When Your Job Is Your Identity, Professional Failure Hurts More
“It is critical that we learn to distinguish and differentiate our roles from our self. We get into trouble when we lose ourselves in our role instead of thinking in a detached way about how the role is viewed by others. It can be very rewarding to throw all our education, training, talent, and passion into our work roles, but we forget that others in our organizations are reacting to the role we represent in their work lives, not necessarily the interesting and thoughtful people we think we are.”
In his recent article on HBR, KONU partner and Harvard Lecturer Tim O’Brien shares insights from his courses at Harvard Kennedy School, where he tries to help students disentangle themselves from their roles so that they can be better leaders and make the differences they want to make.