3 Reasons a Flawed Leadership Identity Sabotages Your Success
If You're Leading in the Barnyard, Having an Eagle Identity Isn't Helping You
Living life without knowing who you are is sad. Leading others without knowing who you are is a tragedy.
In This Article:
You can’t lead people when they don’t trust you. And people won’t trust you if you aren’t authentically you. And you can’t be authentically you if you don’t know who “you” is.
When you don’t lead from your identity, you lead from a fake identity.
Leading from a fake identity eventually results in self-protection.
Make no mistake: The world’s view of leadership is shaping you (unless you make sure it’s not).
Key Application:
Simple and profound (though perhaps not easy): Be the best version of yourself.
A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chickens and grew up with them.
All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.
Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.
The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked.
"That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we're chickens."
So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.
Anthony de Mello, The Song of the Bird
I love The Song of the Bird. The moral is striking and powerful. Having been made for soaring at great heights and a commanding presence, the eagle instead settles for a pawing the earth and eating worms—all because of a faulty identity. It’s a life of wasted purpose.
You could also spin the story a bit to reveal another moral: What if the chicken were to see itself as an eagle? Believing itself to be the king of birds, it would work hard to appear strong and intimidating. That would get some results in the short term, and it might even convince other chickens to think of themselves as eagles, too.
Ultimately, though, the whole chicken-as-an-eagle mistaken identity damages the barnyard culture—especially since eagles see chickens as a tasty meal—and threatened chickens don’t lay many eggs. It’s a community of wasted purpose.
It’s a tragedy. And (as silly as it sounds) it’s more common than you realize …
A Tale of Two Leaders
Leader #1 - The Dominator. This leader’s behavior centered around expressing his dominant personality traits. He was extremely intelligent—he was the smartest person in every room he walked into. His approach was to move faster and go further … at everything. He could comment on the pluses and minuses of what everyone on the team was doing. He was capable, confident and productive.
But there was a hidden driver behind his behavior: insecurity. He didn’t just have the last word in every conversation, he had to have the last word. He didn't handle it well when he was challenged or when people chose to question his direction. He gradually lost his team's loyalty, and many of them eventually transferred to a different department or left for other opportunities.
Leader #2 - The Captivator. This leader’s behavior centered on inspiration. Her specialty was motivating people. She had a knack for being able to rally the troops in a crisis, and people enjoyed being inspired by her ... for a while.
Crisis eventually became the operational norm. People got burned out. Under pressure, she resorted to guilting her team into putting their projects aside and working extra hours to get another "critical" all-hands-on-deck initiative across the finish line. Their initial feelings of being captivated by her leadership turned into feeling like captives. They realized they were working for her interests, not theirs.
Mistaken Identity
Both leaders, in their own way, were out of touch with the reality that they were actually chickens. Not realizing that being a chicken is a really good thing, they bought into the lie that told them to be the king of the birds—something they could never be. The more they tried, the more extreme their behavior became. And instead of effectively using their gifts and talents for lasting influence, they wasted their opportunity.
There are three major things in play here …
01 :: When You Don’t Lead From Your Identity, You Lead From a Fake Identity
If you’re not settled on who God made you to be (both your current AND your aspirational identity), then you’ll fall into what I call an Outside-In leadership approach. Meaning: When your identity is unclear or un-embraced, you cannot function according to your design. By default, you try to be someone you aren’t.
Fake.
And people intuitively won’t trust someone they perceive to be fake.
You define your identity situationally:
How can I motivate people so they will see me as a motivator?
How can I take charge so that people will think I’m confident?
So instead of motivating, you try to be a motivator. Instead of being confident, you try to appear confident. You become preoccupied about getting the external results, instead of just being yourself. It looks like you’re trying too hard.
I get that some leadership situations require us to adapt and stretch ourselves out of our comfort zone. That’s not what I’m calling into question here. I’m talking about appearances overriding execution.
This is a subtle but significant distinction: There’s a difference between being situationally responsive and being situationally driven. Letting appearances and your environment define you means you lose touch with who you are.
02 :: Leading From a Fake Identity Results In Self-Protection
When your primary concern becomes behaving a certain way so that you get a desired response from people, there’s one consistently predictable outcome: You do whatever it takes to maintain this perception.
You begin trying to subtly control people and your environment to get the desired outcomes. But since no one can control their circumstances or environment, this is doomed to fail. You end up being inconsistent. You become a different person in every different circumstance.
The resulting behavior is a sort of identity CYA: You self-protect. You blame, deflect, manipulate or misrepresent. You reinterpret “reality” to fit the version that best suits you. You can’t operate courageously and confidently, because you’re more concerned about yourself than what’s happening around you.
Ironically, instead of influencing your environment, you end up letting your environment influence you.
03 :: The World’s View of Leadership Is Shaping you (Unless You Make Sure It’s Not)
The world is great at offering leadership behaviors that self-promote. Most of these convince us that we should position ourselves to be “more” than everyone else: More powerful, confident, controlling, dominating, etc.
There’s nothing, necessarily, wrong with these qualities, when they are …
A product of knowing yourself (instead of the means of knowing yourself, and
They ultimately serve other’s interests and the greater good more than your own.
This is servant leadership. It counter-intuitively cuts against the grain of the world’s approach. But the real insight to be gained here is that excelling at servant leadership behaviors only comes through seeing yourself as a servant of others.
This is about identity. If you don’t see yourself as a servant, you’ll default to seeing yourself as the king of the birds.
Putting It Into Practice
01 :: Know Who You Are—And Who You Aren’t
Your identity defines the parameters you will use to most effectively influence others. Your identity involves (in part) your values, beliefs, conscience and key convictions. It is based on the premise that God created you uniquely, just to be you. It’s foolish and inefficient to try to be someone else.
That’s why faith-informed leadership can be so effective: humbly pursuing truth positions you to lead more effectively. In other words, follow to lead.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” — Oscar Wilde
Consider:
Are you willing to make sacrifices because of who you are, your values and what you believe?
Are you jealous if someone else gets the notoriety or achieves more than you?
Are you uneasy around someone else who has insight, talent or perspective that you don’t?
If these questions threaten you, then you may not be comfortable with who you are.
02 :: Make It Your Purpose to Make Everyone Else Better
Being comfortable with who you are means you’re not as concerned about your interests and reputation—you take self-protection off the table. You’re now in position to be a catalyst. This opens all sorts of opportunities to influence change and lead effectively.
Call people to a vision and a purpose, then help them discover their role in it.
Help them see who they are and what they bring to the table, so they can operate from their identity (and not yours).
Help them get better at influencing others.
Give away authority, then coach and steer as they learn from mistakes and experience success.
Delegate, instead of dominate.
Collaborate, instead of control.
Don’t just instruct, direct and restrain, when you can inspire, equip and release instead.
Multiply leaders, instead of adding Mini-Me’s underneath you.
When you start with the truth that you are the best person to be you, then becoming a better you is a natural and easy next step. This is leading yourself.
Once you start leading yourself, you are able to focus your energies on making everyone else around you better. This is true leadership.
Peace be with you …
What’s Your Experience Been?
Does this resonate with you or conflict with what you’ve seen? Leave a comment and let’s discuss …