Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader
What we do is who we become. One of the best books on the transition into leadership roles.
The conventional wisdom of career transitions says that you have to start with introspection and self-reflection on who you are and who you want to become. The problem is that our way of thinking is a product of our past experiences; and our past experiences & successes can sometimes hold us back from change.
To change, we need to think differently. And to think differently, we first need to act, we need new experiences. Herminia Ibarra's book "Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader" reverses the conventional wisdom and insists that action should come before introspection. We don't discover your true self by introspection, it emerges from what we do. What we do is who we become.
The outsight principle is the core idea of the book: the only way to think differently is to first act:
plunge yourself into new projects and activities, interact with very different kinds of people, and experiment with unfamiliar ways of getting things done.
There are three critical sources of the outsight:
Redefining your job. Here, we deliberately shift how we spend our time. The idea is to escape the competency trap, to get out of the comfort zone of past successes and familiar daily routines and to experiment with the new activities, projects and ways of working.
Redefining your networks. We deliberately expand your networks to increase their "BCD": Breadth, Connectivity and Dynamism.
Redefining your self. Many of the career transition activities do not come naturally and initially can make us feel as fakes. Every time we speak about discomfort of not being true to ourselves, we should ask ourselves: is it really it? Or is it just a disguised fear of change, fear of failure? We can escape authenticity trap by becoming more playful with our selves: we can experiment with new behaviors to see what works, without actually committing.
A distinct advantage of this book is a lot of transition stories and actionable advice, for each of the three sources of the outsight. Although the book specifically focuses on transitions towards leadership, its recommendations and approach are broad and useful for other types of career changes too.
Career transition is a process, often messy and emotional: we are no longer happy in the current role, but we may not yet know either our next destination or the road to it. Career transitions rarely resemble shooting for a concrete outcome. The destination often emerges as we go. In the final part, the book outlines five stages of the transition process and offers advice on how to overcome the difficulties that will inevitably appear at each stage.
I recommend this book to anyone considering or going through a career transition, especially the transition into leadership roles.