Identity and Impact

We are all just back from our first international leadership retreat since Covid kicked us for a spin. Twenty-five leaders running high-performance black belt practices as subject matter experts. An amazing group of people. I noticed a significant lack of ego amongst the group and I wasn’t the only one, many a person shared the same perspective at different times privately with me.

Lisa O’Neill, the CEO of Thought Leaders, was the architect of the experience and built extreme care into every moment of the experience. Lisa is a retreat master and this mastery was on show all week.

High achievers + Caring experiences = less Ego.

I am fortunate to be an elder in this community. As such, I am welcome at everything, required to do nothing, but invited to share privately and publicly if I see anything worth a comment.

I saw high achievers focused on the impact they are making and less about the identity they were curating. Make no mistake there were deeply personal, reflective conversations but they had an authentic, vulnerable quality to them. Open-hearted, clear-minded, agency-oriented conversations, respecting the differences between us and the integrations that make us-us.

If you want to remove the ego from your top-performing teams, have them focus on the impacts they’re making and not just the results they are generating as they apply to their own personal identity.

Rebecca Sutherns, another great facilitation leader and a black belt in our community, shared some great tips for people starting to regather, tips and strategies that I think are both inspired and deeply instructional. One that I find super relevant to the experience of our first leadership retreat in some time was:

“Don’t snap back into old patterns, but instead be intentional about setting new habits of collaboration. Our context has changed and so have we — we would be wise to co-create new rhythms rather than assuming that our old ones will still fit.”

 

Read Rebecca’s full thoughts here: https://rebeccasutherns.com/tips-for-regathering

Bottom line for me, bring your people together, do it well, and use this moment to break old patterns or ‘rhythms’.

The habit of “What is the impact that you are making as a group?” versus “What is the identity that you’re creating or curating for yourself?” helps us become a ‘we’ and move away from purely a ‘me’.