In stepping up to play a leadership role: you can only learn what you need to know about your job and about yourself by doing it--not just thinking about it.
Aristotle observed that people become virtuous by acting virtuous: if you do good, you'll be good. His insight has been confirmed in a wealth of social psychology research showing that people change their minds by first changing their behavior. Simply put, change happens from the outside in, not from the inside out.
In her contrarian new book, "ACT LIKE A LEADER, THINK LIKE A LEADER," Herminia Ibarra, Ph.D., argues that you have to act your way into a new type of leadership thinking instead of thinking your way into it. Branch out beyond your routine work, habitual networks, and historical ways of defining yourself, and these new ways of acting will slowly change the way you think about your work and yourself so you can expand your capacity to be a leader.
We need to develop what Ibarra calls "outsight"--the fresh, external perspective we get when we change from the outside in and when we act like a leader before trying to think like one. The more you experiment with acting like a leader, the more you and others will perceive you as one.
This outside principle is the core idea of this book. The principle holds that the only way to think like a leader is to first act: to plunge yourself into new projects and activities, interact with very different kinds of people, and experiment with unfamiliar ways of getting things done. New experiences not only change how you think--your perspective on what is important and worth doing--but also change who you become.
The stepping-up guidelines are based on three critical sources of outsight.
First, is the kind of work you do.
Second, new roles and activities put you in contact with new and different people who see the world differently than you do.
Rethinking yourself comes last in this framework, because you can only do so productively when you are challenged by new situations and informed by new inputs. Developing outsight is not a one-shot deal but an interactive process of testing old assumptions and experimenting with new possibilities.
Source: Herminia Ibarra: Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader