Your identity can influence your business

Your identity is the person you currently are, and unless you try to change or improve, you will always fall back on that person. Getting to know your identity could come from your analysis or from 360-degree feedback or from sharing important stories of your life with others to know their views. You could also get a professional consultant to help you. Once you know your true identity, you will experience an "Aha!" moment when you understand yourself better.

To explain this identity issue, let us use a real example of a person I know well, who discovered with the help of strategic consultants that his identity was that of a "Headmaster". His nature, at that time, was to oversee every thing, including people. While he was committed and fully accountable for the results, he liked giving orders, telling people what to do and, to a large extent, solving every problem that came his way. He treated his employees as students who should do what they were told, not leaving much room for them to be creative or to lead.

This person was successful in his early career, where the challenges were relatively small and the company he worked for had small groups of people, with simple organisational structures. Back then, the "Headmaster" shone.

Today, the same person is running a much larger business, with more people and where the business is much more complex. He realised one thing: His identity had become his biggest enemy. By ensuring all the key decisions go through him, he had become the company's biggest bottleneck. By constantly giving orders and providing solutions he was not developing leaders who could think for themselves.

By analysing the situation and with help from consultants, he formed his "leadership intent", which meant a new way of working and being a new person. His intent was to "create success by building and working with big leaders". He made a public declaration to his team, admitting who he was before, who he intended to be now and the possibility of great things that this change could bring about.

Since then, he has seen things change. Consequently, there was a new way of working introduced to the organisation with the aim of creating executives who would be accountable for the success of different business units instead of leaving the key decisions to the company executive board or the managing director, which was him.

Instead of telling people to just do things, this person found himself asking questions such as, "What is your suggestion?", "What would you do if it were your own company"?

This person found the more he was aware of his leadership intent and the more he tried to live up to it, the better he became as a leader and as a person. And now, even as that man is on his development journey, the business is flourishing, with significant growth seen in the past three years and which was against the industry and economic trends.

That man feels he has just opened another level of his development potential. There is a long way to go, but he is more excited and eager to take on the journey than ever before. The reason I know this person so well is because that person is me.

So, now you need to ask yourself: Do you know your identity?  Have you identified your leadership intent that will bring out the best in you and your organisation? And have you behaved as such?