Leadership Identity: Is The Leader You're Being Blocking The One You Could Be?
Most of us carry around some idea of what a good leader should look like.
Calm under pressure. Confident. Decisive. In control. Able to walk into the difficult meeting with the answer, make the call and reassure everyone else that things are going to be OK.
There's nothing inherently wrong with any of that. The problem comes when our leadership identity becomes something we're constantly trying to perform. When part of our attention is occupied by how we look, whether we're getting it right, what other people might think, or what the leader we admire would do in our shoes.
Leadership already asks quite a lot of our attention, and if some of that capacity is being used to manage the person we think we're supposed to be, how much is left for the people and reality actually in front of us? That's the tension at the heart of my conversation with executive coach, former RAF pilot and Free to Lead author Will Steel.
It also leads to a deceptively difficult question. Could the leader you're being be blocking the one you could be?
🎧 Listen to the full episode here
Prefer to read? Download the full episode transcript here
Leadership identity doesn't begin when you get the job title
One of the most interesting parts of my conversation with Will comes long before we get into leadership theory. He tells the story of an experience from childhood that he says he interpreted as meaning his parents hadn't wanted him. His response, as he remembers it, was an angry decision:
“I'm the best.”
Will describes how the need to be the best then followed him. Winning wasn't enough to satisfy it. The underlying story remained.
His point isn't that every leader has some dramatic childhood event they need to uncover. What it does illustrate rather well though, is something more useful: we don't arrive at leadership as a blank canvas. We bring beliefs about ourselves. Interpretations of past experiences. Ideas about success and failure. Expectations about how we need to behave. Some we're very aware of. Others may have become so familiar that we no longer experience them as beliefs at all. They're simply how things are. And then we add another layer: how a leader is supposed to behave. That can be a pretty potent mix.
When trying to look like a leader gets in the way of leading
Will's RAF experience brings that problem into sharper focus. During officer training, he says he tried to behave in the way he thought was expected of him. His impression was that he didn't naturally fit the mould around him, so he attempted to adapt himself to it. It didn't work. He failed the course.
When he went through it again, his approach changed. In his words,
“I'm just going to be myself.”
Eighteen weeks later, he graduated winning the leadership trophy too. It's a great story.
It's also tempting to draw a very easy leadership lesson from it: Just be yourself. Except I think that is where things become more interesting. Because “be yourself” sounds deceptively simple. But which self? The one responding to what's actually happening? The one worried about what everyone else thinks? The one carrying old assumptions about what success looks like? The one trying to live up to the picture of leadership you've absorbed over the years? Which one? Being yourself is much harder than just saying it.
What is your leadership identity costing you in capacity?
This is where Will's flying background gives us some additional colour to his perspective, especially around the impact of capacity on identity. As pilots were trained, more and more demands were placed upon them. The basic act of flying eventually needed to become sufficiently second nature that the mental capacity remained available for the wider mission.
Because being able to fly the aircraft wasn't enough. You needed capacity to deal with what was happening around you. Will makes the connection of this experience to leadership:
“And if you're leading and you're busy with how you look, or what people are going to say, or how would so-and-so do this, or how should I be doing this, or I should don't say this, or, you know, you've got very little capacity to deal with what's in front of you.”
That's a useful reminder, isn't it? Authenticity can sometimes sound like a rather soft leadership idea. Something concerned primarily with whether we feel genuine. Spare capacity makes the consequence much more practical. Every bit of attention occupied by How am I coming across? What should I say? What would they do? Am I being authoritative enough? is less resources available for the situation you're supposed to be leading. The issue isn't simply that trying to be a certain type of leader might feel uncomfortable. It might make you less able to lead.
The problem is that the story in your head feels true
But there's another complication. It's easy enough for me to write another article telling people to ignore the noise in their heads and just focus on reality. Doing that in reality is something else entirely.
When you're in the middle of a difficult situation, the voices in your head don't normally introduce themselves by saying:
Hello. I'm merely one possible interpretation of events. I'm probably just trying to protect you. Feel free to disregard me if you feel ok about the situation we're in.
It presents itself as reality.
That's the challenge I put to Will in our conversation. All that emotional talk in our heads can feel like absolute fact in the moment. Creating greater objectivity can therefore give us back some agency over what we do next. Will's response is important because he doesn't pretend that recognising this makes it easy. He says understanding it isn't enough. It takes practice.
That matters. Otherwise, the message risks becoming another impossible expectation for leaders:
Don't get stressed. Get out of your head. Be objective. Be yourself.
Brilliant! That's just another four things to feel inadequate about then! But that's not really the point, is it? The point is to try and become better at noticing when your interpretation and reality have become fused together, and probably isn't reflective of what's really going on.
Pressure makes the distinction harder
This becomes particularly relevant when the pressure is on, and Will makes a strong claim that most pressure is internally imposed. I think that idea deserves a bit of reflection.
Deadlines are real. Targets are real. Making people redundant is real. Cash-flow problems are real. A customer walking away is real. Consequences don't disappear because we change our thinking about them. But there is still a useful distinction to be made between what is actually happening and everything we add on top.
Will shared a story about a situation in Morocco where he was leading a programme involving people in the room and online at the same time. There were translation problems and multiple voices coming through his headset while he was trying to coach the room. His immediate internal response was essentially:
This is screwed.
Then he paused and reconnected with what he was actually there to accomplish. In spite of everything that was going on around him, the circumstances hadn't magically changed. It was just his relationship with them had. Realising that, in that moment, gave him more space to deal with what was really in front of him. I think that's a much more useful interpretation of the pressure argument for me. Not that external pressure doesn't exist. But that our interpretation of difficult circumstances can consume way too much of the capacity we need to handle them.
Objectivity doesn't mean becoming emotionless
We inevitably discussed the topic of overwhelm. Will suggests writing down everything that's occupying your mind, identifying what genuinely has to happen today, scheduling the rest and then focusing on the task in front of you. That's all very much in line with the old Eisenhower Matrix many of you will be familiar with. But again, the interesting part to me here, isn't the to-do-list technique itself, it's what the technique does.
It takes a swirling, overloaded, internal experience and makes some of it visible. It helps us ask, What's actually going on here? What genuinely needs doing? What can wait? What am I adding to this? That's not about pretending emotion doesn't exist. It's about stopping the emotional experience from having an uncontested monopoly on what counts as fact.
Getting things “black and white” is something Will refers to as creating greater clarity and freedom to deal with what's actually there. For leaders, that matters because choice needs space. When the story and the reality feel like exactly the same thing, our response can feel narrow. But create even a little separation between them and another possibility appears:
A Choice About What You Do Next.
Perhaps “be yourself” is the destination, not the instruction
This brings us back to the apparent simplicity of being yourself. An dwill is quite clear on this.
Before consciously creating who you want to be, you first need to loosen the grip of the assumptions and identities already occupying the space between your ears.He uses the metaphor of a blank canva, but I wouldn't take that literally. I'm not convinced any of us ever become completely blank canvases, detached from everything that has shaped us.
Perhaps leadership development isn't only about adding stuff, but also noticing what we're already carrying. The expectation that I must know everything. The belief that I must look strong no matter what is thrown at me. The assumption that asking for help makes me weak.
The voice telling me this meeting is a disaster before it's finished, and that I'm failing at living up to this image of the leader I'm supposed to resemble.
Becoming free to create who you are and choose what your leadership is about, is where I think Will is coming from, and adds a little bit more colour to the usual, be an authentic leader that gets pedalled around.
Freedom still needs discipline
The interesting paradox that's at play here, and illustrated throughout the conversation, is that to be free to lead like you can, needs some discipline behind it.
These disciplines are all about integrity. Schedule what matters. Do what you said you would do when you said you would do it. Be clear about the context and why you are doing certain things, as a motivating force. None of those sounds particularly liberating on first inspection.
But perhaps that's the point. These are the little daily battles we need to lean into with intention.
Will describes fighting with himself still after 28 years working with these ideas. That internal noise hasn't disappeared. He still has to notice it and choose. So becoming free to lead isn't freedom from commitments, difficult feelings, pressure or the messy stuff happening inside our heads. It is much closer to having enough space not to let all of that noise and self-talk automatically decide what happens next.
And perhaps that's the question worth carrying into your next difficult leadership moment.
What is actually happening here, what am I adding to it, and who do I choose to be in response? Because the leader you're being isn't fixed. And that means you don't have to block the leader you could be.
Comments