At the stroke of midnight, I thought to myself, “This is it, it’s happening in 8 hours, the announcement of me taking the helm will be released. I have prepared for this, I am ready.”
Many leaders prepare for years, even decades, for the responsibilities and expertise to rise to the next level in their career but rarely prepare for the identity shift that comes with it.
“I’m top class at solving problems. Give me a task and I’ll get it done. But I don’t have enough time to do everything. Also, skills in setting strategy and driving P/L don’t seem like enough. I keep hitting a wall, and I can’t move the folks who are not willing to change. Can’t I just role model hard work and dedication, and putting service before self-interest?”
Leadership goes beyond doing what you excel at and getting even more efficient at it. When you step into a bigger role, the question changes from “What will you accomplish?” To “Who will people experience when they look to you for direction?”
• Employees and team members will watch you before deciding for themselves how they will act.
• Investors and business partners will want to know what you have in store to take the business to new heights.
Communities and other stakeholders will be curious how your leadership will evolve the organisation.
How would you prepare for this next version of you as a leader? We can view this identity shift along three tracks: from doing to being, from individual capability to collective influence, and from mastery to growth.
From Doing to Being
Before you shape your leadership style, the first checkpoint is to move from ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ to ‘reconnecting’ with yourself.
• What moments make you feel most alive and most empty?
• When no one is watching, what do you deeply care about?
• What emotions do you feel when you are dealing with an uncomfortable topic?
It is not hard to spot when you’re stuck in ‘doing’ mode. If I ask a question, “How do you feel about this situation?” and you respond with, “I think this is how we are going to solve it,” then you are still focused on the problem and not your leadership. This is an area where many leaders feel awkward because they have been conditioned to delivering solutions over a prolonged period, and have become more distanced from feeling. Closing the gap on that distance is a critical piece of a leader’s evolution.
People need to feel the heartbeat of the leader. They do not tune into a machine-like strategy that simply churns out numbers, those numbers need to be accompanied by human stories, and the spirit and energy that propels the strategy forward.
A leader connected to the emotional impact of the work would say, “We are reinventing the operating model across the entire organisation. I feel the weight of ensuring the core business continues to thrive and creating success under the new model. But I have seen how our team showed resilience and creative solutions when we were overcoming worldwide lockdown, and I know our customers will continue to choose us because we are choosing to evolve together with them.” This approach shows openness, what you stand for, and how you absorb pressure and provide direction to the organisation.
From Individual Capability to Collective Influence
Leaders often lean on individual capability to command respect, maybe even admiration, among colleagues. Admittedly, individual capability has a role to play in instilling confidence that the direction or solution are grounded in subject matter expertise. That said, when it comes to mobilising people to move in the desired direction, respect alone may not secure people’s willingness to act.
Imagine this scenario: you are totally immersed in convincing your colleague how brilliantly a carbon emissions tracking tool works and how it will seamlessly feed into ESG reporting. It didn’t cross your mind to address your colleague’s lack of interest, only to receive a response at the end, ‘Ok, I will look into it’.
People’s behaviours are driven by motivations, aspirations, concerns, and fear. Only when they feel understood will they become more willing to engage in difficult conversations, challenge the assumptions they have on what works and what doesn’t, and experiment different ways to approach work.
If you had discovered that throughout the conversation your colleague was worried about the supplier who had no means to track carbon emissions, you might have offered them a chance to test the built-in carbon calculator and see first-hand how it will help that supplier. By being present with their reaction, you’re inviting your colleague to come along the journey with you to adopt new ways of working, thereby influencing your colleague to be more open-minded to adopt new behaviours.
The core tenet of influence is simple: place people before problems.
Showing that you care about what the other person cares about builds trust. You can demonstrate this by creating a safe space for people to talk, practising active listening, and finding shared connections to build relationships. When you role model these behaviours and encourage others to do the same, it creates a collective culture of placing people before problems.
From Mastery to Growth
When you venture into the domain of senior leadership – solving for existential threats – you may start to notice that your decision-making process do not serve you as effectively as before.
The supply chain shock can no longer be solved by sourcing for more suppliers when money can’t buy a solution that is simply not available in the next quarter. AI is chomping away consulting jobs as forward deployed engineers (consultant, sales, software engineer, integration specialist all rolled into one) are being embedded in enterprise client environments, and it can’t be solved by coming up with more clever strategy frameworks.
Moments like this demand that you critically examine these questions:
• Are you falling back on familiar decision patterns simply because they feel safe?
• Is your past success creating a comfort zone of behaviour? Are you willing to step into a stretch zone where growth becomes possible?
• Do you have the courage to expand your range, admit that there are new developments that you are not familiar with, bring on board fresh perspectives, and drive new behavioural change?
• What conversations are you having about enterprise risks and how does your personal risk appetite inform those conversations?
The shift from current modus operandi to your new form requires tremendous courage to crystallise what you really want, explore your options of how you could get there, who could help you, and by when will you arrive.
Leadership transitions are ultimately identity transitions. The next version of you is not about doubling the work hours and dishing out more directives. It emerges through a different kind of growth – the willingness to continually redefine who you are becoming as you navigate increasingly complex relationship and decision dynamics. Every promotion asks whether you are willing to evolve beyond the habits, assumptions and strengths that brought you here. The leaders who embrace this transition most successfully are not those who have all the answers. They are the ones who remain connected to what they stand for (what feels real for them), stay curious in the face of uncertainty, and continue to expand their capacity to influence, adapt and grow.
Diana Gan, with over 20 years of international experience in innovation, cross border investment, fund raising, is an Executive Coach at TPA Asia.
To receive more expert articles from our coaches on a monthly basis you can register to TPA’s Leadership Digest here