Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School. Prior to joining LBS, she served on the INSEAD and Harvard Business School faculties.

An authority on leadership and career development, Thinkers 50 ranks Ibarra among the top management thinkers in the world. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, a judge for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, one of Apolitica’s 100 most influential people in gender policy, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the 2018 recipient of the Academy of Management’s Scholar-Practitioner Award for her research’s contribution to management practice.

She is the author of two best-selling books, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Her most recent article, The Leader as Coach, won the 2019 Warren Bennis Prize for the best leadership article in the Harvard Business Review.

How to Step up to Bigger Leadership Roles

Today’s breakneck pace of technological change has an immense impact on leaders, and as a result, on their organisations’ capacity to transform. All too often, executives remain stuck in outdated mindsets and modes of operating, even when they recognise the need to reinvent themselves in order to step up in their careers. This interactive session upends traditional, introspective advice and says act first — in order to change your way of thinking. Whether you are moving into a new role or stepping up in your current post, in this session you will learn to change through action, not reflection, and to apply a growth mindset to our own leadership capacities.

Learning objectives:

• Identify how to redefine your job so that your contributions are more strategic and client-centred.
• Learn how to expand your network so that you connect to and learn from a bigger range of stakeholders inside and outside your firm.
• Understand different ways of defining authenticity in order to give yourself permission to stretch beyond your ‘natural’ leadership styles and habitual ways of contributing.

Leadership Skills for Organisational Transformation

Today more than ever we need leaders who can help transform our firms — so they become more agile, more innovative, more digitally savvy, more customer-centric, more inclusive and/or more human. Herminia has found that five leadership skills are vital for moving our organizations in this desired direction, increasing their people’s capacity to deal with today’s adaptive challenges: situations in which problems are complex, there isn’t an obvious answer, and, the brainpower and enthusiasm of many, not just the top leaders, is needed to solve them.

The Five Skills:

• Cross-cutting: developing networks of relationships that extend and connect to a diversity of people and groups.
• Collaborating: fostering candor and psychological safety to increase team performance.
• Coaching: asking questions to develop others’ potential.
• Culture-shaping: proactively shaping organizational culture and mindsets, including recognizing and modifying practices that are no longer fit for purpose.
• Connecting: growing in empathy and authentic leadership.