Outgrown your role or exhausted your identity?
“It’s time for a change.”
“I have outgrown the role.”
“There is nothing left to achieve.”
These are some of the most common reasons we hear from leaders when they are considering changing roles and, on the surface, they make sense. In fact, we have used these same phrases over our own careers.
There is plenty of research that could back these statements up, such as the Corporate Executive Board and Harvard Business Review, which state that executive leaders cite reasons such as lack of growth opportunities, misalignment with company values, burnout, or conflict with the board or CEO. These are all valid and real.
But in our experience coaching senior leaders, there’s often something deeper going on, something that rarely gets named or spoken. That is because it’s not something leaders want to acknowledge.
We think the unspoken reason why leaders change roles is:
"I have exhausted my default identity."
What we see is that leaders are not leaving roles because the company changed, or they ran out of challenges to deal with. They’re leaving because they’ve exhausted their default identity and they don’t know how to break through to new levels of possibility.
As we wrote about in our last post, 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.
Most people build a leadership identity early in life, an adaptive strategy that helped them gain approval, feel in control, avoid failure, or stay safe. It might be being the fixer, the achiever, the people pleaser, the steady hand, the self-reliant one. This identity becomes a kind of leadership operating system and in many cases running silently in the background.
And it works successfully…..until it doesn’t.
Over time, the demands of any role evolve, the complexity increases, and the leader is left pushing the same strategy harder, expecting different results. When the going gets tough, leaders deploy the tools that have worked for them in the past, which usually looks like effort and working longer and harder, but they experience diminishing returns. When their default modes stops delivering, they feel stuck, drained, or disillusioned. So, they begin looking (or more accurately blaming) outward: “This place isn’t right for me anymore” or “I am no longer valued here”
So, they run, they leave, and start again. A new role, new team, new context, but the same identity strategy. The same pattern, dressed up in different clothes.
The early outlook looks good at the new role, you have energy, enthusiasm given by the ability to go back to the well of comfort found within your default identity. But the predictable is that the thing you were running from at your last job, will follow you, it’s only a matter of time. The problem you have is that until you grow beyond your default identity, every new role will eventually become another version of the last one.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Leadership reinvention is possible. But it requires looking inward before you leap outward. The path to sustainable leadership impact lies not in finding a better match for your current identity, but in expanding who you are as a leader.
It’s not about abandoning your strengths; it’s about outgrowing your limitations.
If you know someone who might be thinking of leaving their role, ask them to consider the following:
What identity have I been leading from in this role?
Am I exhausted by the work, or by the version of myself I’ve been using to do it?
Have I confused situational discomfort with a signal to escape?
What parts of me have I avoided developing because they don’t fit my current leadership persona?
Is this really a role problem, or is it an identity evolution moment?
What would reinvention (not just replacement) look like?
Leaving might still be the right choice, but you owe it to yourself to be honest about why.
Because your next chapter doesn’t just need a new role…it may need a new relationship with yourself.