Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / Practice Before Confidence: What Herminia Ibarra Gets Right About Becoming a Leader
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled Practice Before Confidence, What Herminia Ibarra gets right about becoming a leader. Here we go. There's a question every leader asks right before a big step up. Am I ready? Feels like a fair question. Feels responsible even. But it's built on a false premise. It assumes readiness is something you accumulate quietly on the inside before you ever act. And once you have enough of it, you step forward. That's not how it works. Not according to the research and not according to what most of us have actually lived. Herminia Ibara, who has spent her career studying how people move into new leadership roles, put it simply. We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. Sit with that. We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. Let me tell you what that looks like in a real leadership moment. Someone gets promoted. Suddenly they are leading people who were peers last month. They know the org chart has changed, but inside nothing has changed yet. They still think like the person they were. They wait to feel like a leader before they start acting like one. Weeks pass, sometimes months. And the waiting itself becomes the problem because the team can feel the hesitation even when nobody says anything about it. Here's a common misread. Many people think identity comes first and action follows. Feel confident, then act confident. Know who you are as a leader, then lead. It sounds logical. It's also backwards. Ibata's work shows the opposite sequence. You act first, in ways that are unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable. You make a call you're not fully sure of. You run a meeting in a style that is not yet natural to you. You have the hard conversation before you feel qualified to have it. And it's that repeated awkward practice that eventually produces the identity, not the other way around. So here's the reframe. Confidence is not a prerequisite for leadership. It is a byproduct of it. You don't think your way into becoming a leader. You act your way into it, one rep at a time, and the thinking catches up later. This shows up everywhere, but it's worth naming plainly for anyone leading in an AI enabled environment right now. These tools are remarkable at producing theory. Ask for a strategy, you get a strategy. Ask for a framework and you get a framework, fully formed in seconds. That can feel like progress, and sometimes it is. But theory has never been the hard part of leadership. The hard part has always been judgment, knowing when the framework fits the situation in front of you and when it does not. Knowing when to follow the plan and when to depart from it because something in the room tells you the plan is wrong this time. That kind of judgment is not generated. It's built slowly through lived decisions, through the ones that worked and the ones that didn't. The tools can hand you theory faster than ever. They still cannot hand you practice. That part is still yours to do. And this is true whether or not you use any of these tools at all. The principle does not depend on the technology. It depends on you being willing to act before you feel ready in whatever environment you're actually leading in. Here's something to carry forward this week. Find one decision you've been overthinking. Not researching further. Overthinking. A decision where you already have enough information, and what is actually missing is your willingness to act on it. Make that call. Not because you're certain, because certainty was never going to arrive first anyway. Let me leave you with the line again because it's worth carrying with you. We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. Leadership identity is not something you think your way into. It is something you build decision by decision, rep by rep in the actual practice of leading. The readiness you're waiting for is on the other side of the action, not before it. If you're waiting to feel like a leader before you act like one, that feeling may not come until after you have already started. So start.