Triple Identity
Many people believe we live in a highly individualistic culture. I disagree. We live in a highly socialized culture that emotionally isolates people in order to exploit and pacify them.
As a result, the identity formation in people is stunted. They don’t know who they are or what their lives mean.
As a consultant, I saw this in the people who led organizations where I was involved. Many of them were not well aware of who they were and what it meant to lead. As I have said to colleagues, they know how to run a business, but not to lead a business.
To overcome these deficiencies with need a story that we tell ourselves. This story provides self-awareness, social context, and focus for the future. In other words, there are three identities that need to be developed for us to be fully prepared to be impact leaders. These three identities are:
Personal Identity
Social Identity
Purpose Identity
In this post, we look at how we can bring these together to create a strong sense of who we are for work that makes a difference that matters.
Stories Define Us
A decade ago I worked with a group of young women who were in an addiction recovery program. They all lived in the same house. By their living arrangement, they were forced to face the issues of identity and relationships that caused the trauma in their lives. I provided them training in life skills to prepare them for their post-program life.
In order to get to know them, I ask that they tell me the story of their addiction and what took place that led them into addiction recovery. They are very similar stories to the ones you can see in Mark Laita’s YouTube series Soft White Underbelly. < https://www.youtube.com/c/SoftWhiteUnderbelly/featured > These women lived hard, dangerous, destructive lives. In some cases, they had children that they had abandoned to their grandparents’ care. At some point, they decided to change. They knew that the story that kept replicating in their minds would tragically lead to their deaths.
As a group, we worked together to discover what each woman wanted for her life after recovery. Each one of these women needed a story to guard them against returning to their former self-destructive lives and to give them a purpose for a possible future. Their stories rewired their brains to become strong, self-sufficient women.
The Story You Need To Tell Yourself
We live in a world of competing narratives. They come from every source and every person imaginable. We receive these messages and without our own story of purpose, we become the person that the messages tell us that we are. This is the power of marketing and social media.
I saw this in particular during the year that I spent on the road promoting my book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change. At every book signing event, people told me their stories. Some stories were very matter of fact. Others were stories of ambition, and many were of disappointment and loss.
There was always a social element to these stories. It may be a spouse, their workplace, the classroom, and their extended family. They would identify a conflict between what they felt they should do or become, and what the expectations of people were. Without a clear sense of self and supportive relationships, they became subject to situations that were not in their best interest.
The way to clarify these situations is to ask questions. Here’s an example.
Setting: Saturday morning in the café of a bookstore.
Man: What’s your book about?
Me: It is a book for businesses that want to elevate the leadership capacity of their people.
Man: Hmmm, sounds interesting.
Me: What do you do?
Man: I lead a support team for a group of software engineers
Me: How’s your team working.
Man: I like my team. They are doing well.
Me: Is your team clear about why they are doing the work they do?
Man: Yeah, I think so.
Me: Do the software engineers respect the work of your team?
Man: No!? (as he looked at me with a surprised face.)
Me: Does the company understand what its impact should be?
Man: I’m not sure that they do.
By asking three simple questions, he told me the story of his company in about two minutes. These questions and the framework of a story that we tell ourselves are based upon the Circle of Impact model of leadership.
What he told me is that the place of his work is simply organized as a mechanical operation without reference to shared values or relationships of respect, trust, and mutual accountability. Think of these as criteria for determining whether to hire someone or be hired by a company. In situations where there is no story that we tell ourselves about why we work here, the result is there is little motivation to be a person who makes a difference to the company and its clients. Just do your job and go home.
Creating Our Story
For each of the three dimensions of leadership, there is a corresponding part of our story. For each component of the story, there is also a goal that is described as a quality measure of each dimension.
In our story, we want to establish the following.
· Our personal identity is based on our values and an understanding of our transition through life.
· Our social identity is based on shared values and purpose that are reflected in relationships of respect, trust, and mutual accountability.
· Our impact identity is based on the goals for our lives reflected in the work we do and the contributions we make to our community.
This is the story that you tell yourself. It is a story of grounding in values, lived out in social situations, and with a distinct purpose that results in an impact. And it becomes a basis for others to understand who you are as a person that has a unique contribution to make in the world.