Five minutes with the faculty: Herminia Ibarra

Herminia Ibarra is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, and a leading expert on career change and leadership. Her research explores how people reinvent themselves at work, build new professional identities and navigate periods of transition. She is the author of Working Identity and Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, and her latest book, The Bonus Years, examines how longer lives are reshaping our careers.

What’s the most interesting failure you’ve had, and what did it unlock?

My first years teaching MBA students at Harvard were a failure. I was young, had no business experience, and my course ratings were near the bottom. I thought my job was to master the material so thoroughly that no student could stump me. But I was teaching an interactive case-discussion course. I came across as too academic, nervous, dull, and distant.

A senior colleague told me to stop focusing on content and start owning the room. The theatrics he suggested felt ridiculous, but I eventually took his advice. Doing the opposite of what came naturally taught me that I had to redefine both my job and myself. Not simply as a serious researcher, but as someone who could create an impactful learning experience.

That failure shaped my arguments in The Authenticity Paradox and Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and gave me a good story I still tell whenever I teach or speak about how hard it is to change.

Explain your work as if you’re talking to an intelligent 12-year-old.

I help people who are wondering, “Is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life?”

Sometimes their job has changed, sometimes they have changed, and sometimes they are simply curious about a different life. I study how people make those changes, and I teach them how to try out new possibilities without having to bet everything on one big decision.

What do you do when you feel stuck intellectually?

I stop. I do something else, then return to it fresh – sometimes the next morning, sometimes much later. After finishing my PhD, I was so fed up with my main topic that I could not bear to write the article about it. Instead, I wrote two other papers from the same data. Both became much more influential than the article I’d been avoiding. I’ve followed that method ever since.

What did your sabbatical year teach you that you couldn’t have learned by staying at your desk?

That a year off does not have to produce a dramatic transformation to be transformative. Mine unfolded through small shifts: unfamiliar freedoms, new priorities, time to dabble, and occasional disorientation.

I wrote in Miami and Greece and discovered just how much proximity to the sea inspires me. I also spent time in Madrid and rediscovered how much I love using my native language, Spanish. I came back without a grand plan, but with the conviction that I will figure out my next chapter one step at a time.

What do people consistently misunderstand about career change?

The only way you figure it out is through small experiments and new relationships that reveal possibilities that reflection alone cannot. Career change is rarely one decisive leap. More often, it is a series of modest moves that gradually makes a different future imaginable.

If we’re going to have much longer working lives, what do you think we need to unlearn about careers?

We need to unlearn the idea that a successful career is a straight line: education, ascent, then retirement. Over a longer life, what we want from work changes, as does what the world of work values. We need to expect periods of building alongside periods of transition. Times to push ahead, but also to question, learn, pause and change direction. Reinvention is not evidence that something has gone wrong, it is a normal part of a long working life.

Do we discover who we are through reflection, or through trying out different versions of ourselves?

Both matter, but the sequence is important. You need to try things first.

Reflection helps us make sense of what we have learned, but it cannot substitute for experience because so often we fool ourselves into thinking that we know what we want – when we really don’t. That’s why we have to test our fantasies in the real world, to see what energises us, what we are good at, who responds to us, and what kind of life a particular path makes possible.

What’s an idea you’ve encountered recently that made you think, “I wish I’d thought of that?”

When I was researching The Bonus Years, I discovered the work of behavioural economist Hal Hershfield. He found that, when people think about their future selves, their brains react as if they were thinking about a stranger. I wish I’d thought of that.

It explains why it is so hard to act on long-term goals, even ones we care deeply about. The more distant our future self feels, the less power it has to influence what we do today. So, we defer the PhD, or the book project or new beginning, and that future self becomes more distant still. The answer is to bring it closer by doing small things that activate it today.

Which book, idea or piece of art has shaped how you see the world?

I have just read Angela Duckworth’s new book, Situated, which explores, among other things, the enormous impact of our surroundings – especially our workspaces.

I am also surrounded by contemporary art, which inspires me in a different way. By my desk hangs a spin painting of a skull, given to me by Damien Hirst at the World Economic Forum one year. Skulls, or vanitas as they are known, have long been a motif in art because they are meditations on mortality and the fleeting nature of the things we pursue, whether beauty, wealth or success. And, though this always surprises people, I usually work with music playing at a relatively high volume, mostly opera, during the day.

It all adds up to an environment that keeps me stimulated and inspired.

What’s something about you that doesn’t fit the stereotype of a professor?

I am hopelessly disorganised. Not merely ‘not detail-oriented’, but capable of buying a flight for the wrong date.

I also have very bad handwriting. My first mentor at Harvard Business School actually recommended that I practice writing on the blackboard so that my students might eventually be able to read what I wrote (I did not do it… and continue to suffer the consequences).

People expect professors to be methodical and perfectly planned. I am much more likely to play things by ear. It can be inconvenient, but it is also part of how I stay open to the unexpected.

What’s one thing you’ve learned outside academia that has shaped how you think inside it?

That leaving something that is no longer working and reinventing yourself elsewhere is normal and desirable.

My grandparents left Spain for Cuba in search of better economic opportunity. My parents left Cuba for the United States, with me in tow, to escape a regime they disagreed with. I moved to Europe in my late thirties in search of a different quality of life. Now my son has moved to the United States, convinced that his entrepreneurial efforts will be better rewarded there. Transition has always seemed more normal to me than staying put.

What’s the most counterintuitive thing you’ve learned through your research?

That the most valuable network for a career change is often not a brand-new one. It is your dormant network: former colleagues, clients and collaborators whom you have lost touch with. They already know and trust you, but their lives may have taken them into entirely different worlds. Reconnecting with them often opens doors that a cold approach to a stranger never could.