Who Are You as a Leader?

The key to building connections, according to Claude Grunitzky who is a world-class networker, is to first arrive at a thorough understanding of your own identity—the interrelated elements that you use to define yourself. In Grunitzky’s case those elements include family roles such as father and husband, career roles such as CEO and journalist, an interest in jazz, and his Catholic faith. Only once you’ve identified the many facets of your identity, you can “identify commonality” with people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Commonalities provide a solid foundation on which to build and expand your network.  

Doing that well can help you thrive both at work and in life. The good news is that you have more control over your identity than you may realize: You can curate it in ways that will improve your performance as a leader, the trust you’re able to inspire in others, and even your overall well-being.

Today we are constantly asked in the workplace to answer the question “Who are you?” There’s no avoiding it—especially if you’re in a leadership or a management role. Leaders project authenticity, and become trusted, by communicating their identities.  Leaders also call on their identities when they need confidence and guidance.

If we’re socially connected to many others who have a particular identity element—if they consider themselves creative, say, or an athlete, or somebody who likes to cook—we’re more likely to adopt that element ourselves. Likewise, how we think of ourselves is to an extent a function of how others see us. In the end, our personal identities are partly the result of negotiations with others.

In her now-classic book Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra makes the case that successful career transitions depend on aligning your personal identity with the role you are transitioning to. She offers practical advice for achieving that alignment, such as experimenting with projects and activities—including outside work—to discover identity elements that will help you succeed in a new role.

Your identity will be most useful to you, of course, if you understand it as something you’ve defined for yourself rather than something that others have defined for you.  Research has also shown that our identities serve us better when we understand all their elements (no matter how diverse or even seemingly self-contradictory) as being harmonious.

To understand yourself, create your identity map – Identify potential elements of your identity, put those elements on the map, connect the elements, and Indicate elements that you keep concealed.

In analyzing the identity maps that the authors executives created, made some interesting findings. For example, that those who had more elements than others in the group on their maps—a feature I call multiplicity—had more contacts in their professional networks. Those with, say, 26 elements on their maps had professional networks that were 80% larger than the networks of executives who had only 13 – —a pattern consistent with Claude Grunitzky’s sense that being able to affirm a multifaceted personal identity correlates with being able to build an extensive professional network. Given the considerable evidence that connects professional network ties to outcomes such as salary, bonuses, and promotions, being able to identify many elements of your identity might mean the difference between a thriving career and a floundering one.  The executives who reported concealing more elements of their identities than others did had smaller professional networks, rated their own life satisfaction lower, and were rated less effective at work in 360-degree evaluations.

Another interesting finding we made when studying our executives was that the networks of those who put more identity elements on their maps were more diverse than those of the executives with fewer elements. That’s a huge win, because diverse networks are associated with access to diverse ideas—which in turn lead to better decision-making and more creativity.

Ultimately our identities, purposefully curated and artfully deployed, are the substance behind the elusive quality of authenticity.

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