The second book that I’ve finished reading this year is Hermina Ibarra’s “Act Like a leader, Think Like a leader”. Although it seems like a book that discusses the essential features of a successful leader, some of these principles can be readily applied to anyone who is looking for personal growth.

A major theme of this book is self identity. We often view self identity as a collage of our past. However, Ibarra suggests an alternative: the possibilities you envision for yourself in the future also forms part of your identity. As we frequently get trapped in the cycle of repeating what we’re good at, Ibarra recommends us to reach out of the boundaries of our expertise and engage in more extracurricular activities. Often, people with prevention orientation focus on performance goals and have little tolerance for mistakes. On the other hand, if we switch to a promotion orientation, we’ll feel much more at ease and appreciate the learning from the mistakes we make as we work towards a learning goal. I’ve felt this more strongly ever since graduating from school and entering the workplace, where people are no longer assessed according to a single set of criteria (i.e. grades), but are evaluated on a much wider scale. Rather than jumping out of our comfort zones, we could expand our comfort zones to embrace new possibilities that we’ve fenced away earlier. It’s ok to not know our end goal; we’ll find out more in the process of trying to get there.

Nevertheless, the thought of networking is still draining in my opinion. However, that is a major deciding factor in the success of a leader. Rather than a hub that connects the inner team members, a leader should strive to be a bridge that connects the team to outer opportunities, and to do so, it is vital to network with parties outside the company and even the field. Therefore, the skill sets expected of a leader may be drastically different from that of a technical member, so we should not judge our leaders’ competency from the technical perspective. Instead, the new opportunities and development directions created based on a bigger picture are much more valuable. Reading this also allowed me to reflect on how I view other people and taught me to view others holistically rather than putting labels on them at first sight.

Despite the mounting pressure that I felt when I started reading this book (mostly due to my self-realisation of how incompetent I would be at leadership), it has provided me some valuable insights on how to view my own identity and how to perceive others. Personally, I think the tone of this book is very similar to Jane McGonigal’s “Reality is Broken”, probably because both are pitching new action plans. Hopefully I’ll start acting before thinking too much and try some outsight strategies.