The Leadership Identity Puzzle

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.