How Your Identity Changes When You Change Jobs

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2018

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Herminia Ibarra, a professor at the London Business School, argues that job transitions — even exciting ones that you've chosen — can come with all kinds of unexpected emotions. Going from a job that is known and helped define your identity to a new position brings all kinds of challenges. Ibarra says that it's important to recognize how these changes are affecting you but to keep moving forward and even take the opportunity to reinvent yourself in your new role.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Looking for a good book? Pick up your next business read during HBR Cyber Monday sale.
0:06.0	Head to store.HBR.org and use promo code cyber23 to save big on HBR books, tools, curated collections and more. That's store.
0:16.6	HBR.P. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green-Carl. Whether we work somewhere for four weeks or 40 years all jobs have a beginning and an end.
0:52.0	Leaving a job can be a big transition with a major
0:55.5	impact on our identity. It's something our guest today, Herminia Ibarra, has
1:00.9	looked at a lot. We are wired to be storytellers and to make sense of our
1:06.8	choices and our decisions and sometimes as people ask especially when you're leaving a very blue chip organization like
1:15.6	why would you leave or why would you do that the story is not necessarily always
1:22.1	fully formed or clearing your head or compelling or well told.
1:26.0	And so there's also an aspect of telling yourself as a way of creating the story for yourself as much as for the other people around you.
1:37.0	Ibarra's research has been on my mind a lot lately because after almost 12 years at Harvard Business Review I'm leaving the
1:45.6	organization for a new job. This will be my last HBR idea cast. I wanted to take this opportunity to look at some of the ways I or any of us can
1:56.2	manage these kinds of transitions. And you know I wanted an expert to tell me all the things I was
2:01.7	feeling and thinking were normal.
2:03.7	Hermonia Avara is a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School and she
2:08.2	joins us now.
2:09.3	Hermonia, thanks for being here.
2:11.4	You're very welcome. So when I decided that I would be leaving HBO, I was caught off guard by the intensity of the emotions I felt about that. Is that
2:27.0	normal? Are these transitions always so intense?
2:31.0	I think everybody goes through that even I think what often surprises us is when we
2:37.8	leave voluntarily and when we leave for something that we really want to do it still hits because it's a
2:45.9	loss it was such an important part of your life and you're moving on it's kind
	...

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