Leadership for the Emerging Future

Forging Your Post-Meltdown Identity

By Dave Laveman

This article, the first in a series on Integrative Leadership, explores how the current economic meltdown is impacting the 'identity' of leaders. The next article will investigate some of the integrative challenges leaders face when stepping up to new and larger responsibilities.

In the face of a system-wide failure of our financial institutions, a global economic recession and marquee companies trading at fractions of their book value, it’s time to take a new and serious look at business leadership in these unprecedented times. Conditions today require a multifaceted renewal of leadership—from C-level executives to the high-performing young leaders of the future.

The leaders we’ve observed in action seem to have been caught flat-footed by the rapidity of the current economic collapse. Much of their behavior appears to be the same old tired stuff, just more so. A few examples:

• A financial services company that tended to under-communicate from the top down in good times went into virtual hibernation when faced with an abrupt about face in their market.
• Another company, whose leadership constantly identified allies and enemies while masking their intentions by making some attempts to ‘play nice in the sandbox’ during good times, saw long-simmering antagonisms turn into open factionalism, with all parties intent on undermining one another, as market conditions deteriorated and resources became scarce.
• A CEO, ignoring the warnings of his senior finance people about an impending collapse to the industry sector in which they played, lost precious time turning over their less liquid assets while there still was an active secondary market for their sale. His attachment to an optimistic, ‘can do’ identity (for which he had a reputation to uphold) resulted in his ignoring the voices of industry veterans who were most in touch with the rapidly shifting terrain of their business. The delay in taking effective action, especially in light of the warnings, was as demoralizing as it was financially disastrous to the company.

These examples of senior leaders who either didn’t see the warning signs or saw the signs but did more of the same are by no means isolated cases. What was really going on here? And more importantly, what is going on with our business leaders as they face the unprecedented economic conditions we are looking at today?

Change and Identity

The massive, disruptive changes occurring today are affecting the personal ‘identities’ of those who are leading our businesses. Any rupture to this identity, if not acknowledged, can aggravate and prolong an already difficult condition. In business terms, one’s ‘identity’ helps shape one’s self-esteem at work and the value we feel we contribute to our company.  It is often an invisible lens through which we view our sense of worth and how we think others see us—what we believe is our status in their eyes and the esteem they have for our work and contribution. Normally, our ‘identity’ is undisturbed and in the background. We don’t think about it much. However, when our circumstances undergo a disruptive change, the sleeping giant of our identity stirs and can throw our inner world into chaos and question.

Anyone who has ever been laid off or fired, lost a promotion, screwed up an important assignment or been blamed for a bad situation (whether justified or not) knows what it’s like to take a hit to their identity. What is not often appreciated about our identity is that it can be severely disrupted by even positive changes in the outer world if that change impacts something that we hold to be central to how we see ourselves and/or how other important people see us. In other words, if we are identified with an institution or particular network of relationships, then our identity (at least in part) is formed by those connections.  An example from the business world will make this clear.

The global information services organization of a renowned banking institution with a great brand name was outsourced to what many senior IS managers viewed as a second-tier player. Despite elaborate presentations to the contrary, the outsourcing was seen by those effected as a vote of no confidence by senior corporate management to its IS team. Interviews with IS senior executives revealed that they were undergoing a perceptible, painful shift in their identities.

The sense of prestige and elevation that came from identifying with a renowned institution was lost, even though the only thing that changed was the name of the company they worked for. For the overwhelming majority of people in this situation, their career opportunities were enhanced and their location, co-workers, salary, benefits, and even the number of people reporting to them all remained the same. Yet people suffered from all the signs and symptoms of disruptions to their ‘identity’. We observed, for example, loss of prestige, fatigue, a sense of failure and self-reproach. People blamed themselves for being ‘given away’ by their former esteemed company and its managers. Other symptoms included difficulty concentrating, shattered assumptions, frenetic busyness, a searching for renewed purpose. In other words, people were grieving the loss of their former identity even when most of their outer circumstances didn’t change, largely because the outsourcing altered the self-esteem they had derived from being associated with and valued by a renowned institution.

Fast forward to the current massive, disruptive changes in our midst and we see that this sleeping ‘800 lb Gorilla’ of former identities has now been awakened. What makes this a much more difficult situation than the example described above is that so many of our best leaders face relatively major circumstantial changes that are clearly negative and, in some cases, far worse than that.

Consider the possibility that identity dislocation and the accompanying grief reactions are much more widespread in today’s turbulence in executive and senior management ranks than is generally understood or acknowledged. Unacknowledged, they have a serious impact not only on the ability of a leader to make quality decisions and effectively rally the troops, but also on the leader’s own sense of self-esteem and well-being.

The mores of the traditional business environment usually don’t help the situation. Often a taboo exists against acknowledging strong emotions, including those that give rise to indecisiveness, upset, manic ‘busywork’ and the like. Anyone undergoing a disruption to something as personal as their identity will have a range of strong emotions: anger, fear, grief, embarrassment and shame are likely companions in these crises.

Many change management programs claiming expertise in helping companies go through massive change aggravate the situation by overly emphasizing the outer, rational, tangible dimensions of change. Standard change management interventions like ‘envisioning a compelling future’, ‘creating cases for change’, ‘identifying and reinforcing new behaviors’, ‘communicating proactively with stakeholders’, and ‘engaging employees’ work only to a point—and often miss entirely the personal identity disruptions that people are going through. The ‘change management’ toolkit just addresses this ‘outer’ dimension.

Personal identity belongs to the realm that business is weakest in understanding and working with: the non-rational, emotion-laden, moonlit dimension of our humanness. The strengths of business institutions tend to lie in the cognitive, rational, sunlit dimensions. The moonlit dimensions are left to the shadows, corridors and hallways of corporate life. Whether these murkier areas are acknowledged or not, they will make themselves known one way or another. If accepted and worked with, they offer our leaders a great opportunity to reconstruct a stronger, more integrated and resilient personal identity. If ignored, they present a greater danger of being expressed as blame games, environments of distrust and ill-considered decisions.

Forging a New Identity

Prescribing a solution to this would oversimplify the very difficult outer and inner realities we face. It is not that simple. However, learning from the experiences of others, combined with the hard work of sustained effort and trial and error, can have value. The following ideas come from observations of leaders who are successfully forging their new identity.

Acknowledging the often unwelcome emotional side of change

Leaders whose companies are undergoing dramatic change find their former identity also undergoes a dramatic change. It is important to make room for the feelings associated with this passage. ‘Making room’ for unwelcome emotions is neither indulging in nor conjuring up feelings that are not there. Making room is about acknowledging that we are having these feelings—as unwelcome, ego-deflating or uncomfortable as they may be.  These difficult feelings may come up directly as guilt, shame or anger—or indirectly as fatigue, difficulty concentrating, agitation or sleeplessness. Be on the look out for them if there has been a change in your company’s status (even if you have little to do with it directly).

Accepting these unwelcome emotions

After acknowledging the feelings, learning to ‘be with’ these unwelcome house guests for the duration of their stay can be hard. Common tendencies are to make excuses for their presence, avoid their company with busy work, divert attention to convenient scapegoats (of which there is no shortage in this environment), and to try to understand them through compulsive ruminations.

In normal times, an executive’s best friend is their ‘can do’, action-oriented attitude. So the advice to ‘be with’ unwelcome emotions goes against the grain. That, however, is exactly what this systemic breakdown is teaching us: that going with the herd, with the automatic, with the obvious has a hidden price. And we may be required to pay up when we least can afford it.  Consider the possibility that the system-wide economic breakdown is telling us to slow down, take a look and tolerate discomfort. In fact, one can’t reconstruct a meaningful new identity that will withstand the certain stresses of the future without doing this.  

Inquiring into our former identity—and creating a foundation for the new to emerge

Leaders need to begin an inquiry into what constituted their former identity at work—not only to find answers, but also to engage their own curiosity. Inquiries depend on questions. Some illustrative questions that can reveal what was in the background of a formerly ‘normal’ identity include:

• How did I feel about being a part of the executive team during good times? How do I feel now?
• How has the mood in our company changed? How am I and my colleagues responding to the new mood?
• In the past, what future was I believing I and my team had? What about now?
• How did significant others (peers, family and media) see me? How do I think/feel they see me now? How do I see myself?

The findings to these questions can lead to a more rounded and complete understanding of how identity exerts a hidden influence on how we see ourselves. It leads naturally to a new set of questions that help stimulate the formation of a new identity geared to an emerging future. Some questions we’ve found to be most helpful are:

• What future is emerging now and how am I going to participate?
• What new perspectives are required in terms of my own self-awareness, my worldviews and the leadership competencies I now need to develop?
• Am I satisfied that I and my team are taking full advantage of the opportunities present in current events and not just reacting to what’s happening?

These 7 questions provide the foundation upon which a new identity can be forged.

Be cautioned: the process of reconstruction is neither short-term nor linear in nature. Ground covered comes undone, reactions thought mastered and overcome show up in unguarded moments, peers and friends at work once thought to be empathetic and available become distant and non-communicative. We’ve seen organizational moods spiral downward because leaders who were undergoing significant and under-recognized stress and identity disruption stepped out of their leadership roles and related to their direct reports as emotional confidantes. We’ve also seen the opposite: executives denying, repressing and minimizing the presence of these emotional guests and then failing to connect this dismissal with subsequent trouble concentrating and, worse yet, lapses in making good decisions.

If there was ever a time an executive coach could make a difference, this is it.

What distinguishes the best coaches is that they can help you go ‘inside out’ for insight and then work ‘outside in’ on solutions. The right coach knows how to treat the guests and ghosts of the interior landscape, as well as provide assistance in guiding you in creating solutions for your particular corporate (and, in some cases, broader life) situation. This can include everything from developing reinterpreted narratives of the situation, cultivating a plurality of perspectives and creating new possibilities to communicating effective strategies for renewal and staying centered and productive in the midst of chaos.

Taken as a whole, the executive undergoing an identity transition must first of all be self-aware enough to recognize it for what it is, still enough to tolerate unpleasant emotions, and active enough to deeply inquire into its nature and create a new set of perspectives with which they can identify themselves.