Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

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Herminia Ibarra—an expert on professional leadership and development and a renowned professor at INSEAD, a leading international business school—shows how managers and executives at all levels can step up to leadership by making small but crucial changes in their jobs, their networks, and themselves. This is more key the more senior you become, and the more widespread your responsibilities and purview. You know you have to carve out time from your day job to build your leadership skills, but it’s easy to let immediate problems and old mind-sets get in the way.

Think of the sales account representative with seven years of experience who won the competition and is now leading the team she was a part of last month.

If the Outsight principle is about action, Ibarra crystallizes the theory with an extremely useful model that any type of leader can utilize. In the past, I've always found this genre to be extremely boring and, while I was interested in the topic, it was just too dry which caused me to very slowly muddle through the book (I mean who really wants to read about leadership styles when you could be reading about dragons/magic/murders mysteries).

In that, the book could have been cut in half; a good scientific one on networking, and an iffy one on trying to fit in as a "chameleon". Yet, Ibarra contrasts these two ways of looking at leadership effectively through analogy of hub roles vs. Outsight - is gaining the new experiences that stretch us because too much introspection focuses on the past. See…had I really listened to my wife in the beginning I would have understood that what she really meant was that by first doing the action of dressing better (act successful) I would be changing the perception of myself (think successful).True enough those insights help me and my team achieve our objectives and thereby contribute in one way and another to the success of our program. Having her breadth of knowledge and experience in the domain of leadership and career transitions did a wonderful job of not only giving the examples and techniques, but also gave strong supporting evidence for each of them. Moving away from being siloed in the legal department is a clear trend that comes up again and again across a range of areas that we at GC Magazine speak to general counsel about.

One of the key traps managers can fall into which prevents them from truly embracing leadership is what Ibarra defines as the ‘competency trap’.Applicability of cancellation rights: Legal rights of cancellation under the Distance Selling Regulations available for UK or EU consumers do not apply to certain products and services. Be aware others around you are not learning the same things as you are so they may not support the new leader you are becoming and they may want to treat you like the old you.