Who Are You As a Leader?

To reach your full potential, first identify—and then map out—as many elements of your identity as you can.

March 2025

Summary

Social scientists have recently developed a new appreciation for how your conception of yourself can affect your professional and personal lives. The good news is that recent research has shown that you can curate your identity in the workplace in waysthat will improve your performance as a leader, the trust you’re able to inspire in others, and even your overall well-being. The author discusses this research, including some of his own, and presents best practices for curating a multifaceted identity that will serve you well professionally and personally. At the center of this approach is the construction of what Ingram calls theidentity map—a simple device that allows people to identify, visualize, and ultimately leverage the many interconnected elements that make up their sense of who they are.

Claude Grunitzky is a world-class networker. He’s so good, in fact, that both Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School have published case studies about him. (I am a coauthor of the Columbia study.) Both case studies document how Grunitzky built and maintained professional relationships during the course of his career that allowed him to launch his first startup—a magazine called Trace, which covered hip-hop music—and subsequently a series of businesses, including an advertising agency and a media network that now operates in 190 countries.

Today Grunitzky is the CEO of the Equity Alliance, a venture capital firm with a strategy of investing in companies whose founding teams include at least one woman or one member of a racial minority. Key to implementing this strategy is what Grunitzky calls the “social-capital playbook,” which he and his colleagues use to help their investees establish robust professional networks. They recognize that these networks—which consist of what might informally be called business friendships—are critically important in entrepreneurship and venture capital, but people from underrepresented backgrounds are less likely to have them.

Grunitzky’s own identity is expansive and diverse. He has lived in Togo, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His father was a powerful politician, and his mother a poor seamstress. They never married, and growing up, Grunitzky would spend weekdays in his father’s mansion and weekends with his mother in a humble home without running water. His interests today are eclectic: He’s a fan of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the political podcaster Ezra Klein, and the hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan. He considers himself “transcultural.”

I teach a class on social networking to MBA students at Columbia Business School, and a few years ago I invited Grunitzky to talk to us about his career and his approach to networking, which he prefers to call “developing social capital.” The key to building connections, he told us (and my own research subsequently confirmed), is to first arrive at a thorough understanding of your own identity—the interrelated elements that you use to define yourself. In Grunitzky’s case those elements include family roles such as father and husband, career roles such as CEO and journalist, an interest in jazz, and his Catholic faith. Only once you’ve identified the many facets of your identity, he continued, can you “identify commonality” with people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Commonalities provide a solid foundation on which to build and expand your network.

For earlier generations, venturing deliberately into the territory of identity was a discretionary act. The word identity wasn’t even used in social science to describe self-identification until the mid-1950s, and not until 1960 could citizens choose their own race for the U.S. Census. (Before then, census takers assigned it.) However, social scientists have since come to appreciate the importance of how people understand themselves, and they’ve conducted extensive research on the way your self-concept can affect your professional and personal lives.

I’m one of those researchers. I’ve spent years studying how leaders develop their personal identities, and my work supports Claude Grunitzky’s idea that to develop and expand a healthy professional network, you first need to focus on understanding your own identity. Doing that well can help you thrive both at work and in life. The good news is that you have more control over your identity than you may realize: You can curate it in ways that will improve your performance as a leader, the trust you’re able to inspire in others, and even your overall well-being.

Today we are constantly asked in the workplace to answer the question “Who are you?” There’s no avoiding it—especially if you’re in a leadership or a management role. Leaders project authenticity, and become trusted, by communicating their identities. When Captain Matt Feely was commanding officer of the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Logistics Center in Yokosuka, Japan, for example, he took each sailor, Marine, and Japanese civilian who joined his organization to the large globe in his office, where he pointed to the location of his hometown of Dedham, Massachusetts, and asked the newcomers to show him theirs.

Leaders also call on their identities when they need confidence and guidance. After the devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011, Feely and the people in his organization were thrust into a leading role in the effort to save lives—and subsequently learned that during that effort they had been exposed to nuclear radiation. Upon receiving that news, Feely had a moment of darkness, wondering, “Why me?” Almost immediately, however, he thought about the experiences that had brought him to that moment: He had served in combat zones, previously led responses to natural disasters, and been in the Pentagon on 9/11. With all that in mind, he was able to ask himself a different question that allowed him to move forward as a leader: “Who better than me?”

In this article I’ll discuss recent research—including some of my own—on defining personal identity in the workplace, and I’ll present best practices for curating a multifaceted identity that will serve you well both professionally and personally. At the center of this approach is the construction of what I call “the identity map”—a simple device that will allow you to identify, visualize, and ultimately leverage the many interconnected elements that make up your sense of who you are.

Self-Authorship

If we’re socially connected to many others who have a particular identity element—if they consider themselves creative, say, or an athlete, or somebody who likes to cook—we’re more likely to adopt that element ourselves. Likewise, how we think of ourselves is to an extent a function of how others see us. In the end, our personal identities are partly the result of negotiations with others.

For example, creativity is a core element of my personal identity. If the people I work with did not consider me creative, and in fact snickered when I claimed to be, I wouldn’t be able to sustain creativity as part of my self-concept in their company. I’d have to adapt my sense of myself to conform to their view of me or I’d have to find others to work with who were more sympathetic to my self-image as creative. Either you take the lead in defining yourself or someone else will do it for you—and it’s infinitely better to do it yourself.

How we think of ourselves is to an extent a function of how others see us. In the end, our personal identities are partly the result of negotiations with others.

In her now-classic book Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra makes the case that successful career transitions depend on aligning your personal identity with the role you are transitioning to. She offers practical advice for achieving that alignment, such as experimenting with projects and activities—including outside work—to discover identity elements that will help you succeed in a new role. I particularly like her advice to tell and retell the story of why you’re the right person for the role you aspire to, and to adjust that story according to feedback from your interlocutors until you arrive at a version that works for you and for them. That’s a clever strategic response to the truth that our identities are negotiated with others.

Your identity will be most useful to you, of course, if you understand it as something you’ve defined for yourself rather than something that others have defined for you. Researchers recently confirmed this idea in an experiment that required subjects to solve a set of challenging math problems. Before putting the subjects to work, they primed some of them to affirm a view that they had of themselves and primed others to affirm a view that others had of them. The former group was asked to complete sentences such as “When I am a ______, I feel ______,” while the latter was asked to complete sentences such as “When I am a ______, I receive______.” (Inputs in the first case might be “student” and “fulfilled” and in the second, “student” and “praise.”)

After completing their sentences, the members of these groups were given math problems to solve, and their results were compared with those of a control group. The subjects in the self-determined group performed better on the math problems than the control group, whereas those in the other-determined group performed worse. That finding has been confirmed in additional studies: Our identities serve us better when we understand them as self-determined. In interacting with others, it’s therefore important to be assertive in affirming who you are and how your various identity elements align with the roles you aspire to.

Research has also shown that our identities serve us better when we understand all their elements (no matter how diverse or even seemingly self-contradictory) as being harmonious. For example, the former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi writes in her autobiography of the importance of simultaneously maintaining her identities as an immigrant, a woman, an Indian, and a corporate executive and not choosing among them. Indeed, the title of her book—My Life in Full—evokes the idea of an integrated, harmonious identity. If we simply accept others’ characterizations of us, it’s hard to arrive at that feeling of harmony, because we all interact with many people, each of whom is likely to have a different view of who we really are. That’s cacophony, not harmony.

All this drives home just how important it is to affirm a rich sense of self that you can bring to the workplace. The best way to do that, I’ve found, is to come up with a single-page document that lays out a detailed picture of who you understand yourself to be.

The Identity Map

During the past five years I’ve worked with more than 1,000 executive MBA students to define and map out the connections among the various elements of their identities. On average, those executives are in their early thirties, and many have held management positions in industries such as finance, consulting, and healthcare. Yixi Chen, one of my PhD students, and I have used machine-based vision analytics to convert each of those maps into a digital network, which has allowed us to identify the relative importance of various elements listed on the map on the basis of how they’re connected to other identity elements and the central “me.”

Before I discuss our findings, let’s talk about how you can create your own identity map. To do so, you’ll need to take the following steps.

Identify potential elements of your identity.

At the top of a blank page, write these column headings: Career, Education, Family Roles, Hobbies and Interests, Personal Traits, Social Groups, and Other. Under each heading write down any identity elements that seem significant to your understanding of who you are. Anything that is important to your self-concept counts. List as many elements under “Other” as you care to.

Put those elements on the map.

On another blank page, write the word “Me” in the center and draw a circle around it. In a set of concentric circles, put your various elements around the word “Me,” with the elements that are most important to you being closest to the center. As you do this, if you feel that any element you wrote down in the first step doesn’t actually belong, leave it off. And if you think of other elements that should be on the map, add them.

Connect the elements.

The elements on your map represent nodes in a network. Draw lines between any that feel related. For example, on my identity map I connect being an empiricist to Cornell University, where I did my PhD, and I connect being a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs to being Canadian. Many of your nodes are likely to have multiple connections.

Indicate elements that you keep concealed.

Are there any elements on your map that you choose to hide from others, either at work or in other contexts? Highlight them on your map.

Multiplicity and Individuation

In analyzing the identity maps that our executives created, we made some interesting findings. We found, for example, that those who had more elements than others in the group on their maps—a feature I call multiplicity—had more contacts in their professional networks. Those with, say, 26 elements on their maps had professional networks that were 80% larger than the networks of executives who had only 13—a pattern consistent with Claude Grunitzky’s sense that being able to affirm a multifaceted personal identity correlates with being able to build an extensive professional network. Given the considerable evidence that connects professional network ties to outcomes such as salary, bonuses, and promotions, being able to identify many elements of your identity might mean the difference between a thriving career and a floundering one.

We also found that 80% of the executives in our database conceal at least one element of their personal identities at work. By “conceal,” I mean that they either deny the element or avoid discussing it—as opposed to revealing it selectively depending on the context, which is more common.

People often conceal elements of their identities to avoid the costs of social stigma. Mental-health challenges, sexual orientation, low social-class origins, difficult family histories—these are among the elements that people are most likely to keep to themselves. Some people conceal less significant elements that they worry might be viewed negatively by people they interact with—being a video-gamer, say, or a fan of the boy band One Direction.

Many people conceal elements of their identities to avoid social penalties, and sometimes that’s the right decision to make. But concealment has its costs.

Those negative effects can be traced back to at least two sources. Concealment inhibits your ability to make connections with others because it limits the commonalities you can find with them and is a barrier to trust. It also imposes a cognitive tax. As my colleague Michael Slepian has shown, when you conceal parts of your identity, you have to be constantly on guard to protect your secrets—a psychologically exhausting state of being that can detract from your performance at work.

Given these costs, it’s worth taking stock of what you’re concealing about your identity. If you find that it’s something you wish you could be open about, ask yourself whether the costs associated with concealing it outweigh the penalties that you think revealing it would bring.

Another interesting finding we made when studying our executives was that the networks of those who put more identity elements on their maps were more diverse than those of the executives with fewer elements. That’s a huge win, because diverse networks are associated with access to diverse ideas—which in turn lead to better decision-making and more creativity.

People have a natural tendency to connect with others who are like themselves, which raises a question: Why is it that people with more identity elements are able to resist this tendency? Because of a phenomenon known as individuation.

Individuation involves seeing others as individuals rather than as representatives of a social category: It’s an antidote to stereotyping. If somebody has defined a multifaceted identity for themselves and makes you aware of it, it’s hard for you to relegate that person to a single category. If a colleague has made herself known to you primarily as liberal and vegan, you might assume that you know her type. But with multiplicity in her identity, she becomes harder to categorize. After all, who recognizes a social category that involves being not only liberal and vegan but also Catholic, a runner, from the working class, a student at Columbia Business School, and an early riser? With no social category to slot that person into, you have no choice but to view her as an individual. And when you do that, you open up possibilities for understanding, friendship, and an expanding network.

Five Practices

In my research and executive teaching on personal identity, I use a whole-identity approach, which considers all the elements that people understand to be part of their personal identities and focuses on the interdependencies they recognize among those elements. Over the years, as part of that effort, I’ve helped countless leaders and managers at all kinds of organizations develop identity maps of the sort I’ve discussed in this article. The goal of this exercise, I always tell people at the outset, is to help you understand yourself in a way that will allow you to apply best practices for identity management in the workplace—practices that will set you up for better performances, better relationships, and greater well-being.

What are those practices? I believe there are five, all of which I’ve alluded to in this article:

cultivating a multiplicity of elements in your identity
being self-directed when defining that identity
recognizing the harmony that its elements create and excluding any that don’t contribute to it
understanding how those elements relate to the roles you want to succeed in
being as open as possible in presenting your identity to others

I’ve experienced real career benefits from applying these practices myself—such as when I called on my identity element of “improviser” to get into the right mindset to facilitate a particularly tense strategy meeting at a large company. I’ve also seen the impact these practices have had on others: An insurance company CEO saw his career take off when he decided to be open at work about a disability he had been concealing. A communications executive inspired thousands of others by speaking publicly about early-life trauma. A mid-career banker sobbed with relief when she came to understand that she did not have to define herself in terms of the worst experience of her life, regardless of how formative that experience might seem to anyone else. All of us were guided in these moments by the work we’d done in creating our identity maps.

. . .

Ultimately our identities, purposefully curated and artfully deployed, are the substance behind the elusive quality of authenticity. Consider again Claude Grunitzky, the journalist-turned-entrepreneur-turned-financier. He inspired my early research on identity, and in working with him I have realized that a consistent through line connects all his enterprises: Each was built to amplify the contributions of Black people to society.

With compelling credibility, Grunitzky can connect his life experiences to this goal—and over the years, as a result, he has actively developed a wide-ranging, supportive, and influential professional network that has enabled his many successes. When Grunitzky considers how the various elements of his identity come together, he thinks of them as forming the “trunk of the tree,” a solid, stable, and living core from which he can grow, adapt, and thrive—rooted deeply in his past yet always branching upward and outward toward new possibilities.

A version of this article appeared in the March–April 2025 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Paul Ingram is the Kravis Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. He consults on leadership, organizational design, and strategy to companies around the world.