Who Are You When the Job Is Gone?
Who am I, actually?
A few years ago, I lost my job.
For the first ten days or so, I was numb. My wife would ask if I wanted to draw or read - things I genuinely love - and I just didn't have much desire to do anything. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, my mind racing about some unfinished project, some loose end I had left behind, before the realization would slowly settle in: it wasn't my burden to carry anymore.
I had been with that company for over twenty years. And somewhere in those twenty years, without fully noticing it happening, so much of who I was had become tied up in who I was there. My role. My title. My place in the organization. When that was gone, I had to sit with a question I had not asked myself in a long time.
Who am I, actually? Not what I do. Who am I?
That question, uncomfortable as it was, turned out to be one of the most important ones I have ever had to answer. And it is the same question that most organizations urgently need to answer too, but almost never do until something forces them to.
Every organization thinks it knows who it is.
Most are describing who they were, or who they wish they were, or what their competitors say about themselves.
Real identity is specific enough to say no with. If yours isn't, it isn't doing any work.
A few years ago, we ran a brand and identity workshop with a steel building manufacturer in Atlantic Canada. They were genuinely good at what they did. Nine out of ten customers came back. When one of their team members was injured and couldn't work, they kept paying them and supported them through their recovery. That is not a values statement. That is values in action.
But when we asked them to describe who they were as a company, what came out was a list that could have belonged to any competitor in their market. Integrity. Service. Quality. Honest dealings.
We stopped them.
Everyone says that, we told them. What does integrity actually mean for your company, on a specific job, on a specific day?
The room got quiet. And then it got interesting.
What started coming out was not polished language. It was honest language. We say what we do and we go do it. Not a tagline, a description of how they actually operated. We're not going to be the cheapest, but you will never get a surprise invoice. That is an identity statement. It tells a customer exactly what they are buying and exactly what they are not. We fix buildings that don't meet code; while competitors were putting lipstick on structures that were safety risks, this company refused to operate that way, but had never said so out loud as part of who they were.
By the end of the workshop, the identity that emerged was not what they had walked in with. They were a building partner, not a vendor. They brought a full team - manufacturing, drafting, engineering - and they stood behind what they built. The identity was not invented, it was surfaced. The work was naming what was already true.
Satya Nadella did the same thing at Microsoft, at a much larger scale.
When Nadella became CEO in February 2014, he inherited a company that had hardwired its identity around defending what it already owned. Windows. Office. The PC era. The culture had been built around protecting the legacy, winning internally, knowing the answers.
His first-day email was an identity statement: "The industry does not respect tradition, it only respects innovation." His reframing, from know-it-alls to learn-it-alls, changed what Microsoft was willing to build. Embracing Linux. Opening the ecosystem. Building Azure as a platform for competitors' products. Decisions that would have been impossible under the previous identity became obvious under the new one.
Revenue grew from $86.8 billion in fiscal 2014 to $281.7 billion by fiscal 2025.
Notice what Nadella did not do. He did not announce a new strategy. He changed what Microsoft was allowed to be, and everything followed from that.
The steel building company and Microsoft are the same story at different scales.
In both cases, the organization was operating with an identity that was borrowed from the market or inherited from the past. In both cases, the work was about surfacing what was already true and making it operational: turning it from something that lived in the instincts of a few people into something that governed decisions across the entire organization.
Three things you can do this week:
Ask the independent sentence test. Have every leader on your team complete this sentence independently, without discussing it first: "We are a company that ___. Then compare the answers. Where they diverge is where the alignment work needs to happen.
Audit your last three major decisions. Not what you said you would do. What you actually did. Do those decisions reflect the identity you claim? Where they don't is where the drift is.
Name one thing your identity rules out. Real identity makes choices. It says no to something. What does yours say no to, and are you actually saying no to it?
Getting honest with myself
It took me a while after losing that job to rebuild a clear sense of who I was beyond the role. But the process of doing that - getting honest about what I actually stood for, what I was genuinely good at, what I was not willing to compromise on - turned out to be the foundation for everything I have built since.
Organizations need to do the same work. Not because a crisis forced it. Before the crisis forces it.
Leadership In Focus helps organizations surface the identity they already have and make it operational. BrandTruth Alignment™ is the system we use to get there.
