating track. The stuff
thats viewed as more mission critical to the organization.
Q: What sort of organization will help people develop their leadership?
Ideally, organizations allow you to grow. A lot of my students describe bosses who
basically want them to stay where they are, delivering what theyve always
delivered because theyre more useful that way. In those situations,
extracurricular opportunities can be important. That might be a professional
association or developing a network.
I talk a lot about networking in the book because its your relationships that give
you everything you need; information, perspective, innovative ideas, access,
everything. But a lot of times people will feel inauthentic when I tell them that
they need to be more methodical about building up their networks. People feel
thats using people, and you shouldnt take such a utilitarian or instrumental
approach to building relationships.
They often realize that when you dont take a more methodical approach, you end up
building networks composed of people who are just like you. A network that not only
wont help you move forward, it doesnt put you in a good position to help others
because your connections are too homogeneous, your network doesnt have enough
reach and breadth.
Interviewed and edited by Ted OCallahan.

http://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-do-you-become-leader