Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

Herminia Ibarra Leadership The European Business Review

In this excerpt from her book, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader Herminia Ibarra discusses what she describes as the ‘Outsight’ Principle: the cycle of acting like a leader and then thinking like a leader; change from the outside in. She argues that people become leaders by acting their way into a leadership position. The “Outsight” Principle: How …

Tech tools to measure performance can fall short

Herminia Ibarra Career Management The Financial Times

Benjamin Franklin could be considered a pioneer of the modern “quantified self” approach to personal improvement. In the late 18th century, he famously used a chart to monitor his behaviour, including acts of virtue, and reviewed his record of daily activities every night. In the Fitbit era, companies have a dizzying array of tech tools for setting and tracking work …

Develop Leaders From the Outside In

Herminia Ibarra Leadership Chief Learning Officer

Increasing leadership capacity is an increasingly important part of a company’s business strategy. Unfortunately, formal leadership development efforts often fall short of expectations. At best, managers gain valuable personal insights but fail to learn how they can apply them to create value for their organization. As managers step into bigger leadership roles, there are pitfalls to popular, self-awareness-centered approaches to …

The Most Productive Way to Develop as a Leader

Herminia Ibarra Leadership Harvard Business Review

Everybody loves self-improvement. We want to get smarter, network better, be connected, balance our lives, and so on. That’s why we’re such avid consumers of “top 10” lists of things to do to be a more effective, productive, promotable, mindful — you name it — leader. We read all the lists, but we have trouble sticking to the “easy steps” …

How to Act and Think Like a Leader

Herminia Ibarra Leadership INSEAD Knowledge

To become a successful leader, you have to ditch the conventional “think before doing” logic and instead start acting like a leader in order to start thinking like a leader. “I’m like the fire patrol,” says Jacob, a thirty-five-year-old production manager for a mid-sized European food manufacturer. “I run from one corner to the other to fix things, just to …

The “Outside” Principle

Herminia Ibarra Leadership Talent Quarterly

“I’m like the fire patrol,” says Jacob, a thirty- five-year-old production manager for a midsized European food manufacturer. “I run from one corner to the other to fix things, just to keep producing.” To step up to a bigger leadership role in his organization, Jacob knows he needs to get out from under all the operational details that are keeping …

Self-awareness in leadership development is sound, but insufficient

Herminia Ibarra Career Management,   Leadership Chief Learning Officer

Increasing leadership capacity is an increasingly important part of a company’s business strategy. Unfortunately, formal leadership development efforts often fall short of expectations. At best, managers gain valuable personal insights but fail to learn how they can apply them to create value for their organization. As managers step into bigger leadership roles, there are pitfalls to popular, self-awareness-centered approaches to …

The Key to Becoming a Strategy-Minded Executive

Herminia Ibarra Career Management,   Leadership The Wall Street Journal

Some executives believe that if they set aside a few hours each week for uninterrupted thinking, they will have more and better strategic ideas. This is not only wishful thinking, it’s backward thinking. We are much more likely to act our way into strategic thinking than we are to think our way into strategic action. Many executives who want to …

Beware the navel-gazing leader

Herminia Ibarra Leadership The Financial Times

Many top business schools — Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, Kellogg to cite a few — have overhauled their MBA curricula in recent years. Among the most popular changes is increasing “leadership” learning. This trend seems to be driven by a troika of stakeholders: employers, who no longer want to have to train new recruits from scratch; students, who know …

How to Revive a Tired Network

Herminia Ibarra Leadership Harvard Business Review

On a scale of one to five, how important is having a good network to your ability to accomplish your goals? When I ask my executive students this question, most of them answer in the fours and fives. Even the most naive of them agree that, like it or not, relationships hold the key to both their current capac­ity and …