The following contains excerpts from the book, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader (Herminia Ibarra).
In this continuation of the book, information is given to help the musician and artist develop an ever-widening sphere of influence. And influence is the core meaning of leadership.
In our music school in Odessa Texas, we hope to help students see the importance of developing influential Leadership.
Network Across and Out
“Your comparative advantage- how you differentiate yourself from others who are as smart, hardworking, or expert as you are- depends on your capacity to connect people, ideas, and resource that wouldn’t normally bump into one another.”
“Connectors can see a need in one place and a solution in another, a vacancy in one area and a talented person in another, a discovery from a different discipline and a problem in their own, and so on, because they’re just one or two ‘chain lengths’ away from the issues.”
“Thinking like a leader starts by acting on your network. Start on the periphery of your current network, and build outward by getting involved in new activities, asking the people you already know to connect you with others, doing some maintenance, and finding kindred spirits who are also working to step up.”
The old adage, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know that makes the difference” does have some truth. We encourage students in our music school in Odessa Texas to continue to make contacts with people who they can partner with, as they develop their influence as artists.
“Communities of practice exist (or can easily be created on the internet) in almost every area of business you might be interested in.”
“To make these connections strategic, savvy managers use what they are gleaning outside the boundaries of their jobs and companies as a hook for making valuable internal connections to previously untapped people and groups, setting the stage for addressing strategic concerns.”
“Within any given professional domain, our connections are rarely more than two, at most three, degrees away.”
“Don’t wait until you need really need something badly to reach out. Instead, take every opportunity to nurture your network, whether you need it now or not…You can so easily get consumed in your day-to-day work that you forget that having lunch with certain people at least three times a year is really important. If you don’t you lose connectivity, and if you lose connectivity, you lose relationship.”
Taking time to develop relationships with other musicians not only broadens one’s own artistic views, but can also be highly enjoyable. We encourage students in our music school in Odessa Texas to set aside time to find new friends in the artistic community.
“Sustaining regular social contact with people who are in the same boat or have already arrived on the other side is essential for enduring change, because they can endorse and model your own transition to leadership…you usually need to build these relationships outside the scope of your job and company.”
- As you embark on the transition to leadership, networking outside your organization, team, and close connections becomes a vital lifeline to who and what you might become.
- The only way to realize that networking is one of the most important requirements of a leadership role is to act.
- If you leave things to chance and natural chemistry, then your network will be narcissistic and lazy.
- You need operational, personal, and strategic networks to get things done, to develop personally and professionally, and to step up to leadership. Although most good managers have good operational networks, their personal networks are disconnected from their leadership work, and their strategic networks are nonexistent or underutilized.
- Network advantage is a function of your BCDs: the breadth of your contacts, the connectivity of your networks, and your network’s dynamism.
- Enhance or rebuild your strategic network from the periphery of your current network outward as a first step toward increasing your outsight on you self:
- Seek outside expertise.
- Elicit input and perspectives of peers from different functional or support groups.
Be More Playful with Your Self
“Because doing things that don’t come naturally can make you feel like an impostor, authenticity easily becomes an excuse for staying in your comfort zone. The trick is to work toward a future version of your authentic self by doing just the opposite: stretching way outside the boundaries of who you are today.”
“Playfulness changes your mind-set from a performance focus to a learning orientation. You’re no longer trying to protect and defend your old identity from the threat that change brings. You’re just exploring.”
We encourage students in our music school in Odessa Texas to have an attitude of playfulness in their craft, exploring new directions that can lead to unexpected breakthroughs in their development.
“When you are in performance mode, the game is about presenting yourself in the most favorable light: minimizing risks and maintaining positive illusions. A learning mode leads to a more playful approach, one that allows you to reconcile your natural yearning for authenticity in how you work and lead with an equally powerful motivation: growing and, most of all, learning about and extending possibilities for yourself.”
“Writer Salman Rushdie once wrote: ‘Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts.’”
“A tried and true way of finding the right personal story to convey one’s values or purpose is to reflect on defining moments in our lives, when our mettle was tested in some important way.”
As teachers in our music school in Odessa Texas, we encourage students to have their own ‘trophy chest’ of memories of successes that gives them confidence to know they can succeed in new challenges they may be facing.
“You have to believe your own story, to internalize it, but it is changing all the time, according to what you need it to do. As your purposes change, so should you change your stories, so that your narrative best accounts for your new aspirations and resonates with the audience you are trying to win over. You are not inventing fiction, but selectively appropriating things that have made you who you are. That’s why revision- or playing with- your story is a big part of stepping up.”
- Many of the typical challenges of stepping up to leadership make people feel like fakes: taking charge in a new role, selling their ideas, managing their higher-ups, working in an alien culture, and learning from negative feedback.
- Chameleons are comfortable shifting shapes and styles to fit each new situation; true-to-selfers, on the other hand, tend to feel inauthentic when asked to stretch outside their comfort zone.
- Authenticity traps really get you into trouble when you are stepping up to leadership, because what feels like the authentic you is the old self that you are trying to shed.
- One way to escape the authenticity trap is to think about experimenting with new behaviors as playing around with your sense of who you are instead of working on it. The new behaviors might feel unnatural in the beginning, but they help you figure out who you might want to be, without your actually committing to become it- playing gives you outsight on yourself.
- Identity- who you are- is not just about the past; it’s also the possibilities you envision for yourself in the future.
- Here are three ways you can play around with your sense of who you are:
- Steal like an artist: observe a broad range of role models to create your own collage of things you want to learn from these models, and keep refining your style until it is effective and authentic.
- Aim to learn: Set learning goals, not just performance goals.
- Don’t stick to your story: Try different versions, narrate different defining moments, and keep editing, much as you would your curriculum vitae.
Manage the Stepping Up Process
The Big Questions:
- What am I really getting from and giving to my work, colleagues, professional community- and myself?
- Do I know what I truly want for myself and others? How can I start finding out?
- What are my central values, and how are they reflected in my work?
- What are my greatest talents, and how am I using (or wasting) them?
- What have I done with my early ambitions, and what do I want of them now?
- Can I live my work life in a way that leaves enough room for other important facets of my life?
- How satisfactory is my present state and trajectory, and what changes can I make to provide a better basis for the future?
We encourage students in our music school in Odessa Texas to be honest about these kinds of questions. Ultimately, being honest with one’s self is the final test of authenticity.
- Stepping up to play a bigger leadership role is not an event; it’s a process that takes time before it pays off. It is a transition built from small changes.
- Most methods for changing ask you to begin with the end in mind- the desired outcome. But in reality, knowing what kind of leader you want to become comes last, not first, in the stepping-up process.
- The transition process is rarely linear; difficulties and complications will inevitably arise and often follow a predictable sequence of five stages:
- Disconfirmation
- Simple addition
- Complication
- Course correction
- Internalization
- Getting unstuck when problems inevitably arise requires that you reflect and integrate the new learning- to bring the outsight back in- so that the ensuing changes are driven by a new self-image that is based on your direct experience.
- Making major, external moves like changing jobs and careers, however, does not necessarily take you to a better place. More important is to grow by questioning where you are today, actively entertaining alternatives, and eventually committing to making changes. The changes can be external, like job moves, or more internal, like changing the way you think about what you do and why.
- Breaking from your “ought self” – what important people in your life think you ought to be – is at the heart of the transition process.
The author of this book begins strongly on the principle of ‘outsight’ and ends on ‘reflecting’ in order to make decisions. The idea is not that ‘insight’ and ‘outsight’ are in competition with each other, but rather to have better insight, we need more ‘outsight.’ Both principles need each other. Even to embark upon a journey to gain more ‘outsight,’ one has to choose which direction to go based upon internal yearnings.