Learn from people you don't want to be like

Think of someone in your network or at work, who you look up to. Someone you’d like to be more like in a few years?

Now point to one thing they do, that you could apply right now.

Most of us don’t have an answer to that second question.

We had this conversation in the Keys To Impact Community recently. We could all think of a role model we have, but we couldn’t point to a specific behaviour that we could actually use.

And that’s a problem - having a role model isn’t enough, if you don’t know how to learn from them.

I will share with you the practical steps you can take - but before that, let’s find out why role models are so important.

Why we need role models

Research by Albert Bandura (Professor of Psychology at Stanford) in the 1960s/70s showed that most of what we know how to do, we picked up by watching someone else do it first. You form a picture of how the behaviour works, and that picture guides you later when it’s your turn.

That’s the reason why a lot of feedback you get also isn’t helpful, for example “Be more strategic.” or “You need more executive presence.” You don’t really know how that looks like in real life. But if you watch someone who already has whatever your manager is describing, you’ll know within twenty minutes what they meant. And that’s what role models are for.

Pick the person who gets things done

Our instinct is to look for someone like us, someone we can picture ourselves becoming.

But that doesn’t tell you whether they’re any good.

To check, ask yourself: When this person proposes something, does it happen? When they say a project will be done by March, is it really finished then? After the meeting ends, does their plan get implemented?

If the answer is yes, they’re worth studying. Their behaviour produces results, which means copying some of it will probably produce results for you too.

Why we reject good role models
 

Now here is where it gets tricky.

Many of the women I speak to look around at the effective people in their organisation and think: I don’t want to be like any of them. The colleague who always gets his projects funded is pushy. The director who gets his way talks over people. None of that feels like me.

So they conclude there’s nothing to learn from anyone nearby, and they carry on doing excellent technical work and hoping to be noticed.

Herminia Ibarra, Professor at London Business School, found exactly this pattern. She studied professionals moving into more senior roles and saw two groups. One group borrowed pieces of style from the people above them and adjusted them to fit. The other group looked at their managers, decided they didn’t want to be like them, and rejected them as role models. Without a perfect model to copy, imitation felt fake, so they stuck to proving their technical mastery instead.

The first group arrived much faster at a style that was effective and authentic. The second group didn’t only progress more slowly, but their managers read the refusal to adapt as a lack of effort, and gave them less coaching than everyone else. (I have linked the article below - Ibarra calls this ‘the authenticity paradox’)

There’s a reason this is more difficult for us women. Ibarra and Petriglieri (INSEAD) studied professional women in male-dominated organisations. They built a leader identity that felt authentic to them, and that very effort then blocked them from becoming the leader they wanted to be. (I have also linked this research below - it’s the concept of the ‘impossible selves’)

Look for the mechanism

The way out is to separate what the person is like from what they do to actually create results.

Take the colleague who always gets his projects funded. You see pushiness. Watch more closely and something else is going on. He speaks to the finance lead the week before the meeting. By the time the decision is discussed, one person in the room has already agreed with him and says so out loud.

That’s clever sequencing - and nothing to do with pushiness. You can do it yourself for your next project, and you don’t have to change who you are.

I experienced the same myself - in the beginning of my career, I looked up to couple of Directors in my company, who had achieved great things in their career, but were loud and outgoing - whereas I was thoughtful and quiet. I tried to change myself to fit with this - but I found it really exhausting and it never really worked.

What I should have copied instead was one habit. They always tied their work back to the numbers the business cared about - in every update they gave. That had nothing to do with how loudly they spoke.

Don’t copy just one person

Once you’re looking at mechanisms rather than whole personalities, you don’t need to find one person who has everything - and you can learn from people whose personality doesn’t resonate.

Three kinds of role models you should consider:

One or two steps ahead of you. For example the senior engineer who was promoted into Principal engineer, or the manager who just started but has an amazing reputation internally for the effectiveness of their meetings. Their moves are still within reach, so you can copy one this week.

Senior, in your network. For example an exec you might see four times a year. Rare access, but this is where you see what “executive presence” looks like when someone does it properly.

Famous and far away. Brené Brown, or whoever inspires you. You can watch the way she talks, what words she uses. (But watch out to not consume too much of her videos - there is a limit to what you can learn without being in the room)

So what I’d encourage you to do: Take how one person handles disagreement, how a second one writes an update, how a third says “I don’t know” without making others doubt them. That now means you’re assembling a set of behaviours, not copying someone else’s personality.

And that’s close to how Ibarra defines authenticity. Not something fixed inside you, but your ability to take pieces from other people’s styles and make them your own.

Your action this week

Pick one person who you’d like to learn from.

Choose one moment that is effective, for example how they open a meeting or what they say when someone challenges them in front of others.

Watch them carefully and write down their actual words. Then try it yourself, in a meeting.

You can’t control whether your manager ever gives you a useful example. But nobody can stop you watching, and nobody needs to approve it. 

PS. Want to be part of conversations like this one and hear who other women in STEM are learning from? Join the community here.

PPS. The research by Ibarra on the authenticity paradox is linked here. And the paper on the impossible selves you can find here.