Who are you outside of your title?

It’s a question most leaders never stop long enough to answer. And the longer you go without answering it the more the role starts to answer it for you.

In this episode of Leadership After 5, I’m getting honest about something I experienced firsthand: what happens when your identity and your leadership role become the same thing. The blind spots it creates. The connections it costs you.

The quiet question underneath it all: am I enough outside of this role?

This one is for the leader who has ever felt naked outside of work. Who has struggled to relate to people when the corporate conversation stops. Who has built so much of themselves around the title that they’ve forgotten who they are without it.

You are more than the role. Let’s talk about it.

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome to Leadership After Five, where leadership gets real. I'm Kim. And today we're talking about leadership identity, what it is, what happens when you lose it, and why getting it back is something you want to prioritize. I want to ask you something. Who are you? Not your title, not your department, not the number of people you lead or the budget you manage. Who are you? I spent a long time not being able to answer that question without leading with my job. And it took a random Saturday at the grocery store almost a decade ago to really wake me up. Here's the story. I was at the grocery store in my sweats, you know, just trying to get in, trying to get out, doing, you know, my thing. And I saw someone I recognized. It was an executive from an organization I was connected to at the time, but I almost didn't recognize them. No suit, no tie, nothing that signaled who they were in the building. Just a white t-shirt, Wrangler jeans, and a pair of new balance. And something about that image stopped me. Because I looked at them and I saw myself. Not who I was in that moment in my sweats with no title attached, but who I had been trying so hard to become. And I realized in that moment that outside of those four walls, nobody knew my title. Nobody cared. The role I had worked so hard to embody meant absolutely nothing in the grocery store aisle. And to be honest, it felt weird. Like I had been living a double life, professional Kim and then real Kim. And the gap between those two people was wider than I had ever admitted to myself. Here's the thing about losing your identity in a leadership role. Much like anything else in leadership, it doesn't happen overnight. It's gradual, it's quiet. And in the beginning, it actually feels like the right thing to do. You get the title, you want to prove you deserve it. So you dive in all the way in. You learn the language of the role, you start showing up differently, talking differently, engaging differently, you become the expert. You become the function, you become the title. And somewhere in that process, the line between who you are and what you do starts to blur. I've seen this show up differently in different leaders. Some weird proudly. I once had a colleague who had no kids, wasn't married, and lived, ate, breathe, slept the job. That was her choice, and I respected it. But what I noticed over time was that her entire frame of reference became the organization. Every conversation, every decision, every relationship filtered through the lens of the role. And the blind spot that creates for any leader is significant. When the organization needs to evolve, when the culture needs to shift, when something needs to change, a leader who has become the role often can't see it. Because seeing it would require them to question the very thing they've built their entire identity around. When you don't know who you are separate from the role, you lose the ability to see yourself clearly. You lose the ability to recognize your blind spots. And blind spots in leadership don't just affect you, they affect every person on your team and every decision you make on behalf of the organization. It costs you authenticity. When the role becomes the identity, people can feel it. Think about it. Have you ever listened to a person speak and felt scripted? Not because they were reading from notes, but because everything they said sounded like a position statement. That's what happens when the role swallows the person. The human disappears, and what's left is a performance of leadership. It causes you connection, real connection. When the role becomes your entire identity, you start to lose the ability to relate to people outside of a professional context. Friendships become transactional. Social situations feel uncomfortable because you don't know how to show up without the armor. And I'll be honest about this. There were seasons in the earlier part of my career where I felt naked outside of work. Like with without the title, without the context of the role, I didn't know who I was in the room. Corporate conversations, those felt safe, but everything else felt foreign. And underneath all of it was a question I didn't know how to answer. Am I enough outside of this role? Like if you take away the title, the function, the expertise, is there enough here to matter? That's the real cost of losing yourself in the role. And that isolation is more common than you think because a lot of people don't talk about it. We perform confidence in the building and quietly struggle outside of it. And it costs you sustainability. You cannot lead well long term from a place of role dependency because at some point the role changes, the title shifts, the organization restructures. And if the role is all you have, who are you when it's gone? So what do you do about it? The first thing is the hardest. Ask yourself the question I opened with. Who are you? Not what do you do? No, who are you? Write it down. See what comes up. If the first five things you list are all connected to your professional identity, then that's your signal. The second thing is to get curious about your values. Do you know what they are? Not the values on your organization's website, but your individual values, the ones that drive how you show up at the grocery store on a Saturday in your sweats when nobody knows your title. The third thing is to invest in self-assessments. I'm a certified Clift Insurance coach, and I will tell you that one of the most powerful things a leader can do is get language for who they are. Clift insurance gives you that. It doesn't tell you what to do, rather, it tells you who you are and how you naturally show up. And when you have that language, you can start to separate what is authentically you from what is the role you've been performing. Here's what I want you to walk away with today. Your title is not your identity. It is a function you serve, it is a responsibility you carry, but it is not who you are. The leaders who have the most impact are the ones who know themselves clearly enough to lead from a real place, not a performed one. Leadership after five is about what happens when the suit comes off, when the title stays at the office, when you're just a person in a white t-shirt, some Wrangler jeans, and new balance at the grocery store. That person, that's your foundation. Build from there. I have all my socials in my bio. Find me on one of those platforms and tell me what landed. Tell me when you first realized the role was consuming your identity. Tell me who you are outside of the title. This is Leadership After Five, where leadership gets real. I'll see you in the next episode. Take care.