How Your Identity Changes When You Change Jobs

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Welcome to the hbr ideacast from harvard business review. I'm sarah green carmichael. Whether we work somewhere for four weeks or 40 years, all jobs have a beginning and an end. Leaving a job can be a big transition with a major impact on our identity. It's something our guest today, Herminia Ebarra, has looked at a lot.

We are wired to be storytellers and to make sense of our choices and our decisions. And sometimes as people ask, especially when you're leaving a very blue chip organization, like why would you leave or why would you do that? The story is not necessarily always fully formed or clear in your head or compelling or well told. And so there's also an aspect of telling yourself as a way of creating the story for yourself as much as for the other people around you.

Ibarra's research has been on my mind a lot lately because after almost 12 years at Harvard Business Review, I'm leaving the organization for a new job. This will be my last HBR IdeaCast. I wanted to take this opportunity to look at some of the ways I or any of us can manage these kinds of transitions. And, you know, I wanted an expert to tell me all the things I was feeling and thinking were normal. Herminia Ivara is a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School and she joins us now. Herminia, thanks for being here.

You're very welcome.

So when I decided that I would be leaving hbr, I was caught off guard by the intensity of the emotions I felt about that. Is that normal? Are these transitions always so intense?

I think everybody goes through that even. And I think what often surprises us is when we leave, volunteer and when we leave for something that we really want to do, it still hits because it's a loss. It was such an important part of your life and you're moving on. It's kind of like graduation.

Yeah, well, so how do you deal with it? I mean, because you study this and you've been through it yourself, how do you apply what you know?

You know, I think it's just important for people to realize that they're going to have very strong emotions when they're making big transitions in their career. And, you know, I think that it feels logical to them when they have strong emotions after being fired or if their company closes or something that signals it wasn't me, but that when you're actually proactive about it. You're going to feel the same sense of loss. And the interesting question is, why is it that our identities get so caught up in our companies, in our organizational affiliations, which is what the root of it is. You know, we are what we do, and so much of that is connected to who we work for.

Yeah. I remember a line from an op ed you wrote for the Financial Times, and you had quoted someone who was making a career transition as basically saying that their identity was so entangled with their former employer that it was like clothes that wouldn't come off because they were stuck to the skin. And the person said, I didn't even know what I looked like without it. And that really resonated with me, that sense of like an identity that is so tangled up in what you do. How does that happen?

Well, I was actually remembering that very same description because it was so vivid. Part of it is when you're leaving, you know what, that has been very vividly because you've lived it. But the new thing is still kind of intangible. It's some kind of fuzzy image or maybe hope or dream, or maybe you even haven't thought about it very concretely. So you're trading off something that you know very well for something that is very unformulated and nascent and that creates uncertainty. The other aspect of it, and I, you know, I know who this person was and who he worked for is he worked for a company with a very strong identity. And so you would go anywhere and you say, what do you do? And all you to do was say, you know, just like, oh, I work for Harvard, or I work for this company. And the company itself had a strong culture and reinforced it. And, and so all of those things add to the fact that your identity starts to merge with the company's identity.

So how do you start to disentangle from that? When you're in the middle of a transition.

There'S really not that much you can do except keep moving forward. You know, there was a very famous book when it comes to identity studies called Becoming an Ex. And it was the research of a former nun who left the order and as a result of her experience leaving the religious order, became very interested in that specific transition. And then her research advisor said, no, you can't just study yourself. You know, let's look at other kinds of transitions as well. And so she did, you know, from things that were fairly mundane, like moving into different career, to things that were, you know, pretty big, like changing Changing sex, gender. And there were very common patterns. And one common pattern is as people start to see that they are going to be leaving or becoming an ex, they start looking for reaching out to people outside their organization or outside their profession or just in different places as ways of helping themselves pull themselves out of what can often be very tight and cohesive social circles. And so that's where our networks can be very helpful because they can show the way towards different people and different role models and different ways of defining yourself. Hmm.

Yeah. I think one of the things I've been wondering is a lot of people change jobs nowadays every sort of two or three years, you know, or they have portfolio careers, or they're kind of doing a mix of different things. In my own case, that's not true at all. I was here at HBR for almost 12 years. Um, but I'm wondering, when people are bouncing around more, do these transitions become easier because you're practicing them more, or are you just sort of constantly going through the cycle of these feelings sort of more regularly?

So I think that's a fantastic question and one that I haven't studied directly and one that I have really wondered about. What I have seen in the world that you've described, where there is more gig and there is more flux, and that is that people need to find other ways of defining themselves that are not necessarily the organizational affiliation. And it's important for them to find them. And so some of them have maybe an anchor role in the portfolio that provides more of a sense of identity and community. Some define it much more around the work itself, or perhaps a community of kindred spirits of some sort. But all of these things add a little complication, because in our primitive minds, we're used to saying, oh, I'm a professor, or, oh, I work at the London Business School. For a lot of people, that's enough. You're categorized. It's shorthand. Whereas with portfolios and this kind of flow, you have more explaining to do. And even as it's become more common, it still is not the norm. Now, maybe in California it is. There are places where it's much more so, but it is still a smaller percentage of the population than that which defines itself by a very concrete company identity or professional identity. I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer.

What are some of the biggest mistakes people tend to make during these transition times?

Well, you know, there's lots of different kinds of transitions. So you've made a decision to go and work somewhere. That's one another is you've made a decision to take a pause because you want to go work something in something else, do something else, but you don't have the time to figure out what it is. Another is you're thinking about slowing down or. And so you're going to actually take the pause. You see what I mean? They're all very different. And I think a common ground across them all is you really need to know kindred spirits and you really need to have people with whom you can talk fairly candidly about what it is that you're experiencing, because it can be. Can catch you by surprise in the intensity of it. And it is a bit comforting to know that other people have gone through it, that other people, you know, a common thing is you'll just be too exhausted to do much of anything if that's your mind telling you, you know, you just need to decompress from what's been a very intense experience. So really having some social support is a very big part of it. And the other thing that I see people do, and this comes often a little bit later, it's the whole what's your story? We are wired to be storytellers and to make sense of our choices and our decisions. And sometimes as people ask, especially when you're leaving a very blue chip organization, like why would you leave? Or why would you do that? The story is not necessarily always fully formed or clear in your head, or compelling or well told. And so there's also an aspect of telling yourself as a way of creating the story for yourself as much as for the other people around you. We can't apply this kind of linear, rational logic to transitions as well as we can to maybe other kind of smaller work decisions. These are big things. And maybe a mistake is to try to rationalize it all, or certainly to go just with the mind and not with the heart, or just to try to be as rational as possible about these things. Because usually there is something inside us that's guiding these very important choices about what we do next in life.

So it's interesting because you have studied specifically transitions and leadership sort of together, the transition into leadership and how that shapes identity. And I'm wondering if these job transitions are sort of different in organizations if the person is in a leadership role.

So there's a. I mean, those are big ones and they're very emotional. You know, in my working identity study, there were some people who were in that situation. I still remember one person talking about how he had planned out the transition and so lived through a Lame duck period as a leader. And he could actually feel that people weren't responding to him in the same way. And so he was living with the markers of his declining power on a day to day basis and how hard that was even when you think you have a pretty solid ego or I talked to not that long ago about somebody who was stepping down from the leadership of a big firm and he had planned it all out and all of this, but then, you know, there was just this kind of emotional upheaval that, that happened and you know, am I going to screw this up and what's going to happen? And it reminded me a little bit of Jeff Sonnenfeld's book about the hero's farewell and all of the emotions and the mythology around a leader stepping down, particularly a leader who had been around for a while and had had a real impact.

Yeah, I have been in definitely a situation where beloved leaders have left and when a colleague leaves you behind, you sort of keep in touch with them, you miss them, but it doesn't really affect your day to day work. But when someone in a leadership role leaves the organization, there's also a big impact on the organization of that person's absence.

Yeah, it's usually a changing of regime in some way, shape or form. And generally speaking, I mean it's not always, sometimes the successor is handpicked by that leader, but oftentimes it's a changing of the guard and a change of the agenda that person put in place, which makes it bittersweet maybe.

So you mentioned earlier that one of the things that's hard about leaving a job that you have loved and identified with is that you know what you're leaving, but the future thing that you're going to, that even if you're excited about it, is still unknown. Can we talk a little bit more about that? I mean, what happens when you then kind of start to get into that new role? How do you start to then shift your identity as you take on the new opportunity?

Right. So for a lot of people there's always a bit of a sense of surprise in that. You know, as much as you've done your homework, you haven't lived it and you haven't been in the role. And so there's, you probably have in your head conscious and unconscious expectations, but reality never quite jives with that. It's just like when you read a book and then you see the movie and the character looks different than how you imagined him or her. You know, there's that aspect and so there's a real need to make sense of it. What am I experiencing? Is this as good a fit as I thought? How do I contribute here? What's the learning curve going to be? And then kind of part of what then starts to shape your sense of identity is the classic stuff. It's what you do, so what kind of skills it engages. And you know, the kind of the you are, what you do in the sense that it engages things that you're good at that start to define you. And it changes the network around you, at least in terms of the people you're interacting with to do your job, who will see you in a certain way, who will, you know. In some cases, these are opportunities to reinvent yourself simply because the new people around you haven't seen your historical you, how you've been. And so there are opportunities, and sometimes there are things you've learned that you haven't had a real chance to exercise because they'd be too much of a departure from how you've been. And so they give you license to play around a little bit more with new ways of leading or working or being. And so they give us. They give us a little bit more license to refashion ourselves, but they also impose on us a different set of expectations.

One of the things I've always liked about your work on this topic is that you do talk about this as a playful process. And I'm wondering why, why, why is it helpful to think of this in playful terms?

Because when you're in a new situation, your old repertory isn't necessarily the most appropriate, and because it's helpful to deviate and vary in order to learn. The only way we learn is by doing something different. See what happens and whether that's something useful or not. And so the process of learning requires doing some different things. What's fun about the idea of playfulness is it's not play in the literal sense of the word, but playfulness in the sense of giving yourself license not to be consistent and giving yourself the freedom to just try things out without necessarily having a very specific purpose. It replaces the logic of efficiency with the logic of exploration. And because transitions open things up, they're natural times in which to give that full reign.

Do you think, you know, is it kind of hard to do that because, you know, you're in a. You're going to a new situation, you want to succeed, you want to prove yourself. And the idea that it might be sort of nonlinear or inefficient, or you might sort of take the long Way around. That's kind of scary.

That is true. But anyway, the new situation is going to throw you for a loop anyhow because you're not going to be able to plug in exactly to how you deliver at your most effective in the old setting. It's going to throw all kinds of detours and inefficiencies in your way. So you can say to yourself, oh, no, let me get back to the straight and narrow. Or you can say to yourself, oh, this is interesting, you know, let me go with this and see what happens. And you do have a little bit of license at the beginning to be a newbie and to not know what you're doing. You know, it's not going to last forever.

Yeah, it's interesting. I'm thinking some people might hear this and say, well, what's the big deal? You should work to live and not live to work. And your work shouldn't have such a big impact on your identity. But I'm wondering, is that realistic? If we want work to be meaningful, isn't it understandable that it would have a powerful influence over how we see ourselves?

Of course, that's the paradox of it. The phrase you are what you do could be taken in many different ways, and the first of the ways in which you expressed it, you are what you do is what none of us want is to be a kind of like a narrow thing that's only defined by the instrumental logic of making a living. But you are what you do in the more Aristotelian way is you are what you do every day, what you do habitually, what you do most often, how much that shapes you. And because we work all the time and, you know, we work more hours than we do most anything else, it's going to shape you. And so better to recognize it and to make sure it's shaping you in ways that you want to be shaped.

For some people, they might have to go through some transitions like this while not actually leaving their company. You know, mostly I've been asking you questions about implying, you know, sort of a big job change or leaving the company. But there might be situations where, you know, people are saying, oh, this is, you know, we had a big reorg and I went through something similar, or, you know, I got a big promotion and I went through something similar. How are these transitions different?

In some transitions, you have to decide, I'm leaving or it's time to change and you go. And that's very different than when you are promoted or shifted to another role and position within the same organization. And this is back to how much identity is something that is social and interactive. You know, just simply in the need to say to people, oh, no, I've left Harvard, or as opposed to, yeah, I'm in a new assignment. They're very different things. They signal very different things. And so you get different kinds of reactions to them. And also, as I said earlier, there's just much more unknown, surprise, uncertainty in moving to a different company, a different career, a different profession.

I guess then maybe my final question here is just, is there anything sort of really concrete or specific that you recommend to people like me in these situations? A question to ask, an exercise to do, you know, a place to go? Is there anything super concrete that we should keep in mind, really?

What I said before about talking to people who've gone through these things about their experience, but, you know, not a big fan of sitting down and doing self reflection around these things. I think the self reflection comes a little bit later. I think really just embracing the fact that it is a bit emotional and talking to people about their own experiences as a way of making sense of your own is just a wonderful way of going about it, paying attention to what they are and understanding that there's something very exciting here. I don't know what's going to happen next. We have a lot of certainty and routine and predictability in our lives. And how wonderful to be able to have that little sense of thrill and mystery about what's coming down the pike.

Yeah, it's a whole new adventure.

It sure is. I hope it's a wonderful one. Sarah.

Thank you, Herminia. Thank you.

You're very welcome.

That's Herminia Ebarra, professor of Organizational behavior at London Business School. This episode was produced by Mary Dew and Kurt Nickish. We got technical and production help from Rob Eckhart. Adam Bucholtz is our audio product manager. Since this is my last episode, I would also like to thank our CEO David Wan, who may be the only person on the planet to listen to every single episode of the HBR ideacast. David. Thank you, listeners. I cannot tell you what a joy and a privilege it has been to be your host this past decade. Hosting this show has been for many, many years the best part of an absolutely fantastic job. Thank you all so much for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. Signing off, I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.