Act Like a Leader Think Like a Leader

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Ibarra, Herminia. Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader. Harvard Business Review Press. Boston, Massachusetts. 2015.

I enjoyed learning about outsight and how to use it to improve my abilitites through the ideas Herminia Ibarra presents in Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader.

The transition to leader involves changing your thinking. Changing your thinking comes from first taking a leap to test new ways of acting on your world.

Outsight

Thinking that comes from seeing what happens is "outsight".

This outsight principle is the core idea of this book. The principle holds that the only way to think like a leader is to first act: to plunge yourself into new projects and activities, interact with very different kinds of people, and experiment with unfamiliar ways of getting things done.

Leaders emerge from outsight in three areas:

  • your work (your potential and emerging activities)
  • your network (your emerging community)
  • your self (your potential and emerging identity)

After you act on something for a while, you have results and feelings that you can reflect on and grow upon. Your true self will emerge from what you do.

Work

Essential Practices

Leaders must recognize four essential practices:

  • Bridging across diverse people and groups
  • Envisioning new possibilities
  • Engaging people in the change process
  • Embodying the change

Bridging and envisioning: leaders need more support doing these well.

Bridging

Perhaps teams need two leads (like a captain and an executive officer) so that one can focus on managing the nuts and bolts and one can focus on leading the team. The nuts and bolts demand strong internal focus. Leading demands a good vision and the ability to monitor the horizon and trends.

Leaders need to move from filling the hub role to filling the bridge role. (Table 2-1 in the book)

Hub role - valuable, inward focused

  • set goals
  • assign roles
  • assign tasks
  • monitor progress
  • manage performance
  • hold meetings
  • coordinate work
  • create good team climate

Bridge role - invaluable, outward focus

  • align team goals with organizational priorities
  • funnel critical resources and information to the team to ensure progress toward goals
  • get support of key allies outside the team
  • enhance team visibility and reputation
  • get recognition for good performers and place them in great next assignments

Envisioning

Ways you can develop your vision:

Sense opportunities and threats in the environment

  • simplify complex situations
  • see patterns in seemingly unconnected phenomena
  • foresee events that may affect the organization

Set strategic direction

  • encourage new business
  • define new strategies
  • make decisions that consider the big picture

Inspire others to look beyond current practice

  • ask questions that challenge the status quo
  • be open to new ways of doing things
  • bring an external perspective

(from Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, Pierre Vrignaud, Elizabeth Florent-Treacy, and Konstantin Korotov, "360-degree feedback instrument: An overview," INSEAD Working Paper, 2007)

Leading change

Table 2-2 from the book summarizes steps and styles for leading change

Steps

  • create urgency
  • form a guiding coalition
  • craft a vision
  • communicate your vision
  • empower others to act on your vision
  • secure short-term wins
  • embed the change in the organization's systems and processes

Styles that influence change process

  • Where to I get my information?
  • How much do I involve others?
  • What people do I involve?
  • How many?
  • How will I sell my ideas?
  • What should my role be?
  • How fast should we go?

(from John Kotter, " Why Transformation Efforts Fail," Harvard Business Review. 73, no. 2 (1995), pp. 59-67)

Embodying change

Leaders embody change in three ways:

  • strong convictions from personal experience
  • good and frequent communication relying on personal stories
  • strong coherence between what you believe, what you actually do, and who you are

Emerging leaders

When you see you need to lead, you also need to begin expanding into leadership:

  • develop your situation sensors
  • get involved in projects outside your area
  • participate in extracurricular activities
  • create slack in your schedule

Good story - elements

  • protagonist to care about
  • catalyst to prompt the protagonist
  • trials and tribulations that lead protagonist to evolve
  • turning point and resolution where the protagonist "can no longer see or do things the same way as before" (protagonist either succeeds or fails tragically)

(Herminia Ibarra and Kent Lineback, "What's Your Story?" Harvard Business Review. 83, no 1 (2005). p64-71)

Network

Audit and curate your network and it's density. It's a valuable leadership strength.

Networks help you

  • sense trends and see opportunities
  • build ties to opinion leaders and talent in diverse areas

  • work collaboratively across boundaries (more value)

  • avoid groupthink
  • generate breakthrough ideas
  • obtain career opportunities

Networks have layers: operational, personal, strategic. Networks can serve purposes across locations and time frames. Each layer of network has a different set of key relationships.

Your network depends on three qualities:

  • breadth - strong relationships across a diverse range of people
  • connectivity - capacity to bridge across groups that wouldn't otherwise connect
  • dynamism - dynamic set of extended ties that evolves with you

Make your network future-facing:

  • identify 20-25 key stakeholders you wish to stay connected to in a meaningful way
  • assign these contacts to key categories
    • most-senior clients
    • most-senior people in your organization
    • most-senior hedge fund people and competitors
    • most-senior service providers (such as lawyers and accountants)
    • most-senior women in financial services
  • in each category, select 3-5 people to stay connected to
  • choose how frequently you will reach out to each contact

Beware limiting your network. Ibarra notes 4 ways your network can limit you which are similar to those David Burkus notes in his book Friend of a Friend.

  • birds of a feather - too homogeneous, all like you
  • lag - past-facing rather than future-facing
  • echo chamber - all your contacts know each other
  • pigeonholing - your contacts will only see you as you were

Ibarra includes many suggestions for improving your network; networking across and out. Ways to grow your network and ways to branch out. Ways to cultivate a connected mind.

Self

Leaders need to recognize that people are dynamic alive beings. Always changing as we live. Authenticity has several dimensions based on how we change through life.

Ibarra suggests "stealing like an artist" as you develop outsight on your self. Aiming to learn through your efforts. Test different ways of doing things and keep editing yourself and your personal narrative.

(Figure 4-2 in the book covers good artistic theft. Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist. Workman Publishing Co. 2012)

Good theft

  • honors the source
  • studies the material
  • brings together many sources into one execution
  • gives credit
  • transforms the source idea
  • remixes ideas
  • copies your heroes

Be like water.

Hetain Patel, TED talk "Who Am I? Think Again"

A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.

Austin Kleon

Stepping Up to Leadership

Any process of personal change is composed of three parts: A, B, and the transition between them. A, our current state, is how we do things and who we are today. It may not be optimal, but it is familiar and comfortable because we know what to expect. We've been successful at A, and we know how we will be measured and evaluated when doing A. B, the future state we aspire to, is the unknown. It's where we think we are trying to go, but that's not always clear or well defined at the start, and it usually shifts while we are trudging through the transition. B tends to change as we change.

William Bridges. Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change. Da Capo Lifelong Books. 2008

Stages to expect stepping up to a bigger role (these form a cycle)

  • 1: disconfirmation
    • feel the gap to where you want to be
    • feel urgency to act
  • 2: simple addition
    • add new roles and behaviours (keeping old ones for now)
    • building outsight
  • 3: complication
    • hit setbacks
    • feel exhausted balancing old and new behaviours
    • feel obstruction as people hold onto the old you
  • 4: course correction
    • frustrations raise bigger career questions
    • reflect on experiences to integrate outsight into insight
  • 5: internalization
    • changes stick as your new identity motivates you to express your new self

Short example talk at HR Congress