Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader | Herminia Ibarra

I'm gonna start with the headline for our time together and it's the idea of what got you here won't get you there when it comes to moving into more senior roles what we're often looking at is moving from a situation in which we are influencing persuading motivating on the basis of what we know our specialty expertise to a situation in which we have to learn to motivate persuade influence on the basis of a much broader package of skills and include strategic acumen in some of the soft skills that have to do with motivating inspiring influencing without Authority a shift from knowing things to a shift to being able to inform strategy be at the table with the senior leadership of the organization in order to have things happen now as I said none of this is going to surprise anybody we know this definitely in HR but the fact of the matter is and we know for ourselves and for the people we look after it's still incredibly hard to do we trip up on it all the time yes yes you see it all the time the reason for it and I'm gonna argue and this is what I have been studying in the context of my last book act like a leader is that we go about it the wrong way and I'm gonna tell you a little story about one of my own what got you here won't get you there transitions to illustrate how it is that we actually how it actually happens how the learning happens and how it happens so my story happens in a room a little different than this one a bit smaller an amphitheater it was an MBA classroom in my early years as a professor at Harvard Business School and I guess it's it's a bit of a true confession story in that I guess on the positive side my research was taking the right boxes it was getting notice in the right places published in the right places but on the other side of it my teaching took awhile to kind of get off the ground and to put it a little bit more bluntly I was not doing very well in this particular context with my group of ninety MBA students who were extremely disappointed that they didn't get the kind of fifty something year old model with gray hair in a network that could get them a job right and in this situation actually lasted for quite some time because we all tend to repeat what we know how to do and I kept doing more of the things that made me hugely successful as a PhD student which is to work hard and know things and it was manifest in my teaching ratings they were not good it was manifesting the experience of everybody it was not a lot of fun we weren't laughing we weren't necessarily having a good time it was manifest in the parade of senior people coming around to give me a little feedback about how to improve a miserable experience for anybody whoever gets that shower I have a colleague who has studied the process of giving and receiving feedback quite as tense extensively and he always says you know her me Nia whenever anybody tells me can I give you a little feedback he says I said no thanks you keep it right until one day when on my probably least politically correct colleague came to watch me and to give me a little more feedback and you know it's quite apprehensive about what was I was gonna hear but he came up to me afterwards and he said you know her mean yeah we've got it worked out I can tell immediately what's wrong he said you know you're walking in there as if this was all about the content he said you know let me tell you I've been doing this for 30 years has nothing to do with the content so when you walk in there you've got one and only one mission in life and that is to make it crystal clear to each and every one of those 90 students that this room is yours and not theirs he says so look look let me just let me just be blunt about this her mania the only way you're going to do this is to be a dog and go and mark your territory in each of the four corners of that room because as as long as you're standing up there it's just never gonna happen for you what you got to do first go back into the back row and pick the one person who least wants you to come and say hello hello but you've got the point go back there and was taking note see who's read the case because they've underlined don't look so scared I'm not gonna but but actually if you can't touch them he said because that's the only way you really have a one-on-one relationship and that's how you care them just a little tiny bit how much do you think I want to take this feedback that wasn't hard why don't I want to do this cuz I don't know how to do it I don't know what's gonna happen and it's not who I am right it is not who I am Who I am is the person who stays up all night over preparing my much preferred strategy even though was getting me absolutely nowhere a lot of the time we know what we have to do we've seen it be successful with other people but we don't do it because it's not who we are yep now as happened at one point I was desperate enough to try it you know you get to a point where you say all right forget the authenticity bit I got to survive here and so I did I started to do it ultimately one thing that changed is it completely changed my view of what my job was hey I thought my job was to impart knowledge to make sure that they got the cutting-edge content on organizational behavior that they needed to no BS my job was to create an environment in which people wanted to learn and participate because otherwise nobody was going to remember any of that how many of the models that you got at school do you remember you remember professors and you remember experiences the second thing that changed was my idea of who I was and who I wanted to become and that idea of a possible self who might I become is a big motivator is a big motivator and in the past I'd seen people who were successful but you know what I didn't want to be like any of them I thought they were being idiots I thought that they were dumbing things down I thought they were providing infotainment and I was a serious academic with real things to deliver right how often do we do that but ultimately I realized that I could be more effective that I liked the impact that I was having and I was learning things that were new and interesting so two big things that changed now the takeaway from all is I'd completely forgotten this story until I started studying the managers I followed as they were stepping up to bigger leadership roles and I saw all of them the ones who were successful engage in a learning process that was similar to what I had gone through and just the opposite of how we teach them in just the opposite of how we develop programs in HR we use the traditional model which is figure out what the answer is what do we want what's the competency model what kind of leadership we want people to exercise get that all very very clear maybe you use introspection lately again over the last 10 years we've really favored introspective methods for people to get in touch with their own leadership but figure it out and then it's just a matter of implementing think then act but for sure don't do anything until you've got the answer and have it figured out now if you look at the way people actually learn that we know this in HR it's the old 70-20-10 rule about how people learn from doing new and different things in new experiences it's actually do learn some things about the role in about yourself in that role and let that personal experience it tells you in your gut if you want to do it if you want to be it hockey can be affect let that actually change your mindset because it is our mindsets in the end that are a problem when we don't delegate it's not that we don't think it's the right theoretical answer it's that our real mindset is about controlling the outcome so the only way we actually start to change those mindsets that keep us from innovating as we need - in our function and from strategizing him from really being at the table with senior leadership the only thing that's keeping us is personal experience to guide the way and so what I'm going to be talking about with our time together is how do we shift the way that we learn how do we encourage ourselves to be more active learners how do we encourage the leaders the talent that we look after to do more of the acting their way into a new way of thinking and I call that increasing outsite I'm going to talk about three ways you can increase your outside I'm going to start with how you can redefine your job which means thinking about already how you do your job and where you spend your time and so with some colleagues we started polling the executives that come to our courses to get them to just kind of have a look at where their time is going uniformly across the board people said I'm not developing I'm not allocating enough time to strategizing so as we dug deeper we fell onto the idea of competency traps and how much our discretionary time gets eaten up by what we do well already and when we do it well we love it and when we love it we do more of it and we do more of it we get better and you know you become the go-to person for this tiny area of expertise that nobody ever lets you leave behind and what happens over time is the opportunity cost of learning something new and different of devoting time to something where you're going to be a novice where you're going to be slow not efficient and not performing right away gets higher and higher because you're so damn good at that thing you've always been good at and so as we try to figure out what do we do here we started looking at how people go about doing their jobs in kind of broad categories and we notice that some people define their jobs as hubs what we called hubs when you're a hub you're the center of the action all roads lead to you you're intimately involved in all the key functions of the unit the team the project the department and you're at the center of it the alternative ways to be what I call a bridge and when you're a bridge you're in the import-export business you've got one foot in the group in the unit and the other ones outside in a techo system whatever that is the rest of the organization customers competitors I don't know what they are but your job is to make sure that your unit your team your project gets what it needs from the outside money talent political support alliances good reputation and your job what you and only you can do is to manage that flow when you start doing more bridging activities is really hard to stay in the competency trap because all of a sudden you see that what you bring is limited that it has to be supplemented by other things and that when you bring the pieces together what you get is innovation what you get is new and useful things and what you get as a leader yourself in your own development is that mysterious vision thing which has nothing to do with charisma or kind of you know holy visitation it has to do with being able to see out and beyond because you're doing that because you're on the border with that environment that's changing so much because you can see how people are thinking what they want and what they need and how to bring it together and then feed that into any decision any discussion any situation and when you've got to inspire and that's when you're doing strategy on a daily basis no matter where you sit in the organization so first part redefine your job in order to learn in order to contribute more so the flip side is your network the relationships that allow you to get things done get ahead in your career and develop professionally how important is it to have a good network for your leadership effectiveness second question it's really important but how good is yours but I can tell you I've been doing these two questions for the last 25 years and there's always a gap so the research here is also very very clear we need our networks to get things done in today's world which is much more lateral much more porous much more influence without authority that's how we get things done and that's how we innovate because it's not in your silo that you're gonna find the answers to the problems of the future right so all of these things we get through networks yet over and over again people under invest in their networks and underestimate their importance to fairly immediate outcomes right so I went back to very pretty basic research in social psychology about how we operate as humans and discover that there's a lot about human nature that makes it difficult for us to build the networks that we need to be effective as leaders in this world my shorthand for this which my colleagues in this field do not like is that we as human beings are narcissistic and lazy and it is proven on the in the research it's absolutely proven we like people who are like us and some important dimension because it's awkward to deal with difference in uncertainty and so we get to know and get to like people who are easy to get to know and get to like because our office is next door because they live in the same neighborhood because the kids go to the same school and you don't have to go out of your way now that does not make for a strategic Network that's gonna help you step up to lead in a very volatile world I can promise you that you have to be more intentional but we don't like to be intentional either because then we're this sleazy guy who's all about manipulation so that's not so good either so my headline in all of this is we need networks that are broad that are connective and that are dynamic and the only way we get those is by actively building them and actively seeking them out and putting building our networks and building relationships across lines at the very tippy top of our priority list the second dimension is connectivity which has to do with your network structure our your confidence your kitchen cabinet the people you turn to regularly a cozy group that mostly knows each other and has trust or is it a more widespread network in which those people don't necessarily know each other are in fact doorways degrees of separation into new and different worlds that you don't access directly right in network analytic terms this was my area of study as a PhD student in the 80s this is called a redundant network which says very specifically very clearly they're great metaphor for what happens to us when we get encapsulated that way in an echo chamber if everybody knows everybody else we don't need you you can be pulled out of there nothing happens the same information the same benefits and so we need to think about how to get our networks more this way this is the problem why we're constantly surprised about world events because we exist in echo chambers in which we're talking exchanging with people who think the same way the last related one is dynamism is your network changing with you or is it a historical artifact and this is critical not just for your innovativeness for your organization it's critical to your capacity to reinvent yourself because even when your network loves and adores you and wants the best for you when you try to be something else to do something different they react with skepticism and they say this could be your boss your team your spouse they say if I just ignore him or her they're gonna get over they're gonna forget all about it and well things will be back to normal very quickly which they will so very important to every once in a while think about do I have the network that I need to build into the future and by the way it's not a selfish exercise because this is how you contribute to your organization this is how you're able to see there's talent here and an opportunity there a need here in a capacity there you can bring them together hugely important for us the last thing I want to touch on is how do we become a little bit more playful with ourselves so we can really build networks as we have not before and redefine our jobs and work differently in order to think differently and this is a tricky one because if you think about what we have been saying for the last 10 years about leadership is we've really talked a lot about the value of authenticity which is hugely important but if you look at people in transition to very different roles just like my example of becoming a professor at a business school a lot of these things make a feeling authentic because we don't have the skillset we don't have the habits they take us outside our content zone so how do we deal with this dilemma the only way to work it out is to experiment to try to do things that are outside that authenticity zone and in fact paradoxically often times when we feel most pushed into a corner because our style isn't working we become more rigid and convince ourselves that's for the sake of authenticity so the last thing I want to mention and I will leave you to think about it is how do you define authenticity and does it have to condemn us to being as we always have been hopefully not we can be authentic in a future version of ourselves and does it condemn us to imposing on everybody else the values that we learn from our professional socialization even if they're not engineers or even if they're not academics no we have to expand our repertory and that means learning more adaptability some chameleon skills in understanding that that is not losing your soul or losing your values but adapting learning and all of the time iterating to bring it back being more playful with your sense of self so that you can deviate from who you've always been for the sake of learning so I will stop here three things I've asked you to consider redefine your job expand your network don't just be yourself in the historical sense because as adults were much more likely to act our way into a new way of thinking than the other way around thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: The HR Congress

Views: 24,538

Keywords: hr, human resources, leadership, learning and development, hrcongess, hrcongress18, hrcongress17

Id: 4pk9TkHRZmI

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018