Becoming a Leader is Not Like Improving Your Golf Swing

By Herminia Ibarra

Why do so many people take up golf? Because we can practice and play alone, and because it gives us a great handle for knowing ourselves and comparing with others — our handicap. In the same way, our best-selling courses and books encourage people to assess and cultivate their leadership skills in splendid isolation; once their authentic leadership discovered, it becomes a static and enduring feature of the individual, a label we attach to ourselves much like we’d share our Myers Briggs profile.

If you buy the idea that leadership not a set of attributes and skills that we possess or acquire but rather a relationship developed between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow, then learning to lead by reflecting on our individual strengths, weaknesses, preferences and experiences is just a bunch of nonsense. We learn to lead in relationship, by becoming a part of a community and network of leaders. What we preach, however, is very different. Consider several popular schools of thought:

• Situational leadership, originally conceived as the antidote to the great man theories of leadership. The situational school brought us the notion of “fit:” person to situation and leader to follower. The original version said the situation makes the leader. The simpler version we retained says something else altogether, that good leaders choose among the leadership styles or change strategies in their repertoire the one that best matches their current situation, much like a golfer chooses among the various clubs in his bag the one that best fits the ball’s location. The repertoire of leadership “swings” is ours: we own it, we take it with us from one golf course to the next. The clubs don’t change with practice.

• Discover your strengths — another great example of a one-sided and static focus on personal attributes that make people effective leaders. According to this theory, we can categorize ourselves according to a number of themes and clusters of themes that describe our strengths; once identified, they help us make decisions about what situation best match us. Our golf game is such that we play better in certain kinds of golf courses and we do best when we golf in those settings rather than in those that do not play to our strengths.

• Practice. From Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers to Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated we learn about the magic rule of 10,000 hours. Bill Gates, we are told, became a computer wiz because he had access to an early computer and was able to clock the requisite number of hours. Putting in the hours, not innate talent, makes the leader. Like accomplished golfers, accomplished leaders practice while they perform in a regimen tailored to their individual aspirations, motivations, and learning styles.

What’s wrong with this picture? Our impressive arsenal of standardized psychological instruments, abstract self-definitions and metaphors for leading and learning detach rather than connect us to the social context that defines our identities as leaders and allows us to truly shift over time and situation, not because we have the right tool or beefed up “muscle” but because the situation has changed us.

If learning to lead is not like improving your golf swing, what is it like and what must we do? My research on how effective managers make the transition to bigger, broader leadership roles shows that becoming a leader is about learning and growing from the outside-in, by seizing the ropes in our social context — and not through the navel-gazing that only traps us further and further in successful but outdated identities. The experiences of people who escaped the traps suggest the following four, intrinsically social enablers:

• Motivate the transition to leadership. When asked to do things that don’t come naturally, we implicitly ask ourselves “am I the sort of person who behaves this way?” “Do I want to be that sort of person?”. When managers’ identification is rooted in functional groups or expert communities, the answers are negative when it comes to leadership, and thus it is no surprise that they do not sustain the arduous practice it takes to develop as leaders. On the other hand, when they identify with recognized leaders, learning to lead is motivated by the desire to become a member of a valued group.

• Make the “competencies” come alive. One of the difficult things about learning to lead is distinguishing between “what” (content knowledge) and “how to” (process knowledge). We may know, for example, that “sensing external trends” is a critical competency in forging a strategic direction, and we may also want to become more like the leaders we know who are very good at that. But, how does one actually learn to strategize? In a successful learning cycle, role models, peer groups and communities of practice motivate change by changing our reference point on what is desirable and possible, and then once motivated, providing tacit knowledge on how to do it.

• Experiment from the outside in. Many aspiring leaders struggle to stretch their leadership within their current organization and roles. Caught in between delivery pressures and outdated views of their capacities, they more quickly or easily find roles outside the organization that allow them to lead. Their new activities, in professional organizations, clubs, informal advisory and so on, create external identities that they eventually internalize.

• Build external support & networks to sustain change. Often it is hard to get support for change from old mentors, bosses or trusted colleagues. They may have good intentions but maintain of what we can and should do that are based in the past and not the future. People and groups, on the fringe of our existing networks help us push off in new directions while providing the secure base in which change can take hold, one of the reasons why learning methods like peer coaching are so powerful.

If you think back on transitions that you have navigated successfully or experiences that have stretched your leadership, how much did these social ropes help or hurt your progress?

Herminia Ibarra is the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning, Professor of Organizational Behavior, and Faculty Director of the INSEAD Leadership Initiative.