Most leaders can tell you exactly what they need to accomplish.
Revenue targets. Team goals. Initiatives to launch, problems to solve, metrics to hit. They’ve thought carefully about what needs to get done and how to get there.
Far fewer have answered a different question — one that turns out to matter more.
Who did you decide to be?
Not what you need to do. Not what your role requires. Not what outcomes your organization expects of you. But who you are as a leader — the story you’re telling, the environment you’re creating, the experience people have of working alongside you.
Most leadership problems I encounter aren’t problems of strategy or execution. They’re problems of identity.
Leaders who haven’t defined who they want to be default to managing tasks. And task management, done well, gets things done. But it doesn’t inspire people to bring their best or go above and beyond. It doesn’t create the kind of culture where people feel like what they do matters — where they see themselves as part of something bigger than themselves.
Think about the cathedral builders.
There’s an old story about three people working at a job site. When a passerby asks the first worker what he’s doing, he says he’s “mixing cement for that guy” and points to a second fellow. So the traveler asks the same question of the second man, who says he’s laying bricks. Nearby, a third man is sweeping and cleaning up. When asked what he’s doing, he replies, “I’m building a cathedral.”
Same task. Entirely different experience of it. How we see ourselves in the work and our contribution matters.
Leaders who have defined who they are — who understand their story and can articulate it — create cathedral builders. Leaders who haven’t tend to create doers. Doers aren’t committed the same way builders are.
The story you tell as a leader determines what people believe about the work.
Here’s what makes this hard. Defining your leadership identity requires a kind of reflection that most leaders never make time for. They’re too busy doing. Too busy managing. Too busy solving the next problem to step back and ask what kind of leader they actually want to be.
And in the absence of that clarity, something fills the gap. Usually habit. Often fear. Sometimes the ghost of whoever managed them.
None of those is a leadership identity. They’re defaults.
I think about this in terms of story and genre. You can take the same characters, the same starting point, the same situation — say, a young couple taking a vacation at a lake — and tell it as a romantic comedy, a thriller, or a horror film. The genre shapes everything that follows. The decisions characters make. The way conflict gets handled. What the ending looks like.
Leadership works the same way.
If you don’t decide what kind of story you’re telling, one gets decided for you. And the people following you will spend their time trying to figure out which movie they’re in — instead of showing up fully for the one you could be making together.
The most important leadership question isn’t what are we doing. It’s what we’re building — and why it matters.
When leaders can answer that — clearly, honestly, with enough specificity that people can actually feel it — something shifts. People stop just doing their jobs and start caring about the outcome. They stop waiting to be told and start looking for ways to contribute.
Because they finally understand the story they’re part of.
Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash
