Professor Herminia Ibarra: Meyler Campbell Annual Lecture 2015

Eight years ago Professor Herminia Ibarra introduced is to the latest thinking in positive psychology. In the 2015 lecture she brought to life the ideas in her latest book Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader through a combination of entertaining presentation skills offering a genuinely practical set of tools and models based on extensive research.

This was a much awaited lecture and so the Guy-Whittle Auditorium at the Royal Society of Medicine was sold out.

Professor Ibarra’s opening sally embodied her message! While strolling among the audience, cracking jokes and involving the ‘naughty’ back row, she described how she’s originally been a very dry public speaker, concentrating on research outcomes, figures and hard facts. ‘But, through helpful advice I realised I had to change my style, and the only way to do that was to step outside my comfort zone. Teaching should emphasise presentation, not just content. And, most importantly, I found you only discover things by doing them.’

Professor Ibarra’s first argued for the primacy of action in her earlier book Working Identity .She’s now applied her innovative approach to leadership in Act Like A Leader, Think Like a Leader stressing again leaders – particularly those stepping up to leadership – need to act in order to change themselves.

‘I love that quotation “what got you here, won’t get you there.” How do we move from a leadership style based on specialist expertise to one based on strategic and business acumen? Put this in the context of how corporates change nowadays – a process of constant delayering, extending roles and increasing activity – it becomes very difficult to see the moment a company or a job changes.’

‘We’ve overstressed internal in helping people adapt to Instead of concentrating on Insight – internal knowledge, past experience and how we think, we should look more intensely at new experiences, behaviour, and knowledge outside the leadership bubble: what I call outsight.’

Professor Ibarra proposes three strategies to achieve this ‘At the moment leaders report they spend most of their time doing things and very little of it strategizing. They need to reverse this order and also step outside the trap of simply repeating what they do well, the skills that might be irrelevant in a new situation. So, the first task is to redefine your role. The two other focuses are networking more widely and being more playful – in other words don’t just be what you have been but experiment with new yous. It’s particularly important that your network has breadth, connectivity and dynamism – that it isn’t just a self-reinforcing group of the same sort of person. And there’s a danger of don’ts, can’ts and won’ts getting in the way of playfulness.’

Her approach ‘has implications for coaches and coaching not least in questioning concepts such as authenticity, the authentic leader and situational leadership.  If you play with your identity how do you define constructs like authenticity, integrity and being true to yourself. And it also suggests different ways of framing the goals coachees work on, stressing acts as well as thinking, introspection and analysis.’