How to gain role clarity and lead from any position

“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity” — Francois Gautier, French writer and journalist.

In the March issue of Ivey Business Journal, a publication from The Western Business School, the connection between our role as leaders and our personal identity is explored. Can you still bring passion to your leadership style while checking your emotional attachment to your role? The authors offer 5 ways to practice the idea of Wise Leadership.

I invite you to read the full article and give the concept some thought.

5 Ways to Practice Wise Leadership in Your Role

1. Perform the Role without Emotional Attachment
2. Lead or mentor others to lead, with enthusiasm and clarity
3. Be a great team  player
4. Be authentic in any role
5. Seek role clarity continually and mindfully

source:Ivey Business Journal: March 2013
P.Kaipa, N.Radjou, S.Khizrana

In the context of a business, role clarity means knowing that your role as leader is just that—a role, not your identity. Today you are a director in one company, tomorrow you could be a vice president in another company, and a year later, you could be an entrepreneur. These are merely work roles you play to contribute to the development of your organization and yourself. They also could be very different from who you actually are. This is why role clarity is so critically important: It enables you to perform a chosen role effectively and display behaviors corresponding to that role with enthusiasm, and without losing the sense of your core identity or “the real you” that is behind any given role.

Being merely smart is not sufficient to deal effectively with the complexity of 21st-century business realities. Leaders need to become wise. Leaders who are highly intelligent but not yet wise—those whom we call “smart leaders”—tend to judge and attach a meaning to their role because they view roles through the different glasses they wear. Roles are actions or activities assigned to, or expected of, a person in different contexts (like wearing sunglasses, reading glasses, or driving glasses at different times). Core identity is a person’s conception and expression of one’s values and beliefs and, more accurately, oneself. The distinction between role and identity is important, since leaders sometimes mistake their work role (effective performance of tasks) for their core identity (who they are), which can keep them from seeing clearly and making wise decisions. It’s akin to finding one’s home to be very dark, forgetting that one is wearing dark sunglasses.

In this article, I will try to help leaders understand the crucial difference between role and identity and how they can apply that understanding to be an effective leader.

Read the full article on the Ivey Business Journal website