Introduction

Here I was on my bimonthly call with my leadership coach, presenting a recent workplace situation in which I felt that my response as the leader of a multidisciplinary research group had been inadequate. As per usual—and to my continual amazement at her skill—my coach helped me unpack the situation, getting at the levers of leadership I could actually action to shape behavioural patterns.

Oblivious to myself at the time, but not to my coach, I hadn’t developed a self-conception as a leader. This might sound paradoxical for someone who was proud to be in a leadership position and eager to effect positive change. But my real self-conception was that of a knower—someone perpetually concerned with not knowing enough—and of someone who liked to go home with a clear sense that their actions had “moved the needle” that day.

What kept repeating itself in coaching sessions was my coach’s attempt to make me understand that my work of leadership mattered: that I was more than an expert, that I now achieved results by acting with and through others. Yet the film playing in my head was stuck on an individual hero story, where I rose and fell in the eyes of a diffuse authority that seemed to continuously judge my performance in terms of how much I knew about the subject matter and methods our group engaged with. Despite nominal endorsement of the importance of academic leadership in my work environment, there were many institutional signals teaching my body that anything other than traditional results—projects completed, papers published—was the safest way to land my next job.

I was struggling between an embodied identity and a perspective that I abstractly knew was important, but could not yet inhabit.

Identity work is a crucial aspect of becoming a leader

There is increasing awareness that professional identities play a central role in how people act, decide, and take responsibility at work. They are relatively stable self-conceptions that provide a sense of orientation, values, and legitimacy for action, and that position a person within a larger organisational context. They matter for enacting any professional role, including leadership.

Leadership development, however, still tends to focus primarily on skills and competencies. There are skills for leading yourself, for leading others, and for leading organisations. These can be taught, trained, and practiced—often one training day at a time.

But in leadership, the gap between skill and identity is particularly consequential. Skills answer the question how to lead; identities answer the question from where one is entitled to lead at all. Doing identity work is therefore an essential complement to mastering leadership skills. Or, to paraphrase Herminia Ibarra: we have to think like leaders in order to act like leaders.

Leadership identities in science: Beyond the expert–leader dichotomy

There are several pitfalls when engaging with leadership identity as a coach or trainer.

One pitfall is to confound professional roles with identity. A role perspective might, for instance, distinguish between an expert role and a leadership or management role. Roles matter, because they come with distinct responsibilities and defined places in an organisational chart. Defining and assigning roles is an important tool of management.

But an org chart alone doesn’t make an identity.

In many industries, the role–identity distinction becomes blurred because a management career is a clearly differentiated path, with role and identity converging over time. But this is not the case in fields where authority remains closely tied to professional expertise, such as science and medicine. Academic leadership was traditionally conceived as a rotating responsibility: taking one’s turn as head of department or dean, only to return to the faculty afterwards. Leadership was not understood as a distinct career or identity, but as a temporary deviation from “real” academic work. The same holds true for a surgeon acting as a hospital’s medical director.

Another pitfall is to conceive of the development of professional identities as an individual project, when in fact it is the tension between individuals and their embedding in organisational structures and cultures that is generative of professional identities.

A brief look at professional identity formation in academia makes this visible. What comes to mind immediately are Max Weber’s reflections on science as a vocation: a calling rather than a job. Closely related is the norm of scientific autonomy—an institutional space shielded from political interference—and the ideal of collegial egalitarianism. Together, these elements provide a powerful self-conception: science as something other than ordinary work, protected from outside meddling, with peer interaction as its central organising principle. These values are not merely abstract ideals; they are continuously socialised and reinforced through everyday academic practices—seminars and lab meetings, conference presentations and hallway conversations—where newcomers learn, often implicitly, what counts as legitimate work, authority, and belonging in science.

To complicate matters, a recent study of German professors identified not one, but four distinct leadership identity types (Rehbock et al., 2023):

• Rejecting leadership, based on a self-conception as a specialist: collaborating on scientific thinking while explicitly rejecting responsibility for others’ work.

• Accommodating leadership, grounded in an identity as mentor and teacher of the next generation.

• Incorporating leadership, by embracing a management role—for example in applied research teams, with a clear division of labour between strategy, funding acquisition, and execution.

• Emphasising leadership, through seeing oneself as a shaper of science’s societal impact and deliberately seeking out positions of influence.

This plurality can be understood as the product of an institution in transformation, with its traditional value of autonomy being challenged by neo-liberal ideas of economic usefulness and hypercompetition, by increasing demands for societal relevance, and by growing criticism of toxic workplace cultures.

What matters here is that identity formation interacts with values circulating inside an institution—and that these values themselves change over time.

Practical implications for leadership development

So what does this mean for leadership development, especially in academia? How do you develop leadership sensibilities in senior academics who might object to the very notion of leadership on the grounds that it represents a threat to traditional academic life?

Proposition 1: Skills are necessary but not sufficient.

Teaching leadership skills and competencies is essential—and well suited to training formats. But without identity work, these skills often remain unused or feel inauthentic.

Proposition 2: Don’t take terminology for granted.

Resisting business-school language is not the same as resisting the function it points to. The same applies to policy agendas such as “research culture.” Engaging seriously with resistance to particular terms can open space for shared meaning-making rather than shutting it down.

Proposition 3: Develop a new capability without invalidating an existing identity.

Stepping into leadership in science or medicine means developing hybrid identities: combinations of expert, mentor, manager, and institutional representative. These hybrid identities are not transitional or deficient versions of “real” leadership. They are the functional end state of leadership in science and medicine. Focus on creating awareness of how embracing leadership enhances scientific work, rather than making categorical distinctions between expert and leader.

Proposition 4: Hone observation and reflexivity.

Turnover in academia is so rapid that the effects of leadership—good and bad—often remain invisible. The people whose behaviour, motivation, or confidence you shape as a leader may leave the organisation once a contract ends, frequently before the consequences of your actions fully unfold. As a result, a crucial ingredient of adult learning is missing: the opportunity to see yourself having an effect over time.

Leadership development must therefore deliberately strengthen observation and reflexivity. Emerging leaders need support in noticing how their actions influence others in the short term and in experimenting with small, low-risk interventions—such as explicitly acknowledging someone’s contribution and observing what shifts. Making these effects visible helps leadership emerge as ordinary, learnable work rather than an abstract responsibility or a delayed judgement on performance.

Proposition 5: It takes psychological safety to try something new.

Identity development requires experimentation, and experimentation requires psychological safety. Peer groups can play a crucial role here, offering spaces in which new ways of being a leader can be tried out without immediate sanction.

Conclusion

What this experience taught me is that leadership in science is not about becoming something other than a scientist. It is about enlarging what counts as scientific work. When leadership is understood as identity work—grounded in expertise, enacted through relationships, and shaped by institutional values—it becomes possible without abandoning the commitments that draw people into science in the first place. Supporting leadership transitions in academia, then, is less a matter of teaching better tools and more a matter of creating conditions in which hybrid professional identities can legitimately take root.

References and further reading

Ibarra, Herminia. 2015. Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader. Harvard Business Review Press.

Rehbock, Stephanie K., Sylvia V. Hubner, Kristin Knipfer, and Claudia V. Peus. 2023. “What Kind of Leader Am I? An Exploration of Professionals’ Leader Identity Construal.” Applied Psychology 72 (2): 559–87.

Smith, Jan, Julie Rattray, Tai Peseta, and Daphne Loads, eds. 2016. Identity Work in the Contemporary University: Exploring an Uneasy Profession. Sense Publishers.

Sunderman, Hannah M., and Jonathan Orsini. 2024. “Leader(ship) Identity Development and Meaning Making: A Scoping Review.” Journal of Leadership Studies 18 (3): 23–47.

Weber, Max, and John Dreimanis, eds. 2008. Max Weber’s Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations. New York: Algora Publishing.