SPECIAL
FEATURE ARTICLE
THE
LEADERSHIP IDENTITY PUZZLE
Why
Mindfulness Completes the Puzzle Behind our Leadership Identity Mask
Kim L. E. Germundsson, Foo Sue
Xuan, Kiran Shahid,
Tatiana Chu, Asef M. Chowdhury, Taufiqur Rahman
Years of Research Attempting to Find
Ourselves
Years
of research has been devoted to the topic of leadership identity. Many quizzes
and personality tests have tried to come up with the perfect answer for tapping
into who we are and how we lead. For example, Myers-Briggs (1943) came up with
the 16 personalities profiles (Schultz and Schultz, 2005), and Rubin (2015)
tried to tap into our habit formations with her four tendencies test.
The Mask and the Puzzle
Our
lives are a puzzle, often hidden behind a mask that only shows half, or even
less, of the picture of who we are. Life becomes like a masquerade ball. We
think we know the people whom we meet because we know their names, or perhaps
we know their country of origin, or other such labels and identifiers, but
behind a mask, we cannot see the invisible self – what they are thinking, how
they are feeling, or their true perceptions behind the mask. The mask, then,
becomes the reality of our knowledge of the person. We fail to see the bigger
picture because the mask hides the complex puzzle of the person and who they
really are. The only difference between the masquerade ball and reality is that
people wear an invisible mask outside, whereas, in a masquerade ball, you can
see the mask. However, no matter what you try to do, you will never find fulfilment
until you do what is true to your innermost self. Furthermore, without a sense
of who you are, and hence, your identity, you cannot begin to comprehend the
type of leader you want to be, and thus, the world has caused a leadership
identity crisis. The question is, how can we begin to solve what the world has
created around us?
Integrating
the Mask and the Puzzle
With
a leadership identity crisis, it is no surprise that people spend their
lifetimes trying to figure out who they are and what kind of leader they want
to be. The problem is, for the vast majority of us, the mask we wear and the
complex puzzle of our lives are not yet integrated. Once the mask and the
puzzle are integrated, we develop what becomes like a puzzled mask where
slowly, but surely, we are able to shatter the pieces of the mask and become
one with ourselves and our identities. Only then, can we begin to explore our
leadership identity.
The Global Extravert Bias
Before we attempt to tackle the issue of how to
integrate the mask and puzzle of our leadership identity, we must first
recognise the issues in the world around us. The problem is, the world is too noisy to think. Cain (2012) suggested
that this world is run by extraverts, and so the whole system is geared towards
them. Everything from the social strategies of networking to our entire
education system, leaving those who “think”, typically common of the more
introverted types, to feel that there is something wrong with them. Thus, the
typical approach used in leadership becomes “do, then think”.
The
Practice of Mindfulness
How
then, do we integrate the mask and puzzle? The answer is “mindfulness”. This is
the practice of slowing down and taking the quiet space and time we need to
reflect on our lives, and to be with ourselves and our thoughts. Without such a
practice, this world easily slips into a meaningless state of emptiness, a
vacuum of nothingness, similar to a black hole in outer space. Thus,
mindfulness is key to finding our leadership identity, and would benefit our
everyday living (Davis and Hayes, 2011).
A Walk Through the Leadership
Identity Development Model
In
order to understand more about finding ourselves and our leadership identity, a
key model, The Leadership Identity
Development Model, proposed by Komives et al. (2005) must be taken into
consideration.
The
Mask of Others
Awareness is the first stage of discovering one’s leadership
identity. This stage involves
recognising the leaders in the external environment around us. Generally, people recognise the positional leaders
first – the people who have titles like Datuk, Datin, Tunku, Sultan etc.
Perhaps you see your Programme Chair or Head of Department as a leader too.
This is the very first step to building a leadership identity.
From
there, the next stage comes into play, Exploration
and Engagement. This stage is all about group immersion, learning to engage
the group and mingle with friends and colleagues around you. Group assignments, presentations and
extra-curricular involvement are a great way to learn to work with others,
especially when you have challenges working with someone you do not know so
well.
Stage three builds on stage two. It
is called, Leader Identified. This
stage entails the recognition of hierarchies and actions of positional leaders
i.e. leaders who have titles and formal roles in society. This could be
identifying a difference made by your local politician, or recognising the
authority that your lecturer has to set deadlines on an assignment.
Your
Mask
The
fourth stage is called LeaderSHIP
Differentiated. Then emphasis here is on the SHIP. This is because this
stage is all about leadership from a non-positional perspective, where the
shared group process plays a particular importance in learning about your
leadership identity. In recognising that each individual has a role to play in
leadership, we can enable one another to develop as better leaders in the
future. Thus, followers are now given a chance to become leaders too.
Therefore, a person can, in a sense, be both a leader and a follower at the
same time. This is one of the leadership identity paradoxes.
The
Puzzle
This
leads to the fifth stage, Generativity.
This stage is all about developing the leadership capabilities in others. It
involves a shared perspective, with a common goal and purpose. Each individual
is responsible for bringing something to the group, in order to influence the
leadership development of the next person.
The
Puzzle Mask
From
there, a sixth stage is formed, Integration
and Systems. This is the capacity of a person to claim leadership in
contexts that are diverse in nature. The leader then claims the position and
title, and not vice versa (Komives et al., 2005). This is the stage where
mindfulness plays a key role in helping leaders to stop and think, and thus,
when the mask and puzzle become integrated.
The
Leadership Bench is Thin ~ Warren Bennis ~
The problem with today’s society is that we often
focus too much on positional leaders. However, theories such as Servant Leadership promote the view that
we should move away from viewing “leaders” as those in formal positions with
titles (Bolden et al., 2003, p12). This is the perspective that leadership
should be viewed from, where everyone can become a leader, without a position
or a title.
Understanding
the Difference Between Called and Driven
When a person knows their
place in life, their vision and mission, they can begin to find, and then
embrace their Call to
leadership. As Palmer (2000) suggests, to embrace who you truly are is to embrace
your innermost fears. The only way out of such situations is to go right inside
them and through them. When we do this, we find our charism (from the Greek
meaning, “gift”), and in this, one finds their competence. To find one’s
competence is to tap into one’s strengths, and thus, to find one’s leadership
strategy. Only then can we truly know ourselves and make a meaningful and
unique contribution to society (Cook and Simmonds, 2011).
On the
other hand, when a person goes after their goals at the expense of others
around them, stepping all over them to get what they believe they deserve, we
call this concept, Driven.
This kind of driven leadership is what we see in many of today’s leaders,
because they lack a true meaning and sense of their leadership identity, hence,
they lose sight of what their purpose as a leader is and end up breaking what
Sinek (2015) called, The Circle of Safety.
Driven “leaders” focus on
their charisma (the trait) as the ideal, (Jacquart and Antonakis, 2015) rather
than their charism, and is it this confusion, which normally comes about due to
the lack of mindfulness, which leads to detrimental disasters.
Back
to the Root of the Issue – Are Leaders Born
or Made?
In always seeking extraverted, driven types,
especially for those so-called “leadership” positions, certain traits tend to
appear over and over again in the “desired characteristics of job applicants”
or “school scholarship criteria” etc. Behavioural approaches that support the
idea that certain traits seem to determine a person fit to be leader stem from
early leadership theories, such as the Great
Man Approach, which supports the contention that leaders are born, not made (Cawthon, 1996). Such
contentions have stuck with society and led us into this extraverted cultural
bias. The issue, though, is that in order to determine whether leaders are born or made rests with this notion of being called or driven, while
taking into account that to determine such in a person’s life also requires
mindfulness to analyse the situation. Thus, there are a few things one must
take into consideration:
1) What are the traits
critical for “leadership”?
2) What does society consider
to be “raw potential”?
3) Who is qualified to identify
such traits and people?
4) Can anyone really know what
makes a “leader”?
5) If such traits and “raw
potential” was recognised in a person, can it be argued that such recognition
led to the shaping of that particular person’s character in order to make them into a “leader”?
Thus, bearing in mind the above questions, one could
come to the conclusion that leaders are, in fact, made, because society appears to make them.
We
All Play a Role in Using Mindfulness to Make Tomorrow’s Leaders
Therefore, it is mindfulness that allows us to slow
down and analyse situations in order to find one’s true charism and answer
one’s Call to become a leader
who is able to integrate the mask with the puzzle. Hence, the leader can then
shatter each puzzle piece off to reveal their true leadership identity. Thus,
since society made the leaders
today, in practising mindfulness, society, i.e. each and every one of us,
should make and form the
leaders of tomorrow.
