Ruthlessly Caring

CHAPTER 8DEVELOPING AND EXPANDING YOUR LEADERSHIP IDENTITY

What makes us unique is our ability to be plural. To be many things. Identity cannot be identified once and for all, because it's about a long creative process, which is a life-times work. Who am I? What am I? I'm a collection of several parts of myself. Some I’ve been given, others I’ve chosen, and all I've experienced so far and also what I'm in process of becoming. My personal identity is still a work in progress.

—Oum El Ghaït Benessahraoui, singer-songwriter

Why Identity Is Important in Relation to Paradoxical Mindsets

Throughout Chapters 3–7, we have explored how to embrace a whole suite of seemingly contradictory leadership mindsets and behaviours. However, how you think and what you do is tightly woven into your identity. Certain preferences will have seeped into ‘who you are’ and your perception of how you add value in your role. Embracing this set of paradoxical mindsets will therefore inevitably require some recalibration of deeply ingrained beliefs and habits. It will require identity-level work.

Whereas previous chapters zoomed in on how to embrace each mindset, this chapter zooms back out: exploring how to expand your identity to embrace a whole suite of paradoxical mindsets into your leadership approach. Specifically, here we investigate what identity is (and is not), why integration of multiple identities is so important, the power of narratives, and finally how to go about the ongoing task of unravelling ...