The Storied Future

When Authenticity Holds You Back w/ Herminia Ibarra

• Chris Hare w/ Herminia Ibarra • Season 2 • Episode 5

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Our guest today is Dr. Herminia Ibarra, the Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and an authority on leadership and career development. Earlier this year, Herminia and her colleagues Claudius A. Hildebrand and Sabine Vinck published an article in Harvard Business Review called “The Leadership Odyssey,” which explored the correlation between CEO skills and firm performance by examining 235 candidates across 75 CEO successions. Herminia and her colleagues then created a narrative pathway that aspiring CEOs can follow to transform their leadership and increase their effectiveness. 

In this episode, Chris and Herminia explore:

And much more!

Herminia Ibarra  0:00  
You can get to a pretty senior level simply by delivering results. That said, once you're there at the C suite at the top job, continuing to deliver results really does depend much more on the soft skills because you're really trying to move a system.

Chris Hare  0:16  
Welcome to the Storied Future Podcast, a show where I interview high performing CEOs, experts and innovators who have put new narratives out into the world and then use those narratives to shift the future. If you want to create a future where you're celebrated not only for what you've accomplished, but for how you've accomplished it, who you took with you and who you became in the process. You're in the right place. 

My guest today is Dr. Herminia Ibarra, the Charles Handy professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. Prior to LBS, she served on the INSEAD and Harvard Business School faculties for over 25 years. She teaches executives and master students on leadership, organizational transformation and career development. Earlier this year, I came across the article that she and her colleagues published in Harvard Business Review, entitled The leadership Odyssey. In this study, Herminia and her colleagues examined 235 candidates across 75 CEOs successions, and they looked at the correlation between CEOs skills and firm performance, then they created a narrative pathway that aspiring CEOs can follow to transform their leadership and increase their effectiveness. 

When I discovered this work, I knew that Herminia would be a perfect fit for our conversation on the Storied Future. The show is all about putting new narratives out into the world, and then using those narratives to shift the future. But when we do that, those narratives will inevitably collide with our existing narratives. If you welcome this kind of collision, then brace yourself for impact. In this episode, we explore the narrative pathway that CEOs can use to elevate their leadership and move from a hands on directive approach to empowering and enabling their teams, insights and stories from Herminia's global bestseller Act Like a Leader, Think Like A Leader, as well as from her book Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. And finally, Herminia will challenge your understanding and beliefs about authenticity, and propose a new narrative grounded in your identity that can unlock new levels of growth. Please note that during our interview, an out of reach smoke detector decided that it needed to be part of the conversation. So you may hear the occasional beep, you can tell yourself it was just the battery dying. Or you can choose a different narrative that Herminia brought the fire. Either way, let's dive in.

Herminia, thanks so much for joining me on the Storied Future Podcast.

Herminia Ibarra  2:36  
Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Hare  2:37  
So I'd love to start at the beginning. As we're doing this interview, it's National Hispanic Heritage Month here in the US. I know you were born in Cuba and immigrated to the US as a child. How did your identity in that way shape you? And then how did your journey shape you?

Herminia Ibarra  2:50  
Yeah, it certainly has. It's hard to tell specifically in what way but it's probably no accident that I study identity. When I am bicultural. I was seven when we moved to the United States. So English was my second language a little quickly became my first. Since all of my schooling is in English. However, I grew up in a very Hispanic household neighborhood environment. And it is a very important part of my roots. I have one son was born in Paris and grew up in Paris, but I raised Spanish was a language I spoke with him. Spanish as a language I speak with many friends. It's an important part of who I am culturally. And I think being an immigrant, you also feel lucky. You develop very much a can do attitude towards life, but I can't explain is how that led me to being an academic. That's a puzzle.

Chris Hare  3:41  
That's a mystery. Yeah. So what were you like as a kid and what did play look like for you?

Herminia Ibarra  3:45  
I was a pretty nerdy, introverted kid. I don't look introverted, but I still am. I was a library rat. The last person picked for the sports teams. So kinda clumsy, awkward, non athletic, but good reader read a lot. And that's probably what led me towards academia. I think I probably figured I'm good at school. I like it. Let's stay here as long as possible. And here I am all these years later, still there.

Chris Hare  4:14  
So what was the journey from once you graduated school that took you into academia?

Herminia Ibarra  4:19  
So I was from maybe my late teenage years pretty interested in the idea of being an academic and doing a PhD. And I wasn't all very defined, but I was very interested in psychology. And when I went to university, I had one of very lucky things was the head I majored in psychology, the head of the Psychology Department kind of took me under his wing and said, You should really think about graduate school. And I was interested in my field already in Organizational Psychology, and he said to me, there was one person in the department who did work in that area, and he said, don't work with that person. Big because he is not research active, he's not doing research that's being published in journals, and you won't be able to get that experience with him which you will need if you want to go to graduate school. And that was one of the most important pieces of advice I had in my life. So in university as an undergraduate, I did work towards developing a profile that would allow me to apply to graduate schools, which I did, I went to graduate school straight out of university, and did an academic Master's and PhD, which led immediately to an assistant professor role. So I've been in academia, oh, my life.

Chris Hare  5:38  
Looking back, you've done a ton of work. I was joking with a friend that I saw the number of citations, the number of times you've been cited, and I've only received one citation, and it was from a police officer for speeding. But I'm curious, is there one particular piece of work that pops to the top for you in terms of what you're most proud of?

Herminia Ibarra  5:58  
Yeah, this is kind of like choosing among your children. It's a hard thing to answer, I'll tell you that my book that just came out in second edition working identities very close to my heart, maybe because it was my first book, it may be because of how I was touched by the stories of the people in it, and how those stories have affected people over such a long period of time. There's also a piece of research that I did in the 90s. That has stayed with me since and it also has led me to a very funny story that I overuse in a lot of what I do, but the piece of research was published as an academic article, and then Harvard Business Review published a sort of more for the business world digest of it. And the article was called it was called provisional cells, image and identity and professional careers, provisional cells. And it was my first article about identity. What had happened was I was mucking around trying to do a study of networks and just kind of interviewing people. And I hit on something that was more interesting, which is how they struggled with putting on an image that didn't quite match up to their sense of who they were, in cases where these were cases where they were stepping up to bigger roles. These were professionals who were really good technically and politically, but had to start forming relationships with their clients who are a lot older and much more knowledgeable about the business and all of that. And so they felt a bit like imposters. And what I ended up documenting was how they dealt with that, and the different ways in which people dealt with it, and the ways in which it threatened their sense of authenticity, which led me much later to write a good bit about the authenticity, problem and dilemma. And so that's also a favorite piece of research. But I do have several, they are all my favorite children.

Chris Hare  7:54  
What I would love to shift then to talking about the authenticity piece. That was one of your first pieces of work that I saw, was your TEDx talk. Can you talk a little bit about you said we've reached peak authenticity?

Herminia Ibarra  8:07  
Yeah. Where do I start? I didn't notice at some point that authenticity was in the air and authentic leadership was in the air, it was a new way of thinking about leadership much more about who you are than what you do. And probably because I've always been a bit of a different one in a setting. And maybe because by this point, I was working at INSEAD in France, where you had a mix of lots of different cultures, in a US Business School, you'll have 75% students from North America, at London Business School, I didn't say these places, you'll never gonna have even a 15% cultural majority, I noticed that people were reacting to some of the American models of what it means to be authentic, and not particularly clicking in with it. And I also noticed, and this has to do with my research, I've always been interested in what people do, when they face these kind of inflection points in their career, that kind of the What Got You Here Won't Get You There sort of moments. And oftentimes, they require you to go outside your comfort zone, and going outside your comfort zone, inevitably makes most people not everybody feel a bit inauthentic. And how do you handle that. And I noticed that for people who place a real premium on being themselves at all costs, even in that kind of a historical sense. These inflection points were tough. I was teaching managers who were moving into bigger leadership roles. And the whole thing about more persuasive communication and stakeholder management and building the networks and dealing with the politics really made them say that's not me, and often approached situations in a naive and less than effective way in a way that was keeping them from accomplishing what they wanted. And so I started to ask the question of how can you be authentic in way that doesn't condemn you to being as you always have been, which is the question and I did notice that it's actually when you feel a bit under threat, when you are in one of these junctures you're not so sure you can do it, you don't know how to do it the skill sets, I'm familiar, you're a little bit worried about, can you pull it off? And do you want to be that person, what it evokes or provokes in you is a more cautious conservative version of yourself. But if you call that your authentic self, then you lock in, there's a who's going to argue against that. And so you protect yourself from learning. And my argument was, a lot of times, that sense of it's not me, is really more than anything else, a signal that you are learning something new, something that's not habitual, something you haven't done before,

Chris Hare  10:49  
Are you able to share an example of that either from your own experience or from someone that you studied?

Herminia Ibarra  10:54  
Sure. This is my infamous story that almost anybody who's heard me speak has heard because it is truly my best story. But this is the subject of your podcast, so I might as well share it. My best story on this was from my early days, when I was learning to teach as a young professor at the Harvard Business School, and really failing pretty miserably with quite low teacher scores. I didn't have any business experience, I was new to teaching at some demanding context, 90 students in a case study discussion. And so I was not doing well at all, and really trying to figure it out, staying up all night over preparing and getting well intended by but pretty useless feedback from all the people around me. And they say stuff to me, like, just be yourself in the classroom as if that was not the problem. So it was a pretty miserable thing that actually went on for quite a long time. And it's a classic, because you have a skill set and knowledge that doesn't quite fit the situation you get in academia, you get hired, because people like your research, and they think you're gonna publish it. But that's a different skill set, than teaching in a kind of entertaining and engaging way a large group of fairly experienced people. And the pivotal point was a colleague of mine who came to watch me and said, you're walking into that room as if this was all about the content, the knowledge that you have to impart to these people he's like, has nothing to do with it, you've got to own the space, it has to be clear to them that it's your turf and not theirs. And he said it, he literally said to me, the only way you're going to pull that off is to be a dog and go mark your territory, and each of the four corners of the room. And he said, Go walk around, teach from the last row, get in their face, talk to people up front, put your arms around them look to see if they're doing the work, if they have noticed they highlighted the case, see if they brought any food, if you get hungry, eat their food, take it it's yours, all this stuff. And it shocked me, it was the last thing I wanted to do. Even though, as is often the case, I had seen a lot of my senior colleagues do something like that very successfully. And very effectively, I just thought, hey, I'm a serious academic. I have a PhD from Yale, why do I have to do this stupidity, to get their attention. But as it happens, one gets desperate enough. So eventually, I did start to try it and do it. And it's not like it worked right away. But it really liberated me to really rethink what I was there to do, which was more to get people engaged in the learning process, rather than to impart the five crucial theories in my field. And also started to develop an image of myself in the future that was possible and attractive, like I could get to like this, I could get to become a good teacher. And then that was something motivating to work towards whereas before it hadn't been. So anyway, that's my story. At first, I felt like an idiot. And it was certainly not authentic. And I certainly didn't feel that. But I had to do something different. And I didn't know what. And so I tried something. And that something that I tried eventually led me down a path that really transformed what I did and how I did it. 

Chris Hare  14:08  
So if you fast forward to now, if you walk into a classroom, you're obviously been doing this a long time and you're transformed. But what does that feel like for you compared to back then?

Herminia Ibarra  14:16  
Well, very, I'm very much at home. I'm very comfortable on that home. I'm not nervous, I can be more personable, I can be more spontaneously funny. I can handle whatever comes my way. So I feel comfortable.

Chris Hare  14:33  
Yeah, I love what you said earlier about the, if we go to that most conservative version of ourselves out of fear or whatever, right? We're just going to kind of be stuck. But essentially what you're doing is you're authoring this kind of new version, this future version of yourself and then stepping into that, and that's really powerful. I'd love to shift to talk about CEO succession. So earlier this year, you and your colleagues produced an article in HBr called the leadership Odyssey, and it was looking at the correlation between CEOs skills and firm performance. And I'm curious, as you looked at those six sessions, and those also the candidates, what inspired you to take this on and tackle this subject? 

Herminia Ibarra  15:09  
It was two different things. One was seeing a lot in the press, about the rise of soft skills and the importance of soft skills in leadership, which had been building for years, I think we've been proclaiming that command and control is dead for a long time. And then the, especially post COVID, talking about the importance of soft skills, collaboration, and empathy, really people skills, yet having a sense from my students, that there's not a lot of clarity about what those skills are, that they're not necessarily the most valued in a lot of organizational contexts, or at least in terms of what will get you promoted, and that they are actually much harder to learn than we realize. And the second thing was just conversations with colleagues of mine at the search firm, Spencer Stewart, who spent a lot of time both assessing executives for these soft skills. And then also coaching people have been successful in these successions in how to improve their skill sets in these areas. And so it was out of these conversations that the idea for that article came out. 

Chris Hare  16:22  
And I want to get into the study, but would love to understand first, as a level set, how you define leadership, I love your definition of leadership. But let's start there.

Herminia Ibarra  16:32  
Oh, it's not mine. You know, a lot of people have talked about this before me. For me, leadership is the process of influencing others towards a common goal. So that's leadership is other people involved. It's not just you. And there has to be some kind of common goal and what you're doing produces behavior, that wouldn't happen if you weren't doing it. So that's very simple. But

Chris Hare  16:57  
I think what you did is, in terms of, to your point, it sounds like there's a lot of discussion around the soft skills and leadership, but it's a very kind of mushy thing at times.

Herminia Ibarra  17:06  
A very mushy conversation about soft skills.

Chris Hare  17:19  
So can you talk about some of the key takeaways from your study? 

Herminia Ibarra  17:22  
Yeah, so one takeaway is, for sure, you can get to a pretty senior level, simply by delivering results, in whichever way, okay, and you see that in the data. And you see that in anecdotal examples, it is vital. That said, once you're there, at the C suite, as the top job, continuing to deliver results, really does depend much more on the soft skills, because you're really trying to move a system. And so you need to be able to have a view of that system, and you need to be able to move the human element of it. And so it starts to show up the effects of the skill start to show up later in your career. And so the thing is, when's a good time to start developing them? So anyway, that was one finding. And then we just decided it isn't mushy subjects. So we studied it in a mushy way. We took a deep look into a number of individual cases, particularly individuals that were coached over time by my co authors about their own process, looking at what really catalyzed the desire to work on this in a serious way, because it's not a superficial skill. What was the process? And where did they end up? And so the bulk of the article focuses on that journey, what is it that really helps you, you've got to come to understand not intellectually, I should have these qualities, but you have to come to understand in a very real way, that not having them is going to get in the way of what you truly want to accomplish. And you've got to understand that it's not just for show, it's not about what you say in a speech, you actually have to be able to work in this way on a regular basis. So that was the departure in the journey. And the voyage. The actual process is a lot about finding a context in which you can experiment and learn on which you can do different things. For some people, it is getting involved in high profile projects outside their area. Often these are cross functional things so that they are not able to be as directive, as they are within their own domain. And that inculcates skills that then they were able to bring back into their own units and departments for other people. It's finding ways of taking skills that they have been good at in a smaller setting in their own units and then kind of spreading their wings. In these more kind of organizational context, it also has a lot to do with who you're going to enlist for help and feedback along the way. Because without it, you don't get better because you don't see it. And really kind of your mindset and willingness to make mistakes and correct and try again.

Chris Hare  20:16  
So I'm actually going to start at the end of the article, and then kind of Rewind, but you definitely don't pull any punches, like you say, this is going to be a journey of transformation, it's going to be longer, it's gonna be more difficult than you imagined, right? But also more rewarding. So what are some of the rewards if folks are to follow on that journey?

Herminia Ibarra  20:35  
It is a personal transformation. And it's really a shift from saying, I should be a better listener, to, I am getting better at being a good listener, to I am a good listener, it's a journey of identity, it's where you become among the rewards as you become a better situational leader. So we also observed that people who develop these soft skills, it's not like they've got a hammer, and they use it for every nail, they are actually they get better at being able to discern when those are called for. And when simply, I've got to be a dictator. Here, it's time for very directive leadership, because you have more repertory, you're better at selecting the right tool for the situation. And the other thing that is a benefit, but these levels, a big part of your job is instilling or transforming the culture. And one of the ways in which you instill or transform a culture is by what you do, around the people stuff. And for a lot of the people that we took an up close look at, one of the ways in which we saw that they were, you know, basically had arrived, is that they were working to coach others to develop in this way, they were working to transform some of the organizational processes and systems so that they also encouraged these kinds of capacities. So they were truly becoming transformative agents for their organizations.

Chris Hare  22:06  
So on the flip side, I'd love to understand from the research what some of the costs are, of the historic model of the heroic individual leading from the front, right, so I used to work at a trillion dollar company that will remain nameless, it's very much about that one person that's leading from the front. And I saw a lot of costs from that. But I would love to understand what you all have seen?

Herminia Ibarra  22:28  
Yeah. So there's gonna be specific cost depending on who the person is in their idiosyncrasies. But there are also general costs to that today, because I started getting interested in this in the context of digital transformation. And why is that so hard? And why is that so slow. And as a very best selling Harvard Business Review article some years ago, said in the title, digital transformation is not about the technology, it's really about the people and the culture. But it's not just about digital transformation, we are living in a world in which disruptive stuff happens a lot, the pandemic, the climate, political volatility, generative AI. And so, there's a lot of learning to be done. We're no longer in a context where a person who can say I've done it before, I'm going to apply that template, and we're going to run with it, or I know what we need to do. Strategy is a much more fluid kind of ongoing thing. So we're change efforts. And so you really do need to be able to harness the hearts and minds and learning of lots of different people in an organization. So if you don't have the skills, they will tell you what they think. And when they don't tell you what they think you have cover ups that lead to very explosive mistakes. in lots of different organizations, we see that time and time again, you miss opportunities, you have ethical lapses, you make stupid mistakes. And so we're just not in a context where you can not involve the brains and the passions of people involved. Does that fit your experience?

Chris Hare  24:08  
Yeah, and I think it's easier to see the impact on the team and the employees from an employee retention standpoint are things like that. But I think also there's the what happens when you get to the finish line as the leader. And looking back? What does that do to you probably in your soul, right, when you retire, or when you're further down the road? How does the way that you got there impact you?

Unknown Speaker  24:30  
Yeah, well put.

Chris Hare  24:32  
So what are the stages of the leadership odyssey? And then I would love it if you could walk through them. And we could dive into some examples too.

Herminia Ibarra  24:40  
Well, it's the departure of what kind of sets you off to say, now I'm really going to work on changing the way I do things. There is the process. So how are you going to experiment with different ways? Where are you going to learn? Where are you going to do who's going to give you feedback? First part The departure is more about your motivation. The voyage is a lot more about practice and feedback and enter live loops so you can learn. And the return is having this situational breath that you can marshal across, you can use the right approach in each different situation, and also a desire to continue to hone these skills and inculcate them in other people. So that's the three parts.

Chris Hare  25:24  
And is there a specific story from each phase that you're able to share? 

Herminia Ibarra  25:28  
Here's a story I saw up close. This is a leader who was a in a number two role in a large organization that was seriously transforming with a new CEO comes along, who is actually somebody who is extraordinarily gifted on the people skills on the soft skills, the strategic and the soft skills, whereas this individual, top top performer very much beloved, but very much the old style of kind of directive control by the numbers, more the old school managerial process. But being a smart person, and also wanting to have an impact and be part of the transformation of this organization. He stepped up to the plate of learning. And he was coached by the CEO who had a very clear philosophy, and wanted his top team to be able to also walk the talk in terms of becoming a more learning oriented organization. And so he embraced it, he did not realize the extent of the transformation required because he, like so many people thought himself to be a pretty good coach. People found him inspiring he was one of these kinds of PACE setting leaders, he does it himself sets high expectations kind of holds you to them. But he hadn't realized the extent to which he really coached by telling rather than by asking, one of the things he realized by watching his CEO in operation was always asking questions, always asking questions, due to his nature, but also he was trying to walk the talk where a learning organization we ask. And so he embraced a coaching program, he got a coach, he got feedback from people, people told him, they explained to me as well, he tries hard, but he reverts to form a law under stress, it doesn't take a lot, he realized that he was hearing it, he kept working at it. And he got much better at it, he got much better at it. And he started to spot because he was in a pretty senior role. He started to spot ways in which the way they ran things in the organization, some of the formal processes, were forcing people to put on a show to be the best person in the room to just answer the question as of losing the opportunity to have more learning oriented discussions about how do we take this forward into the future? So we started to change those processes.

Chris Hare  28:01  
And do you find that people, I mean, this is my own personal experiences that you don't change until you hit a ceiling or hit a wall, like, oh, no, something needs to change here? And then you go through that transformation.

Herminia Ibarra  28:13  
There has to be some massive level of dissatisfaction in there somewhere in order for people to really take in on in a serious way. But not always, you know, there's an example of somebody else who in a kind of a similar way, saw the writing on the wall, the organization was transforming in this way. And so he started acting the part. And that raised expectations on his team, but he really wasn't transforming all that much. And then started getting pushback, like, What do you mean, you said, you were gonna listen, what do you mean, you said, we do this together. And as a result of that pushback, actually started taking a deeper look at how he operated and what the downsides of it were. So that's another I guess that is also dissatisfaction based, something has to hit you as not optimal.

Chris Hare  29:09  
I'd love to chat about your books. By the way, congratulations on the launch of both of them this week. Thank you so early in my career. Well, this is before I even got into my career, I was flat broke and was essentially I took this job this one week job selling. And that was literally the worst possible scenario for me. In my mind. I'm like, I'm not a salesman. And automatically, it's the used car salesman. I can't stand this, right. But I was put in a situation where I had to do it. And what was remarkable is in the course of hours and a day, I got out there and I started selling and it just transformed me almost to the point where before I said I hate selling. I actually said I am a salesman, and that actually became almost part of my identity. Right? 

Herminia Ibarra  29:53  
That's such a great story. Stories like that are so much at the heart of a lot of my research and writing big cuz people want to decide in their heads, I'm this kind of person, I'm not that kind of person. This is the true me that's not it my true self is, this is the thing I was meant to do right here without realizing that they haven't had experiences that are going to teach them otherwise. And it happens so often that you get thrown into something, and it transforms you and you discover strength. So you internalize a new identity over and over and over again. And that's why it is so important, whether you're trying to have greater leadership impact, or you're trying to move into a new career, to do stuff, a try new things, meet new people, throw yourself at it, rather than try to figure it out in your head by introspection and reflection. 

Chris Hare  30:49  
So let's talk about working identity. Can you talk to me just about really what you dig into in the book in terms of those transitions that we go into? And then what are some of the core principles for that? 

Herminia Ibarra  30:59  
Yeah, yeah. So, Working Identity, the first edition of Working Identity came out 20 years ago. And it was something I hit on by accident, I was studying people's transitions within their current careers and work. And I found a massive number of them who were desperately trying to get out or had already moved into something else. They were kind of at that mid career stage. So he was knocked down on purpose, but on average, are kind of plus or minus 40, plus or minus five. And so I thought, this is interesting, I started to get intrigued. I interviewed a lot of people, I found the after the fact stories absolutely unsatisfying. They made it all sound obvious and natural, the clouds parted and the light shone, and this is what you were meant to do. And so I decided that I was going to find a bunch of different people who were contemplating making a career change, and follow them over three years. And what made that book's impact is nobody had done that before. Nobody had done over volumes and volumes of career advice, but not based on looking at that, what actually happens. And what you find actually happens is that it's a kind of a messy and pretty nonlinear process. Because people can tell you really easily what they don't like and don't want to repeat in the future, and they don't want to have again, but they have a harder time saying this is what I'd rather do instead. So they kind of stay stuck. And then they try to figure it out in their minds, and they buy into the myth of the true self. This is one career that's perfect for you that you want to find that will give you meaning and passion, and everything else. And that's not so there's lots of possibilities that could have those qualities. And so I followed people. And what I got was a sense of what's the process? And what are the things that helped. So I can explain those. The process is one that is interestingly 20 years ago, we didn't really have the ideas about design thinking and fast prototyping and all these things that are a bit more habitual today. But what I saw was that it's a process in which people start to envisage what I call different possible cells usually wasn't one thing. Oftentimes people toyed with all different kinds of possibilities. If I stay here, this is what it might look like, if I try this, here's a riskier thing. Here's a more stable thing. Here's the crazier wacky career paths, here's the more conventional one. They toyed with a lot of those things. And the more actively they started to experiment, the more they learned about what was possible, what was feasible, what they actually liked, it was very common for people to have fantasies that once they tested, they found out they actually didn't want to do at all, just a couple of days ago was talking to a journalist from the Wall Street Journal who said absolutely, I was convinced that what I really wanted was to make a living writing books. I tried it once I hated it, I went back to my job as it is very, very common. And so the process is you start playing with possibilities, some people do it on the side. And it's not even always conscious at first, sometimes you start doing something pro bono, or a friend asked you to help with a startup or you've got some kind of side thing you've been working on that you just really interested in, and you don't think you're going to make money out of it. And over time, these things blossom, in some cases, you invest more time and energy, you grow networks in community in that area, you investigate them further, they become more sometimes less attractive. And over time, if they become feasible, then you leave the old thing. That's one process. Now that process is you've lost your job, or it's no longer feasible. And so you've got to do all of that experimenting, without the safety of a role that you're in but inevitably involves experimenting with more than one possibility. And that's good, because it allows you to compare and contrast. A lot of people think gosh, if I'm contemplating so many different things, must mean, I'm confused. Maybe I shouldn't do anything until I have it clear in my head? Absolutely not. Because the only way you get clarity is by trying things out. So that's how it starts experiment D with possible cells that plunges you into what's known as liminality. Or this kind of betwixt in between period where you're neither here nor there, you don't know who you are anymore. You got to lose your moorings. Yes, who am I, when I'm changing? Who am I, when I'm moving away from something, but I don't know what I'm moving towards. It can be exciting. But it can also be very scary, it often takes longer than you'd wish. And the problem is that you're, you're sorting a lot of stuff through, you're exploring, you're learning information, you're dealing with your own emotions, about leaving something you invested in, in the past and identity that was important to you, you're dealing with friends and family who think you're out of your mind, you're dealing with building new networks. So that's why it takes long. And the important thing there is to withstand, and to avoid premature closure, because oftentimes, the thing that comes easily will be closer to what you used to do. And for people who are trying to change careers, that's not what they want, they want to do something different. So that's the middle Some people call that the messy middle, and coming out is moving into a greater sense of clarity about a path, here's where I want to be, here's what I want to do. In some cases, it doesn't necessarily end with one, be all and end all new career. But you feel like you're on the other side, in terms of the story, you tell yourself about the process, you've been through what you've tried to achieve how you've come out the other end, and maybe there's future steps, but you feel that you are no longer in that old domain. 

Chris Hare  36:45  
What I love with both this work and with the leadership odyssey is you're clearly laying out this journey. And in both cases, it's a difficult journey. And we all go through that difficult journey. But most people in the world to your point are saying, Actually, no, it's easy. You find this magical career, you find this one thing you do this process, but you're clearly laying out no, here's the journey that you're gonna go through. And we're all going through this and it's messy. But giving people those things to anchor into, so they know where they're at, on the way to that potential future. So, I love that. 

Herminia Ibarra  37:18  
Thanks. Yeah, Agreed. Agreed.

Chris Hare  37:21  
What do you make of purpose? Because there's so much about purpose and passion, which, obviously is a very privileged thing to even be talking about. Right? But I'm curious, your take on that. 

Herminia Ibarra  37:32  
Yeah. So it's just like authenticity is who's gonna argue against purpose is great. But you can't just kind of plunk it in and you can't make it up out of nothing. And you make people feel bad. Do you have a sense of purpose, and here's how you can come up with one in five minutes or less? I think it's overdone. We want a sense of meaning in what we do. Not that long ago, I had a lot of people on a webinar, and we asked what they were looking for, in terms of making a career change. And the thing that came out at the top was like 70% of the people that wanted more meaningful work. So that's important. But the way the purpose discussion goes, it seems contrived to seems artificial, it seems like you can just kind of, like I said, pull it in out of whatever. And so for most people, it's not satisfying. 

Chris Hare  38:23  
Yeah, what's been helpful for me, Todd Henry writes about passion and going back to the Latin root word of passion. And it's about suffering, right? So what's the work that you can let you're so invested in that you're willing to suffer for it? That's been a more helpful thing for me to think about versus the what lights me up, because that's just going to shift from day to day, so.

So what about Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader? Can you talk about that?

Herminia Ibarra  38:54  
Sure. For many years, at least 20. I've taught executives who are kind of senior middles trying to move up trying to transition into more senior roles. And I decided to also look at that process and see what it's like. It's not unlike the leadership Odyssey, the leadership Odyssey is maybe the CEO C suite version of it. But I was trying to understand what helped people make the transition to have more impact, and to have impact in a different way. Out of being a functional expert, I'm a marketing expert or financial analyst, or I'm an engineer or I'm a scientist, you end up managing teams in your domain and then as kind of you move up, you end up really far removed from your expertise and what is demanded of you is much more kind of a cross disciplinary view of the business. And again, the ability to work with people and to harness them to get things done. And people find that hard and they find it hard because of identity. Because it's not me. It's not that it's hard to learn a strategic perspective or to learn the people skills, it's that doing and persuading and opining on the basis of your technical expertise or substance expertise becomes your sense of who you are as a professional and kind of moving away from it feels like a violation of who you are. And those things really define how you spend your time and the people you hang out with and everything else. And so they can be very limiting. And so the act like a leader has a three part model for how to approach this and the three parts are redefine your job, extend your network, and be more playful with yourself. So redefine your job, it means don't just do the thing that you have been historically great at and can do in your sleep. Use your job as a platform for learning new stuff, and developing a more strategic view. So you can add more value beyond your immediate unit. And so how do you do that? And how do you kind of become more of a bridge between your area of expertise in your unit and the relevant ecosystem in which it exists and from which it needs information and resources and talent? And so really, how do we tackle the issue of how we spend our time, so that it doesn't limit us so that you can make bigger contributions. The second part is about extending your network people in Toria, Slee bad developing the network's they need to think broadly and creatively and innovatively and to get people on board. We kind of stick to our usual suspects. We like people who are just like us, and we huddle with our friends. And the pandemic made it even worse, they destroyed our networks. The funny thing with networks is I always always ask the same questions, I say how important is having a good network to your success? Everybody's like, top grade upgrade? And then I say how good is your network? And why is it not so good? Because I don't have time to pay attention to it.

Chris Hare  42:01  
Until you need it. And then you try to create it instantly. And it's not there?

Herminia Ibarra  42:06  
No, exactly. So we spent a lot of time thinking about that. What are the barriers? Why is it that most of us are really bad at it? How do we approach it differently? How do we do enough of it so becomes more comfortable and more rewarding. And so that's the second and the third leg of the tripod to be more playful with yourself. The idea is back to the authenticity. So we were talking about how can you give yourself permission to deviate from who you always have been for the sake of learning not to fake it till you make it not being a fake. But if you don't deviate, you don't learn anything new. And a lot of the learning has to do with your style as a leader and how you show up and how you motivate people and all the soft stuff. And that, as I said before, feels very not me to people. And so how can you take a more playful approach, which to me means that you're not committing to be that fluffy, mushy person, you're just trying something out. And let's just see how it works. And if I like it, maybe I'll keep it. But I'm not committing to being that person.

Chris Hare  43:04  
As we come to a close, I'd love to understand what are you most excited about in the year ahead and the work that you're doing and what's coming down the pipe for you.

Herminia Ibarra  43:24  
I'm very focused on getting the word out for the books. I'm very, very much focused on that. But I am I do have a backburner. A new book project, which is about career transitions that we make a bit later in our careers working identity was a lot about mid career not exclusively, but a lot about mid career. As I get older, my friends get older, my executives get older, we're looking to what are we going to do with all these extra years that we now have? Because we're living longer? And what are we going to do in a world in which technology is changing so much of the workplace and work itself? And how do we reinvent ourselves for a time in which we also want to have more control over our lives. We want to work but we want to work on our own terms. And so that's the next project. There's

Chris Hare  44:12  
two friends of mine one mid career and one at retirement who are both engineers. And they both discovered one of them, the one that was towards retirement would just doodle for decades and all of his meetings. And then when he retired, he's like I'm an artist. I'm going to become an artist now. And now he does this beautiful artwork.

Herminia Ibarra  44:28  
Yeah, that's great. So he's lucky. He's really lucky because that's kind of like the thing a lot of people aspire to your total think back to what you were really good at and what you loved and you didn't do and some people do have that. But most people don't. Most people don't. It's harder.

Chris Hare  44:45  
Do you have a thing that's a hobby that's outside of the research and outside of the teaching?

Herminia Ibarra  44:50  
I do but it's not a career. I love contemporary art. I follow a lot of artists I buy some young artists and collect some really interest Didn't that I'm a big music fan. I'm a big opera lover. And so I spent a lot of time on that. I used to be a really avid reader. And somehow screens have destroyed my focusing capacity. But I hope to get that back. Now after the book launch, I like to travel I like to spend time with family. I like to cook I like to have friends over.

Chris Hare  45:22  
I love it. Well, thanks so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. I really, really appreciate your time and look forward to seeing all the amazing success coming with your books.

Herminia Ibarra  45:30  
Thanks so much, Chris. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Chris Hare  45:34  
Thanks for joining me on another episode of The Story future, live part of her genius story and insights did you find most impactful? Did anything in this episode shift how you're thinking about your future, how you're thinking about your narrative, and about how you want to tell your story? Find someone today and tell them your story. Because when we tell our stories that can change us. It can change others, and it has the power to change the future. And that's it. Please subscribe, leave us a review. And be sure to visit TSF pod.com For more information about Erminia For show notes, and to check out other episodes. The story future podcast is a production of the story future LLC produced and edited by Ray Sylvester audio engineering by Allianz by and fee music by the bruise your host has made Chris hare learn more about how I help leaders use the power of narrative to transform themselves, their companies and their industries at WWW dot the storied future.com