Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

Herminia Ibarra: Okay, and of course, Rachel, there's many in the leadership genre. That's one thing we know. That has been a popular niche for books. I think the main way in which it's different is, just as you described it, most books about leadership development ask people to figure out first who they want to be, what's their ideal leadership self that they're shooting for in the future, and then set a plan to put in place to get there. And once you've got that figured out, what's your purpose, what's your authentic leadership self, then it's all a matter of execution.

In effect, my book says that it's really not so simple because the way we learned who we want to be, what we're good at, what we think is worth doing, is by action, by experimenting, and, in fact, that ideal leader that you'd like to become is a moving target that changes with experience. So what I say instead is, you need to broaden your horizons. Do you need to get some new material to feed that notion of who you'd like to become or what kind of leader you'd like to be? And so the only way to do that is by getting outside your mind and outside yourself and outside your introspection, which is only going to lead you to what you've done in the past, and try some new activities, meet some new people, and use a much more action-driven approach to figuring out how to be the leader you'd like to be. Because, of course, the only way you can think like a leader is by being one, by acting like one.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, and Aristotle summed this up quite nicely, didn't he. You quote him in your book. He said, "If you do good you'll be good." The idea being that internal change can come from external factors or changing your behavior. But isn't it just as likely that people can do good and not actually be good?

Herminia Ibarra: Yeah, of course it's possible. Obviously Aristotle was talking about the virtues. What I'm talking about here is how leaders learn to be more visionary, how they learn to be more strategic, how they learn to be more people-oriented. And you just can't help but become more that way the more you do it. The more you work outside your silo and outside your area of specialty, the bigger picture view you're going to have, the more inputs you're going to have that let you think strategically. The more you actually put yourself into situations where you need to manage people, the better you're going to get at it. The more you're going to do it, the more it actually shapes how you think, and other people reinforce it. That's the big part of what Aristotle was talking about: other people hold a mirror up and they see you as virtuous, so they see you as leaderly, and you slowly but surely start to integrate that into your self-concept.

Rachel Salaman: Well, this is the crux of your "outsight" principle that you talk about in your book. Could you tell us your definition of that term?

Herminia Ibarra: "Outsight" is just another word for external perspectives, so the opposite of insight, which is the flash of knowledge that comes on inside. Outsight is the external perspective you get from doing new and different things with new and different people. And so it helps you see your role differently, it helps you see yourself differently.

One of the big places where you get better outsight is through your network, and we'll talk more about that but, a lot of times, we have a network that's really quite limited, quite insular, quite the usual suspects, the people we always talk to, and who always reinforce what we do and how we see ourselves. And so one of the ways to break out of that is to grow a much more diverse, more external network that gives us outsight on ourselves, on our job, on what it is that we need to do.

Rachel Salaman: Now this idea of people acting first and then learning from it or thinking about it later, just to clarify to what extent you're advising people do this. You would expect a little bit of thinking or due diligence before acting, wouldn't you, when a business is at stake. So how instantly should a leader act before thinking?

Herminia Ibarra: Alright, let me clarify something important here, Rachel, just in case our listeners might go and do some foolish things inspired by these words. Right, I'm not talking about don't think when you have to make an acquisition decision or don't think when you're making financial decisions, that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is, as you try to step up to a bigger leadership role, rather than try to say, "Okay, what's the nature of my leadership? Who am I? How am I? How would I like to be? What's my ideal leadership style? What's actually involved in putting those steps in place?" What I'm saying is go and do some new things, right, get out of your everyday routine. Get out of your competency trap. Vary the activities. Do some things outside your organization. Connect up to people you don't normally talk to. All of those things are going to make you think differently, and it is those valuable inputs that will help you shape what it is that you want to do, your strategy, and who it is that you want to be as a leader.

Now, I'm not saying don't ever think. There are times when you really do need to reflect, and, in particular, those times are when you have a bunch of new experiences to process. But when you know you're kind of stuck in a rut and the world is asking you to do something different, that expectations for you are changing, the reflective mode is only going to keep you in that rut because you have nothing new to think about. You cannot project yourself out without having the direct experience doing some new things.

Rachel Salaman: Now, this concept is very nicely illustrated in your book in the example of two diversity officers who took up roles in different companies. I wonder if you could just tell us what happened in the two different cases?

Herminia Ibarra: Yeah, and this is actually a great example of two different ways of approaching the role of change leader, which they were both trying to do. So one of them tried to do it the classic way, which is, "What's the problem? Let's benchmark other organizations. What are the key pieces? Let's build our model that addresses our issues." It was really trying to get all the different pieces in place in her head and within her team before taking it out and selling it to people, and getting other people to commit and buy into it.

The other one said, "Let me just go and talk to a bunch of people so I can understand their point of view about what the issues are, what the problems are, what they can back, what they won't back, what they find interesting and helpful, what they find problematic." So she just went out and started there, and learned a bunch of things that then shaped the kind of offerings that she was putting together. So it's more iterative, back and forth in conversation with the key stakeholders.

Both have had some measure of success, but the one who did it with the more iterative "let me find out what people need first before I perfect the model" got some faster traction.

Rachel Salaman: In your book, you say that outsight, this principle that we're talking about, comes from a tripod of sources, which you've touched on: new ways of doing your work (which is your job), new relationships (which is your network), and new ways of connecting to and engaging with people (which is about redefining yourself).

So if we could talk a little bit more about those three things now, starting with work. What do you mean when you say that leaders need to redefine their job?

Herminia Ibarra: You know, we have a lot of leeway in how we do our jobs, right, and one of the big traps that people fall into, which has been well documented by many people not just me, is that we tend to define our jobs in terms of what we're really good at and we put a lot more time and attention into that because we get results and we feel good and we're rewarded for it. Oftentimes what that does is, that reinforces a kind of a silo or a specialty dynamic. So people who come out of marketing really focus a lot there, who come out of finance focus a lot there. And so what ends up happening is the person does their job in a role that I call "a hub," that all roads lead to them, they're at the center of it all, they have tight relationships within their unit and within their team, they're trying to figure out their group's objectives and manage the relations among the group and set goals and monitor performance, but it's very internally focused. Whereas other people play what I call a "bridge role," and there they're kind of a link pin between their unit or their specialty and the rest of the world, other parts of the organization, the external environment, other firms in their ecosystem, and there their role is not to be the central hub or the person who really everybody comes to, but the one who facilitates exchanges between their group and the outside of information, of resources, of people, of reputation.

Once you start playing more of a bridge role, either by really being on the boundary between your group and other parts of the organization or by simply taking on different kinds of projects in external activities, you start to connect the dots. You see how what you do is relevant to others and where it's not, and you see where there are ideas and opportunities that you can exploit that you hadn't seen before. So that is one of the biggest ways in which we step up to a more strategic role, is by being able to see how the dots connect.

Really I advocate this is the place to begin, is to stretch your job so that you can add more value by virtue of the connections between what you do and everything else. So if you're a person who comes into work every day, cleans out their inbox, goes to meetings, and then does whatever reports or analyzes or what have you, then you're doing your job as a specialist. Here what we're talking about is how to stretch to a bigger leadership role where you're not just getting things done, you're part of the conversation about, "What should we be doing? What should we be pursuing? What are the trends out there in the environment that are relevant for us? What does that mean in terms of how we change either our services or our client base or our products?" And so you're much more part of the strategic decision making.

Rachel Salaman: You say in the book that acting like a leader is not just about what you do but also about the company you keep, and that brings us on to networks. Why is it important to have a wide, diverse and dynamic network?

Herminia Ibarra: You know, it's funny, people don't think too much about this until you ask them directly, and then the light bulb hits, that their network is just a huge tool for them and not just when they're looking for a job. I mean, if you think about it, past a certain point in our careers, and in some careers just from the get go, what really matters most is not what you know individually but what action you're able to mobilize. And that all depends on your networks, because your networks are part of what tells you what action is worth mobilizing. So they're the source of ideas for innovations, for partnerships, for collaborations. And then they are the people with whom you have to get things done or through whom you have to get things done, and they are the people who are past, present and future collaborators. They are the people with whom you can bounce ideas, and certainly, of course, when you are looking for a job or a move or a new assignment, they are the gatekeepers.

So it's very hard, there are very few things I can think of in business that don't go through networks. But, in fact, most of us have networks that are very, very limited in terms of their capacity to do these things because they're not diverse enough and they're not fluid enough. We kind of tend to latch on to a set of people we've grown up with, who we trust, who we like, who are comfortable, but that never gives us the kind of diversity and the connectivity that you need to be a strategic leader.

Rachel Salaman: So what are some of your practical tips for expanding your network and making it more diverse?

Herminia Ibarra: It's very similar to some of the things you need to do to expand your job. You look for external activities that you can be part of that will put you in touch with people who are outside the domain of what you do, and those could be inside the organization, looking for projects, looking for taskforces, looking for committees that will put you in touch with people who can open up your horizons in the organization.

They could be extracurricular things, professional associations, conferences, clubs, all kinds of things that bring together people who are interested in certain issues, in certain industries and certain kinds of products. The world today is such that there's more and more conferences and more and more groups that will be interested in anything, no matter what your interests are, and certainly many of them exist online as well. But what you're looking at is creating different communities to be a part of that allow you, again, places to bounce ideas, to contribute ideas, to connect to people on a basis other than having a formal position with a particular kind of organization.

The other way to do it is simply to have some clarity in your head about what are some categories of people that you need to get to know better. This is especially true when you're changing jobs. You think, "Gee, where are the baskets of key stakeholders and how do I develop a targeted strategy to get to know them better? Do I ask for introductions? Do I go to them directly? How do I approach it? How much do I need to see them?"

There are moments when you really need to be a bit more methodical about the company you keep.

Rachel Salaman: Is this what you mean by the term "future facing," which you talk about in your book?

Herminia Ibarra: Yeah. See, that's based on… there's a lot of findings, there's been a lot of research on this, and one of the findings is that our networks always kind of lag behind our formal job mobility. So you're moving along and you're doing new things and you're expanding, but you're still talking to the same people and that limits you. You need to think, "Okay, so these people have helped me get this far and I've probably helped them too, but who do I need in the future, who is going to give me the counsel or perspective, all of the different things that I need to up my game?" And oftentimes it's a different set of relationships.

Rachel Salaman: So what about some network traps? What should people look out for?

Herminia Ibarra: So, the biggest network trap is that, left to our own devices, we build networks that are what I call "narcissistic and lazy." Narcissistic because we tend to connect and invest time and energy in relationships with people who are like us in significant ways, so same interests, same specialty, same backgrounds, same nationality, same gender. And lazy because also, since we're all busy, we tend to hang out with, and talk to therefore, people who are easy to hang out with and talk to because we bump into them. They're on the same hallway, they are in the same office building, they're in the same club – it's easy to bump into them.

What happens is you just reduce the diversity of your network dramatically that way unless, again, you look and you strategize and you say, "I have to make this more diverse."

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Rachel Salaman: Well let's move on to the third leg of the tripod that we discussed earlier, which is redefining yourself. In the book, you include a very interesting discussion about authenticity. Why do you say that authenticity is misunderstood and highly overrated?

Herminia Ibarra: See, there's a million definitions of authenticity. You can define it a lot of different ways. And authenticity has become one of these big management/leadership buzz words recently. Sometimes it means that you're transparent, so you say what you feel. Sometimes it means that you are ethical, so that you act in ways that are congruent with your values. Sometimes it means simply that what you see is what you get. But what I've found is that a lot of people end up using the term in a way that means, "I must be as I always have been," and in a way that really evokes more rigidity than coherence.

I'm talking about this in a very particular context, and the context is when you're moving into a role that's unfamiliar, whether due to a promotion or assignment or simply the world around you is changing, and even though your title stays the same, what you need to do, what's expected of you to do, is very different. So pretty universally the people who I have interviewed, they find that those situations put them in a trade-off between either being themselves or being effective, but they feel like what it takes to be effective and to meet the demands is often in violation of their true selves, defined as what comes naturally.

Now, if you define it as, "What comes naturally, then be yourself," it totally clashes with the other big self-development dictum, which is, "Get outside your comfort zone." When you get outside your comfort zone, you don't feel like yourself. You don't feel natural. It's contrived. You're thinking about it. You're strategizing. And that's okay because there are times when we're trying to figure out the next iteration of ourselves and, in those times, it's hard to tell what is tactic in form versus what's substance.

Now, I'll give you an example to make it more real. As you're moving into bigger leadership roles, oftentimes you're moving from having great ideas or rock solid analysis or the right answer to actually getting buy-in for something that has many different solutions. There isn't necessarily a right answer, and it has to be bought in, you have to persuade other people. And that whole act, rather than simply it's either correct or incorrect, the whole act of, "Did they buy in? Was that compelling? Was it persuasive? Did I sell it?" feels very political to people, and political in the sense of violating values and violating transparency. Because when you're trying to sell, you're not going to go in and say, "Oh, and by the way, I can see X, Y, Z, D, A flaws or things that could go wrong with this." No, of course, you're giving the best possible scenario. So, in those situations, people often do feel like fakes, until they have enough practice doing that where they can sort out what is a way for them to be okay with persuasion and buy-in, but their way.

Until you get there, it can feel pretty inauthentic, but I argue that that is a learning process, not to be avoided.

Rachel Salaman: In the book, at this point, you use the terms "chameleon" and "true-to-selfer." I wondered if you could just tell us what you mean by those two terms.

Herminia Ibarra: Okay. So the terms "chameleon" and "true-to-selfer" come from different bits of research, including some pretty basic research in social psychology by a guy named Mark Schneider, that show that some people are chameleons in the sense that they're very adaptable to situations. They go into a new situation, they say, "All right, what do I need to do to adjust?" It's kind of like the epitome of the situational leader, "Who do I need to be in this situation?" They have no qualms, they adapt, they do it, and it feels fine to them, that's who they are.

The "true-to-selfers" are people who have the opposite personal preference and a tendency to go into a situation and say, "Well this is who I am. I've got to be me and, so, either the situation can deal with me as I am or I'll change situations."

You know, they're archetypes. There's obviously a mix, but the chameleons have a lot easier a time with transitions to unfamiliar roles because they look around, they see how other people do it, they pick up quickly the subtle cues of what the situation requires, and they learn, whereas the true-to-selfers look around and say, "Well, I can see he's successful but I wouldn't do it that way. I'm not an extrovert. I can't see myself doing this." And so they can go through a bit of a longer learning process because they don't learn by simply adapting to the situation quickly, as the chameleons do.

Rachel Salaman: So we should aspire to be a chameleon?

Herminia Ibarra: Well, you know, that's a word that most people dislike. I use the term "how to be more adaptively authentic." And there's different ways of doing that and one of the ways in which I advocate that is, first of all, let's just be a little bit more playful with our self-concept. Let's just be realistic and realize that who we are today is different than who we were 10 years ago, and it's different than who we'll be 10 years from now. Some things will be constant and some things will change, and thank god because life would be boring otherwise, so can we be a little bit more playful.

I'm not suggesting that people play with their core values and their ethics but, in terms of tactics, strategies, the way they do some of the things that they do, that they think are important, we can be a little bit more playful there. And oftentimes what that means is looking around, being able to observe in other people bits and pieces of things that we need to learn and can benefit from learning, and kind of weaving them together, almost in a collage. You're going to integrate them with who you are anyhow, but freeing yourself up to be a little bit more creative with your own self as a work in progress.

Rachel Salaman: So could you give an example of what that might look like?

Herminia Ibarra: Well, the example's really just what I've said. It's being able to observe role models around you and extract out things that you would like to learn from them. You know, let's say a person, another classic one, is somebody who really has a very hard time delegating, is very hands-on as a leader but really needs to move past that in order to step up and free up time for a more strategic role. Well, she or he can look around and try to see how other people do it and adapt tactics from them and just try stuff, including things that feel like, "This is the last thing in the world I would do!"

Try to create some experiments, obviously with whatever safety nets you can put into place, but rather than say, "How do I be me here?" say, "All right, what would somebody the polar opposite of me do? Let's look around and see if I can find some models for that and let me see if I can try on some of their tactics and see what happens." They're experiments.

Rachel Salaman: So, your specialty is working with leaders in transition and, in the book, you include a chapter on managing the stepping-up process. Briefly, what are your main points here?

Herminia Ibarra: I guess the main point, like in any other change process, a transition is a process. A change is you were A, now you're B. You know, "I was a marketing manager, now I'm a general manager." But the transition is a process that isn't linear and that isn't always on an upward trend, and sometimes you take one step forward and two steps back, and you start getting some traction and then you backslide. You get busy. You leave behind your good intentions. So it is a process that has some vagaries to it that are worth understanding because then you don't give up as easily. You see that's the nature of the beast and this is what happens to most people.

What I've seen in this process is that, the more that it is guided early on with action rather than reflection, the more material you will have for reflection when you hit a bump in the road. So the idea is to start adding in some new behaviors, some new relationships, attacking some of the things that are obvious things to do, and, in the process of getting this outsight, you will get to a point where you are also able to stop doing some things and to simplify some of the things that you're doing, and maybe get rid of some of the things that you used to love to do but are no longer as interesting.

But it is a process in which you're learning along the way and, therefore, it's not A to B but A to a stepping stone, to a stepping stone, with B really changing very much as you learn about yourself and the possibilities around you.

Rachel Salaman: Well, we've covered a lot of ground in our discussion. What do you think are the one or two most useful takeaways for leaders?

Herminia Ibarra: It's really the idea of acting your way into a new way of thinking. You know, the world around us is changing a lot, there are jobs today that didn't exist even five years ago. There's no point in trying to just stay inside your head and think it all through. You just go. You do. You follow your nose. You make sure that you're always learning new things. You're always thinking about what next set of skills or competencies you might want to develop. You find ways of doing that on the side so that, if it doesn't pan out, you haven't made a big leap.

But it's the idea that we are a work in progress and we should treat it that way, and that's a great thing to be valued and to be enjoyed.

Rachel Salaman: Herminia Ibarra, thanks very much for joining me today.

Herminia Ibarra: Thank you very much, Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Herminia's book again is, "Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader."

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.