Leadership Transition: Reclaiming Professional Identity in a New Senior Role

Starting a senior leadership role can feel overwhelming. You get impostor syndrome and lose your confidence. Periods of transition can, however, be turned into a time to explore and learn, if you reclaim your professional identity.

Let me take you back to 2019. I returned to work in the New Year in a new role, having been promoted from Head to Director of Regulation. With this came formal accountability for maintaining the registers of political parties (registration being a prerequisite for standing candidates in elections). 

I’d been running the registration team for years. I knew how to lead, govern and structure the team. Now I was starting a senior leadership role, but surely swapping delivery for accountability wouldn’t be that hard. 

I was wrong. So wrong, in fact, that I almost lost my professional identity. 

Professional Identity and Impostor Syndrome

Your professional identity is who you are in your organisational role. It is formed from the experiences you have had, the values you hold, and the skills and knowledge you bring. It guides your conduct and shapes your judgement. 

At times of transition - such as moving into a new senior leadership role - you are thrust into new challenges, new contexts and new demands. These pressures can fracture the coherence between values, judgement and behaviour. It is easy to slip into short-term, narrow and reactive ways of thinking. 

This is not a negative judgement of you. Much is a result of the stress response, which is autonomic and out of your control. The challenge of transition is often less about capability and more about identity. In your previous role, you knew who you were, how to act and how to make decisions. While settling into a new senior role, you can slip into self-doubt, impostor syndrome, defensiveness or paralysis. You lose your sense of who you are.

Sustaining Identity in a New Role

Take a breath. Pause. Think.

Here was my thought process back in 2019. 

First, realise that I no longer run the registration team. I have a highly skilled and trusted Head of Service who does that. 

Second, acknowledge that right now I am surrounded by uncertainty. I have a new context to understand, one where I am accountable for the registers and can expect to be scrutinised by the CEO, the Board, political parties and the media. 

Third, refocus my time and energy on Director-level actions, choosing who I spend time with and what I spend time on to make progress on assurance and oversight of the registration process. 

Finally, recognise that my experience, values, skills and knowledge are still there. My professional identity is still there. I still know who I am, and I can learn what to do and how to make decisions in this new senior role.

The point was not to become instantly certain of myself. It was to reconnect with the things that define my professional identity.

Professional Identity is Your Guide to Sustainable Change 

Starting a new senior role does not only test your skills. It tests your sense of who you are, how you judge and how you want to lead. That is why leadership transitions can feel so unsettling. Raw Identity helps leaders reclaim professional coherence so they can act with clarity, confidence and integrity in demanding roles.

Exploring the uncertainties of a new role as a landscape to learn from and navigate through requires you to pause and study the map. Your professional identity is your compass. By sustaining it you will find your way.