Don’t do Leadership Capability Training until you have unlocked Leadership Identity
At In Your Corner, we are constantly looking from the lens of having the biggest impact and lately we have been reflecting on the vast investment poured into leadership capability training. And frankly, we’re seeing a lot of money invested without significant impact and this is something we want to confront given our stand for unleashing potential.
This has been lurking in our thoughts for a while and we are not throwing stones because, like a lot of business leaders, we have put some serious investment into leadership programmes over our times in executive roles. These programmes felt good at the time, an enjoyable experience, but had minimal lasting impact.
Despite the massive investment, in some ways, we’ve even gone backwards. Strategic clarity, engagement, and performance have been stagnant at best, at a time where they are crucial to future success. So why do we keep returning to the same playbook?
At IYC, we think the mistake being made is that leadership programmes are being created in pursuit of generating leadership capabilities, put more simply teaching people more knowledge. But in our view, shifting the knowledge of leadership isn’t enough, we believe you need to take on leadership as a way of being. To tackle the being of leadership, you need to unlock leadership identity.
In our experience, while it might present this way, most people are not constrained by a leadership capability gap, instead they more likely have a leadership identity gap. Or at the very least, they’re being limited by their current identity. And unless you’re willing to dig into that, no knowledge training programme alone is going to shift the dial in any meaningful way.
Our default leadership identity, grounded in our constraints of who we are, shaped by the stories we have told ourselves or been told about us, and confirmed by years of success, are our invisible prisons. The walls of our mind that keep us operating within the areas we know how, or have worked in the past, are designed to protect us from possible failure. But these walls keep us trapped in an ongoing and repetitious cycle of operating solely from the way we know how and no amount of more leadership knowledge alone is going to bust you out of that cell.
To give you an identity example, if someone has an identity of being a people pleaser and they just learn more knowledge, they are going to deploy the new knowledge from an identity of being a people pleaser. It will make some form of difference but it is being constrained by the being of people pleasing. For example, no amount of constructive conversation training is going to deeply confront a people pleasing identity. Developing identity means learning to operate beyond being a people pleaser as a default.
So instead of chasing leadership capability, we think you need to develop people to create a shift in performance because that’s where results come from. Targeting capability alone won’t get you there.
To create a new level of performance you need two things:
You need a performance gap, driven from an ambitious future, that pushes you past everything you have ever done before
You need to be willing to confront the way you have always responded to any challenge or circumstance – i.e. your default identity
Put simply, take on something bigger than what your current identity can handle. Then, be willing to reinvent how you see yourself - how you act, how you respond, how you lead. This is when true transformation shows up and that is when it gets exciting.
Instead of investing in leadership capability training, here’s what we would do:
Declare a stand for the future – the aspiration that generates a fundamental shift in performance
Declare the specific commitments and promises in service of the future – even before you know how to do it
Confront the default response – support individuals and teams to understand their default identity response to the shift in performance needed
Intervene in the default leadership identity – create a new identity that is a match for the shift in performance and declare your leadership from this
Convert to practices – Declare, create and put into existence the practices that are a match for closing the performance gap and then have ruthless integrity to your commitments.
If we are going to keep investing in leadership programmes, and we should, let’s make it more about unlocking leadership identity. If we invested the amount of money we have put into training leadership capability on developing and shifting identity, then we are going to see some fireworks. And we want to be a part of that show!