What identities is your organization creating?
The deeper leadership question is not just what people do, but who they have to become to do it.
When we moved in December, I unpacked a few old “academic self-help” books by Donald E. Hall that I once assigned in introductory doctoral seminars. The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual is now more than twenty years old. Antiquated in the sense that it was written when tenure-track jobs and graduate school were a coherent, linear pathway, and the old guard of the academy still set the tone.
I trained a generation of scholarly leaders to navigate institutional cultures, decode their norms, and succeed within them. I mentored academic and professional identity formation for decades.
But here’s how I see it now: We were teaching people identities that helped them survive and succeed inside institutional identities.
This connection is why we often think of career identity (and, therefore, the rupture and grief) as being a personal thing. But identity rupture starts with culture. And we, as leaders and people managers, can cultivate cultures that build team resilience instead of individualization.
My scholarly work examined how institutional contexts shape identity, particularly the internalized expectations around productivity, competence, loyalty, and belonging.
Organizations socialize these identities in their workers.
Think about it. If your systems reward constant availability, people internalize overing as worth. If speed outranks discernment, urgency becomes identity. If belonging requires self-sacrifice, burnout becomes chronic and normalized.
Now I ask a different question: What are your people having to become in order to thrive in your organization?
Are you cultivating adaptive, whole identities or high-performing survival identities?
Because survival identities scale burnout. Whole identities scale resilience.
This is where essentializing moves from an individual coaching tool to a leadership strategy.
Essentializing, at the organizational level, is the structured process of:
Clarifying what truly matters versus what has been institutionalized as constant urgency
Redesigning reward systems that unconsciously incentivize depletion
Building cultures where capacity, seasonality, and humanity are not liabilities
Aligning identity, performance, and sustainability
Building resilient leaders and teams is identity architecture.
If you are leading through retention challenges, morale erosion, culture drift, or AI recalibration, the deeper question is:
What identities are you asking folks to inhabit? What identities are you as a leader leading with?
This is the consulting lens I bring to organizations ready to move beyond surface-level engagement strategies and into sustainable resilience culture.
If you are rethinking how your team defines productivity, belonging, and contribution, I’d welcome a conversation. You can explore my organizational consulting work here.
