Where do you begin? Probably the most important lesson in this book is that the only way to become a leader is to act like one. Action—changing how you do your job, how you build and use your network, and how you express yourself—gives you outsight, the fresh, external perspective you need to understand more deeply what is involved in the work of leadership and to motivate yourself to do it. Outsight holds the power to reshape your image of who you are, what you can do, and what is worth doing—it will change the way you think. You’ll remake yourself as you grow and the world changes.

A point worth underlining: everyone around you will tell you that to be a better leader, you need to self-reflect, introspect, know what you want, increase self-awareness. All of that is well and good, but it will only help you later, when you have some new experiences to reflect on. Otherwise, all your material for reflection is the outdated past. Insight is an outcome, not an input. Knowing the kind of leader you’d like to become is not the starting point on your development journey, but rather the result of increasing your outsight. You must reverse the conventional “thinking before doing” logic to successfully step up.

Making a leap from a lifetime of expert contributions and hands-on control to the more subtle processes of thinking strategically, working through networks, and leading more authentically is not a one-shot deal, and it does not happen overnight. The transition is built from small changes, is less than linear, and is distinctly uncomfortable. It will take time before you achieve the results you want. The process is full of complications, false starts, setbacks, and unanticipated turns, but the mess of it all sets the stage for more profound internal changes. At some point, we have to start bringing the out-sight back in, connecting the dots among our new leadership experiences to reflect on what they mean for us, our work, and career.

New ways of acting not only change how we think—our perspective on what is important and worth doing—but also change who we become. We start by doing, we reflect on our experience, and we rethink ourselves. Whether we decide to take the leap to a new company or a different career or conclude that it’s better to stay on the current path, all of us struggle with crafting a work role in which we feel both part of something larger (the organization, the work) and free enough to be ourselves. Through reflecting on our new experiences, we can better know and pursue our own aims—what the Irish philosopher and author Charles Handy called creating “a life of our own.”¹

I remember feeling more and more frustrated during my first year in the job. The task at hand was guiding my group to define its strategic priorities. That meant having to do all the things I teach: setting a direction, communicating priorities, getting buy-in from key stakeholders inside and outside the group, and having meetings—meetings before the meeting, meetings after the meeting, one-on-one meetings, informal small-group meetings—and so on. But still no one agreed. My new leadership position was exhausting and was putting a big dent in my publication record. I wasn’t happy.

I remember vividly a department meeting that took place about one year into the job. I had spent much time over the previous twelve months trying to get consensus on some key issues. To my dismay, I found myself having an almost identical conversation with the same people, who were repeating more or less the same things that they had said one year earlier. And I remember saying to myself, “With all the time I have put into this, I could have written one or two new articles, and at least I would have had a clear payoff for the time I invested.”

Then I realized that I was exactly in the same boat as the executives I was teaching. I wasn’t stepping up to leadership, because I didn’t think that leading was real work. Therefore, I wasn’t investing enough time doing it to see a payoff from my investment. With no results for my efforts, the sacrifice of so much of my precious “doing” time would never seem worthwhile. If it didn’t seem worthwhile, I wasn’t going to do much more than comply with the minimum job requirements: scheduling, holding and attending meetings, assigning people and groups to tasks, managing performance appraisals, staffing courses, mentoring the junior faculty on their teaching and research, conducting performance reviews, fighting fires when conflicts erupted, and maybe organizing occasional social events around promotions, retirements, and holidays. You get the picture: I wasn’t leading anything. I found the job draining.

Stepping up to leadership, as was true in my case, rarely means eliminating everything else we used to do. Instead, it requires us to make delicate judgments about how to reallocate our time—what to do less of, what to do more of, and what new activities to add. What happens invariably is that we try to keep most of the old things we liked to do and were rewarded for, add the obvious new responsibilities (which are often the least fun, because they tend to be imposed by others), and neglect to think strategically about what new activities we need to add to make the job our own.

In my case, my limited view of the job was negatively self-reinforcing. Instead of driving an agenda of things I wanted to accomplish, I stayed in reactive mode, doing the least rewarding of the administrative tasks. Worse, other people’s agendas somehow ended up on my plate—some of the things I spent the most time and energy on had very little bearing on my effectiveness as a group leader. And because I was so pressed for time, the last thing that would have occurred to me was to spend time outside my area, where I could hang out with other colleagues or volunteer for committees or task forces. I was even limiting my external activities—and these are the lifeblood of academic careers—more than I ever had, because I was so worried about my individual productivity. Naturally, my whole view of who I was and how I could best contribute was at odds with my responsibilities of leading the group.

Four years ago, when I started working on this book, I was asked again to lead my group for another three-year term. This time I did it gladly, with personal enjoyment, and I am proud of what I accomplished. I worked less hard (and had more time to write), but my work was very focused on a couple of key priorities that I focused on single-mindedly. They involved growing my group and removing the single most obvious barriers to my group’s ability to recruit the best faculty and then let the faculty members get on with their research—a practice that helped us get them promoted instead of losing them after so much investment. Pretty much anything else was delegated or ignored.

A colleague of mine, a neophyte, once confessed to me that he found the job of leading draining. Funnily enough, he is a leadership researcher. I asked him what he thought about the job. He answered me according to popular theory: “You have to have a clear purpose for doing this.” For him, it was all about service to his group members. “That’s a lofty goal,” I said, “but service for what?” He was serving left and right with no clear agenda of his own about what mattered most and what key levers would make the biggest impact.

What changed for me? Many things. In the time between the two appointments, several committees and task forces I was involved with at the school gave me a bigger-picture view of how the different pieces of the institution worked and helped me get to know colleagues outside my area better. I took some different roles outside INSEAD and served on Harvard Business School’s Visiting Committee. I sat on some advisory boards and started working with the World Economic Forum on its leadership program, the annual conference at Davos, and its global agenda councils. My professional relationships expanded way beyond my traditional academic connections. I found my new activities so interesting that I was motivated to spend less time on the things I didn’t find so rewarding.

I could go on, but you get the point. I had acted my way into a new way of thinking about leading.

Like Jobs, you may not see at first how all the dots connect as you start branching out beyond your routine work, habitual networks, and historical ways of defining yourself. You won’t know where it’s all going to take you. But these new ways of acting will slowly change the way you think about your work and yourself, giving you fresh material for reflection and urging you on to find more meaningful ways of leading at work and in your life beyond.

Slowly but surely, a more central and enduring leader identity starts to takes root, one that motivates you to spend more time “doing leadership,” expands the pool of people you learn and draw inspiration from, and eventually raises the level of enjoyment and sense of competency you derive from it. In time, it will influence your choice of activities and settings, as you will be prone to invest in those that increase your capacity to provide leadership. Sometimes the journey leads to a major career shift; other times, the transition is internal: you’ve changed the way you see your work and yourself.

It’s worth it. Start now. Act now.