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Evolving our discarded identities

7/5/2018

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Written by Gretchen Vogelgesang Lester
Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash
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Last week at the gym, I brought up to someone that I used to be an aerobics instructor. I briefly recounted some stories about that experience and thought sadly of the phrase “used to be”. I truly no longer consider aerobics instructor as part of my leadership identity, partly because I haven’t taught a class in over 12 years, but even more so that it just doesn’t enter into my daily activities anymore. It’s simply not an identity I "wear" anymore.
 
When we teach about identities and sub-identities, we discuss how students should list their current sub-identities, and how they can become more or less salient over time. But I think it is also a good exercise to revisit past identities and think about how they shaped your current identities. Just like an old broken watch might offer a new life with its parts, our past identities can offer competencies that shape our new identities.
 
I did not know, when I was an aerobics instructor, that I would eventually preside over a different type of classroom – but looking back, some of the things I needed for that identity are still with me. I work hard to project my voice to all my students in the room. I also look for understanding in their eyes, making sure my students are “with” me as I broach new topics. I was lucky as an aerobics instructor - I did not have to compete with the lure of social media (smart phones did not yet exist, and texting on a flip phone was excruciatingly painful). But, I did contend with side conversations, varying levels of ability and fitness, and jockeying for space and materials. I also had to continue to learn new techniques (yes, even aerobics instructors have continuing education requirements). I also had to manage feedback from paying customers. So, although the days of choosing music, creating routines, and leading a class through a challenging physical workout are over, I still put in to practice many of the competencies I acquired in the pursuit of excellence in that sub-identity.
 
When I started to write up this blog entry, I thought the word “discard” was a little too harsh. As researchers, we do use this terminology – we adopt and discard identities as we change and adapt throughout our lives. But to say we discard identities makes it seems like we throw out everything about that identity. Unfortunately, the synonyms for discard are equally as negative: abandon, dispose of, ditch, dump, eliminate, jettison, reject, remove, scrap, shed, etc. So perhaps instead of saying we discard of our old identities, we should say instead that we have sub-identities that have evolved into something new and different.  
 
What previous identities had you at one time embraced but now have evolved into something new?
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Identity Work or identity play?

4/24/2018

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By Gretchen Vogelgesang Lester
​Photo by Jeff Finley on Unsplash
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Last week, I had the pleasure of seeing the Broadway tour of Finding Neverland. This show is an adaptation of the 2004 movie of the same name; the story of J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan. As the story goes, J. M. Barrie was inspired by the young children he saw playing in the park one day, and created a world where boys never grow up, fight with pirates, and live with fairies. At one point in the play, J. M. Barrie and the cast participate in a number called “Play” to shake the serious actors out of their cynical take on the child’s tale. It begins with this phrase:
 
“Can you remember back when you were young, when all the simple things you did were so much fun? You got lost somewhere along the way, you’ve forgotten how to play, every single day.”
 
In our leadership development exercises, we ask our participants to create their leadership timeline from their very first memories to 20-30 years into the future. The past timeline highlights moments that stand out as formative; the future timeline is intended to create purposeful opportunities for leadership development. Some participants focus on their experiences; others note movies, books, tv shows, etc. that shifted a view of their thinking about leadership.
 
But what about the moments that aren’t as memorable? What about those times just playing? Pretending to be a magician, a ship’s captain, a lion tamer…or just creating games with friends to fill up time in the day? Identities slipped on and discarded as quickly as the imagination could come up with the next idea. Just simple fun. I hope everyone has those types of fun memories.
 
But as we grow older, we seem to forget how to play. Yes, we have more responsibility as adults, experiences have taught us self-preservation and society shapes our thoughts on what is foolish and what is logical. But perhaps we have lost too much? Perhaps not everything needs to be so serious. Perhaps we can still find opportunities for playfulness. In my opinion, one of the best attributes of multi-domain leadership is the freedom try out different leadership styles in domains other than work. In the same way children are free to try on different identities while at play; participation in other domains allows adults to also try on different leadership identities. Are there simple things you did when you were young that you can re-incorporate into your life? Can you volunteer in ways that allow you to play? Are there things you can observe that make you happy but also connect to your leadership abilities and challenges?
 
For me, watching musical theater is a delight. And Finding Neverland reminded me that we shouldn’t forget to play (and to give thanks for the professionals who can entrance us with stage magic!). What have you experienced lately that allows you to learn from areas outside of your work? 
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Claiming and Granting Leadership

3/27/2018

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“Lead..Follow..or get out of the way” (George S. Patton)
Written by Gretchen Vogelgesang Lester
Photo by Ethan Weil on Unsplash
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Often when we discuss leadership, we think of it (as Dr. Palanski recently noted ) as one person telling others what to do. He discussed the idea of shared leadership, where the group decides together to take action. Beyond the idea of shared leadership is also the role that followers play in the leadership process. In a true leadership process, the followers are equally as important as the leaders.
 
A leader cannot lead without followers choosing to engage in the process. One way of looking at this is to think about different behaviors that we enact when interacting with others. Do we “claim” a leader role by speaking first, sitting at the head of the table, or volunteering to seek out a solution to a problem? Do we “claim” a follower role by offering to help when needed, or holding back in the moment because we have other responsibilities? Do we “grant” someone else the leader role by offering to help when needed? Do we “grant” someone a follower role by delegating a task for them? What about those who avoid taking a position at all?
 
Think back over your behaviors at work, at home, and in your community. What roles do you take in each of those domains? We’ve discussed quite a few ways to develop your leadership abilities over the past year, but let’s focus on followership for a second. Most of us must take follower roles in some areas of our lives; we are all too busy and only have a finite amount of resources to continually be in the leader position. So when we do claim a follower role, are we acting in good faith? Are we supporting our leaders to the best of our abilities?
 
Research on followership notes individuals may take different perspectives on the meaning of the follower role. In one view, a follower is anyone who formally or informally reports to an individual in a leadership role. The other approach, similar to what I discussed earlier, is the idea that the follower has an active and important role in the leadership process. This view moves beyond the idea of followers as sheep who blindly follow their shepherd to one where followers have an active duty to participate in the goals set out by the organization, family, team, etc. Proactive followership behaviors can include feedback-seeking, using influence tactics, taking initiative, and in some cases, breaking the rules when necessary.
 
Opportunities for proactive followership do depend on the types of leaders present. Some leaders feel threatened by proactive followers and would prefer a group of subordinates (word choice here is deliberate) that do not question the leaders’ actions. However, more effective leaders look to their followers to help accelerate the organization/team/community towards its goals. The latest research on followership shows numerous positive outcomes from proactive followers.
 
If you find that you are looking to be more proactive – at work, at home, in your community -  the first step is to think about the behaviors you exhibit. Are you actively granting leadership opportunities to someone else, which is part of an engaged process, or are you just ceding leadership responsibilities? If you want to be more proactive, try discussing the vision or goals with your boss, your partner, or your community leader. Decide if you agree with that vision, and if not, ask questions and maybe pose some thoughts or creative solutions of your own. It does take time and energy, but the feeling of empowerment and active participation in the leadership process will positively impact other areas of your life.
 
What claiming and granting behaviors have you enacted recently?
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What is your narrative?

2/27/2018

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Written by Gretchen Vogelgesang Lester
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Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash
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     Social scientists are increasingly using narrative research to more accurately capture the stories of the individuals we study. For leadership researchers who strive to eventually predict outcomes such as leadership emergence, leadership effectiveness, follower satisfaction, trust, and performance, narrative research allows additional insight into the stories of potential leaders. In our earlier blog about seeing leadership moments, we discussed how small moments of leading can impact our leader identity. Narratives are a way for leaders to reflect upon past and present events, and could lead to additional leadership discoveries.
 
     In Torrill Moen’s (2006) article on the narrative approach, she recalls how another social scientist, Edward M. Bruner, highlights how narratives can relate to one’s life.
 
“A life lived is what actually has happened. A life experienced consists of the images, feelings, sentiments, desires, thoughts, and meanings known to the person whose life it is. A life told is a narrative or several narratives influenced by the culture conventions of telling, by the audience, and by the social context.” (Moen, 2006; p. 63).
 
     The leadership life told includes the social aspects of leadership – others’ reactions to you as a leader can help solidify or undermine your leader identity. But only the leader knows of the experiences that drive their behaviors. Writing a narrative helps the leader to reconcile personal thoughts and beliefs with the reactions of others.
 
     As leadership professors, we can require our students to write their own leadership narratives and to build reflection into our coursework. The challenge for working leaders is to find time to continue this process. The active nature of reflection upon a narrative allows leaders to be more mindful about the effects of their leadership behaviors. Additionally, it may uncover additional opportunities for development or patterns of behavior that should be reviewed. Consistently taking the time to reflect ensures a closer match between the life lived, the life experienced, and the life told.
 
     So, how do you start writing your narrative? And how do you ensure it is capturing what it should capture? A good narrative relies on the following foundation:
 
  1. A narrative is the method by which human beings organize their experiences. Those focused on their leader identity should gather together major life events and reflect upon those.
  2. A narrative will include past and present experiences, the audience or followers, the values, and notes about context including the time and place. We have written about the past, present, and future before, narratives are another method to get at these important milestones.
  3. Narratives do not just include your voice; you should also capture others’ reactions and inputs into your experiences. Dialogs with others shape your narrative as you become more aware of the reception of your behaviors.
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     This spring, I have asked my students to collect narratives of leaders they observe. I encourage our readers to also start writing down your leader narratives, thinking through your experiences, including the context, and taking the extra step of capturing as many voices as possible to enhance your leadership development. I think you will all find that the time you take for reflection will result in more mindful leadership emergence.
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Multi-Domain Leadership at Work

1/30/2018

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Written by Gretchen Vogelgesang Lester
Photo by Anthony Martino on Unsplash
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I’d like to return to an earlier topic we covered, multi-domain leadership (MDL). In earlier blogs, we describe what MDL is, the benefits of it, and the value of enrichment by applying what you learn and experience in your work, social, or community domain to another. But organizations can also encourage MDL by thinking through the different “silos” that come to exist and motivating workers to look beyond their current departments.

I recently had the pleasure of facilitating a leader identity training for an organization in the midst of a restructuring. Employees who were used to dealing with procedures and stakeholders in one manner were now being asked to change their outlook and adapt to different processes, customers, and co-workers. They were being forced to integrate their identities into a new, larger domain. It reminded me that we all, at some point, need to integrate our skill sets away from one specific functional area into a larger organizational view. When we do that, we need to look up from the work in front of us and interact with co-workers from other departments. Anyone interested in upward mobility in an organization must keep an eye on how they can attain different skills sets to continue to be successful as they get promoted. Managing people or projects requires individuals to move beyond their functional or technical skills to include people skills, budgeting expertise, or general oversight of how departments interact in a larger organization.

So, how does one gain these other experiences? The advice is similar to how we recommend enhancing leadership skills –by looking for opportunities that allow cross-pollination of ideas and by choosing to open up the landscape to which you are exposed. Does your organization have training programs for different skills sets? Is there a mentor in a different department that you can tap to allow you to learn and experience different approaches? Are there outside resources that you can leverage to gain necessary skills? One does not become a partner in a law firm, an accounting firm, a manager in a financial institution, a founder of a start-up, or a leader in an educational institution without obtaining different skills sets such as sales, fund-raising, people management, or creating a business plan. Even within the work domain, MDL can enhance your success by encouraging you to integrate new and appropriate behaviors to enable career progress. Good luck!
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LIGHT BULBS AND LEADERSHIP

12/14/2017

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Written by: Gretchen Vogelgesang Lester
Photo by Riccardo Annandale
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​Seeing the light bulb flicker on – the point of our theories is
to explain how people behave!
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​A few weeks ago, I was teaching content on the Behavioral Approach (Blake and Mouton, 1964) to leadership – particularly on leaders who show both paternalistic and maternalistic behaviors towards their followers. A student who typically stays quiet during class burst out – “wait, that’s my manager at work – exactly!” We went on to discuss the types of situations she has experienced at work, many of which lined up with this particular theory.
 
A few days later, we were covering leader-member exchange (LMX) theories (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995) and describing the outcomes for in-group members vs. out-group members. Again, an outburst from the class – “wait, I think I’m in the out-group at my work!” We went on to discuss that student’s experiences and they did, indeed, line up with outcomes of LMX. Other students got excited about these real-life experiences and started to bring up how their own situations were explained by the different leadership theories.
 
As an instructor, this is my favorite time of year – not the grading, not the worries about final grades - but seeing students realize someone out there (probably teams of someones) have observed similar situations and spent time studying them. Those studies, of course, help explain the phenomenon of leadership. I feel like my purpose is to help students understand how to read those scientific results with a critical eye, to understand how they might incorporate the field’s findings into their own working relationships, and to seek out organizations where they feel leadership is valued. Leadership as a field is unique – almost every one of my students comes with preconceived notions about which leadership behaviors work and which ones don’t – this doesn’t happen in nursing, or biological sciences, or physics. Teaching leadership challenges instructors to make the theories relevant to our students by connecting in different ways – and we know we’re succeeding one light bulb at a time. 
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Stay Puft & Implicit Theories of Leadership

11/28/2017

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Written by: Gretchen Vogelgesang Lester
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Gozer: The Choice is made!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Whoa! Ho! Ho! Whoa-oa!
Gozer: The Traveller has come!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Nobody choosed anything!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Did you choose anything?
Dr. Egon Spengler: No.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Did YOU?
Winston Zeddemore: My mind is totally blank.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I didn't choose anything...
Dr. Raymond Stantz: I couldn't help it. It just popped in there.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What? WHAT "just popped in there?"
Dr. Raymond Stantz: I... I... I tried to think...
Dr. Egon Spengler: LOOK!
Dr. Raymond Stantz: No! It CAN'T be!
Dr. Peter Venkman: What is it?
Dr. Raymond Stantz: It CAN'T be!
Dr. Peter Venkman: What did you DO, Ray?
Winston Zeddemore: Oh, s***!
Dr. Raymond Stantz: It's the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

 
Just like in the Ghostbusters dialogue above, our visions of leaders just “pop” in there, creating leaders based upon leader prototypes each of us has generated inside our own minds.
 
When I begin teaching a segment on leadership, I often ask my students to share personal leadership influences. There is substantial research noting that context is a major determinant of one’s leadership impressions. There are also some trends that come and go based on the general business climate and press coverage, but often, students share stories of fathers, mothers, siblings, and other family members along with coaches and religious leaders.
                                       
These implicit leadership theories (or ILTs) predispose us to accept certain types of leaders and reject others, and will color our ratings of leader performance. So why does this matter? Don’t we all expect our leaders to do great things?
 
Well, just as Ray thought the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man could never inflict harm on people, many of us ignore how harmful our ILTs can be. How could our “ideal” leader harm us? If we expect our leaders to enact transformational change, be directive, and fix all our problems, we end up disappointed and disillusioned. If we think leaders can only be successful by directing others’ behavior, we fail to support leaders who take a more participative, integrative approach. Even more dangerous, if we only accept leaders that look or sound a specific way or espouse a specific credo, we lose out on potential leaders who could challenge our way of thinking and deliver better results.
 
So what can we do? These ILTs are deeply embedded in our expectations of leadership. But we can address them head on by first understanding what our ILTs do. In one exercise we present in our training sessions, we ask participants to draw what leadership looks like to them. These pictures can reshape what people want or expect from leaders – focusing on the behaviors and outcomes instead of traits. We can also expose younger generations to leaders from all different backgrounds and try to balance the messages they receive so they can all see themselves as potential leaders.
 
And we can ask ourselves whether our chosen leaders are just reinforcing our ILTs as we accept their performance, or we can try to set aside our biases and judge performance against an accepted standard.
 
Joseph De Maistra coined the phrase “each nation gets the government it deserves.” Implicit leadership theories dictate individuals often get the leaders they conceive based upon their experiences. We can challenge these imprints by highlighting the wide array of leadership behaviors and styles that are effective in any given situation.

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Oprah Moments: Noticing Leading Opportunities

11/7/2017

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 Written by: Gretchen Vogelgesang Lester
At the end of my day-long interview for a Ph.D. Program focusing on leadership, my future advisor asked me who I thought the best leaders were. I froze. It was 4pm on the longest day of my life – having gotten up a 5am to take a flight from Chicago, Illinois to Lincoln, Nebraska, interviewed with multiple faculty, advisors, and potential future peers throughout the day, and then finding myself sitting across from a well-known and somewhat intimidating leadership scholar. I stammered out one of the only leaders I could think of: Oprah. Oprah! I felt so foolish – how could a talk-show host be a leader?
 
I have not been able to get that moment out of my head – going on 15 years now. I was sure I had blown the interview. Luckily, I didn’t, but I wonder sometimes if my advisor thinks of that answer as a good one or not. But to be honest, I do see Oprah as a leader. A woman that could make a book, a chef, a designer, a personal trainer, a product become so successful just by endorsing it on her show. A woman that could break the internet (back in its earlier days) just by including a product on her “Favorite Things” show. A woman who has since started her own TV network, brought attention to overlooked stories of powerful women, and served as a cultural force for decades. When I see Oprah in her magazine, on TV, or hear about her accomplishments, I’m immediately transported back to that July afternoon. 
 
I didn’t know it yet, but that was a moment that mattered to my conceptualization of leadership. Oprah is a great example of an individual that influences followers to take action. And that moment, where I immediately felt so foolish but eventually came to understand that my belief in leadership as an influence process instead of a dictatorial or directive approach shifted my perspective on how I learn about leadership, how I teach leadership, and how I enact leadership on a daily basis.  

So how can others search for those moments that matter, or trigger moments? My example with Oprah is about shifting perspectives – something important for an individual leaving one career in industry for an academic life. Other ways to use trigger moments include noticing when and where leadership opportunities arise. Perhaps you were not selected for a training program at work – this is a leadership opportunity. Perhaps you ended up refereeing for your kids’ soccer game because no other parents showed up. Perhaps you coordinated a night out for your friends to celebrate someone’s birthday. These might not seem like leadership opportunities, in fact, they might seem like disappointments or distractions from your career goals. BUT, reframing them as leadership opportunities creates a developmental opening.
 
Not selected for a training program? – set a meeting with your manager to determine why or why not. Make it apparent that you are ready and willing to move to the next level by accepting any constructive criticism that comes your way.
 
Refereeing a soccer game? Be sure to reflect upon the things you notice during the game – which kids are playing well together. Which directions are accepted by the children? Which parents are encouraging or frustrating their players? What emotions do you feel during and after the game that you can recognize and incorporate into your leadership style?
 
Coordinating a night out for friends or family? What actions are you taking that are leadership behaviors? Which style is effective – do you need to be more directive or participative? Compare this to your approach at work. Which behaviors get a better response from your group?
 
By treating these types of different occasions as leadership development opportunities, you are building your leadership behavioral repertoire. Keep your eyes out for as many chances to emerge as a leader as possible, and you will continue to stock up your leadership toolbox. Maybe it even involves Oprah.
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