Emerging From the Z-Suite: How Self-Reflection Supports Early-Career Professionals in Building Ethical Visibility and Organizational Influence

Some of us want to be leaders, while others do not. Either way, we still want our voices to matter.

Perhaps your goal is to become a leader. You desire accomplishments, recognition, growth, and the opportunity to influence something that’s larger than yourself. Or, in contrast, maybe the word “leader” feels uncomfortable, unappealing, or distant. Maybe you don’t want the title, pressure, politics, or the responsibility of managing other people. Regardless of the category you fall under, this conversation still matters.

When we think of the words “leader” and “leadership,” they often merge together in our minds with adjectives such as responsibility, authority, pressure, visibility, and performance. More often than not, those adjectives are associated with being liable for the behaviors, decisions, and performance outputs of other people. In this example, “other people” could refer to localized teams, clients, direct reports, stakeholders, or anyone whose work and experience are inherently subject to the leader’s choices.

But what if leadership can also be defined as leading yourself?

Leading other people is important, but it doesn’t start with having authority over them. Leadership begins with the responsibility of self. Maybe you’re hoping to manage people one day, or never want that role at all. Regardless of your goal, adopting leadership principles will benefit you by deepening your understanding of self, making your integrity visible, and allowing you to quietly shape the culture around you.

Why Leader Identity Matters, Even When You’re Not Chasing a Leadership Title

I have a few questions that I’d like you to ask yourself:

• Do you want to be seen for only the work you complete, or also for the character, judgment, and contribution you bring to the organization?
• Do you want your values to remain as internalized personal beliefs, or become visible through the way you influence and interact with others?
• Do you want to move through your career with your judgment questioned, your voice dismissed, and your presence overlooked, or do you want to become someone whose judgment, voice, and presence can be trusted in moments that matter?

If you answered the latter to any of those three questions, then you’re already drawn to the substance of leadership, whether you want the formal title or not. Building your own leader identity from the inside out is not something that you should put off. It’s not distant, unreachable, or impossible. It’s actually your current reality. The way we understand ourselves now shapes the way we show up for both the current and future versions of ourselves.

Before you can influence others, you must first internalize your capacity for leadership.

2025 research from Hammond et al. found that leader identity functions in three distinct ways¹:

1. It motivates individuals to pursue and develop leadership behaviors
2. It shapes the interpretive lens through which they see situations
3. It establishes the relational foundation through which they connect with others.

What Hammond et al. are conveying is that having a leader identity isn’t a title that people grow into later, but instead is an internal framework that shapes how you behave, interpret responsibility, and build trust with others right now. I think this really outlines the importance of why we should be building leadership qualities early, because the way we view ourselves has a direct influence on how we grow, show up, and how others come to experience us over time.

A 2023 Harvard dissertation on early-stage leader development reinforces this point by showing that becoming a leader isn’t a clean or linear process that begins only after someone has been designated as being in charge. Through a field experiment at West Point, the study found that individuals move in and out of leadership moments, with each transition giving them another opportunity to construct, test, and refine their leadership identity. In other words, the study found that early leaders don’t wait until they have the role to begin “becoming”. They begin by experimenting with provisional selves and asking, “What kind of leader do I want to be?”²

This is where self-reflection moves from being a personal exercise toward the first practices of leadership development.

If becoming a leader involves creating, testing, and refining who we are over time, then we need tools that help us name what’s actually shaping us. What motivates you? What matters to you? What are you protecting and pursuing? What kind of influence do you want your presence to have? Without this type of reflection, leadership can become performative, selfish, or rooted in control over character. Instead of developing into leaders from the inside out, we might simply imitate what we think leadership is supposed to look like.

One tool that supports this process is the Barrett Personal Values Assessment³. This assessment can inform your self-reflection by helping you name what motivates you, matters to you, and how your values shape your decisions. After completing the assessment, you receive an email with guidance and exercises for self-development that can further aid your identity formation by helping you connect who you actually are with how you want to show up in the workplace. Once you’ve connected the dots between the two, you can begin to transform internal self-awareness into an external visibility of your character.

My doctoral cohort was assigned this assessment a few courses ago, and I remember finding it valuable because it provided language for the things that quietly shape how I think, respond, and lead. Out of curiosity, I recently decided to take it again. This time, I found that my top 10 values (of who I currently am, not who I aspire to be) were: achievement, competence, continuous learning, creativity, family, forgiveness, humor/fun, independence, leadership, and patience. Seeing those words together helped me better understand that my leadership identity is shaped by my capabilities, but also my humanity. I care about doing my work well, but I also care deeply about growth, creativity, relationships, compassion, and not allowing leadership to become performative.

The assessment does have a cost, which is currently listed at ~$20 USD per use. The Barrett Values Centre does, however, donate your contribution to a charity of your choice out of three different options. You can access the assessment here, or within the references section of this post³ — Barrett Personal Values Assessment

From Values to Passion

Values reveal who you are, but they can also help you recognize what you’re passionate about. Identifying them is important in helping you determine what you’re excited to develop within yourself.

In a TEDx Talk on coaching Millennials, leadership coach and author Danita Bye explains the importance of helping young professionals identify their talents, core competencies, and passions to transform potential into strength⁴. While her talk is centered on Millennials, I believe the same principles matter for Gen Z, as many of us do not want to work just to work. We want to care about what we’re doing because we want to feel purposeful, energized, and connected to something that matters.

Identifying our values can help us recognize what we’re passionate about.

This all sounds great in theory, but what does it sound like in practice? Reflection can’t stop at self-awareness. Values only become leadership when they’ve transformed into action. If we want to be viewed as capable of leadership, whether that means leading self or leading others, we cannot wait to be hand-held into every opportunity or wait for someone else to notice our potential first. Instead, we have to use self-knowledge as a starting point, and then dive headfirst into the areas in which our values, strengths, and passions meet our organization’s needs. That’s where early career leadership begins: not with a title, but with the decision to practice our character visibly, take responsibility, and make a difference from where we already stand.

What If I Don’t Know My Values, or Don’t Feel Like I Have Any Raw Talent?

Big Think+ is a learning platform that helps organizations and individuals grow as leaders through high-impact brief lessons from experts, executives, scholars, and authors⁵. In a 2023 Big Think+ video lesson, Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains that leaders often focus too much on raw talent alone, emphasizing how this narrow scope risks overlooking the distance in which individuals are capable of traveling⁵. When we focus too heavily on what we’re already good at, or what we think we’re not good at, we can limit our growth before we’ve given ourselves the chance to develop.

For early career professionals, leadership development requires more than identifying our own talent. It requires effort, practice, and the willingness to move beyond the version of ourselves we presently identify with. If we want to achieve something meaningful, we can’t wait until we discover what comes naturally to us. We have to learn, try, fail, and keep persevering long enough to see how far we’re actually capable of traveling.

How to Become Noticed

If you’ve read this far, you’ve already started doing the inner work. You’ve reflected on your values, passions, and the type of leader you may be becoming. The hard question now is: How does your organization begin to see any of it?

Researchers have studied leader emergence, the informal process in which peers and colleagues come to see someone as “leader-like” for decades. A study by Neil Mclaren at the State University of New York confirmed the babble hypothesis of leadership emergence, which proposes that speaking up more and speaking longer during interactions helps others identify you as an emerging leader⁶. The research further argues that leadership potential can only become visible through vocalization. “Data from this investigation indicated that the amount of speaking time during face-to-face interactions indeed predicted leadership emergence, even considering factors such as intelligence and personality.⁶”

Although insightful, being noticed isn’t the same thing as performing leadership. Your goal shouldn’t be to talk the most to force visibility or chase recognition just to receive acknowledgment. Your goal, instead, should be to make your values observable through your behavior, so that your character, judgment, and contribution become easier for others to recognize over time.

Leadership emergence isn’t about becoming louder. It’s about becoming clearer, more intentional, and more visible in the ways you’re already showing up today.

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So, what does this mean for those of us in the “Z-Suite” who are still early in our careers?

It means that leadership doesn’t begin when someone finally notices you, or when you begin to notice yourself clearly enough to act with intention.

Reflection matters because it helps us name what we value; our values matter because they reveal what we’re willing to protect, practice, and pursue; and passion matters because it gives energy to our work. However, none of these things become leadership until they move from being internalized to externally visible through the way we show up for others.

Knowing my own values helped me understand the type of leader I’m becoming, but those values can’t simply stay private. If I value competence, then I have to practice being dependable. If I value creativity, then I have to offer ideas. If I value leadership, then I have to take responsibility before it’s formally handed to me. If I value patience, I have to trust that influence is built through consistency and not instant recognition.

This is where we have a choice to make, Gen Z.

We can wait for someone to hand us the perfect opportunity, clearly acknowledge our talents, and tell us exactly what to do and where we belong. Or, we can start where we are now, with what we know, and take the first visible step toward the type of leadership we hope someone else will recognize.

Dear Gen Z,

You don’t need to have every single one of your values perfectly defined, or every talent fully developed before you start leading. You don’t need to be the loudest person in the room, but you do need to let your leadership become visible. Ask the introspective questions. Volunteer for the project that connects to your strengths. Speak up when your perspective can provide value. Follow through when no one is watching, and practice the character you want people to trust.

Leadership begins when self-awareness transforms into action.

Influence begins when who you are becomes visible in how you lead.

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References

[1] Hammond, M., Thrasher, G., & Lester, G. (2025). A systematic review of the leader identity research: A road map for the rigorous study and advancement of leader identity. Organizational Psychology Review, 15(3), 321–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/20413866251351752 | pp. 339–341

[2] Weimer, L. (2023). The dynamic nature of leader identity development [Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University]. https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/4e35faf9-4e86-4327-9a95-535dad2dde53/content | pp. iii-iv

[3] Barrett Values Centre (n.d.). Personal Values Assessment (PVA). URL: valuescentre.com/pva

[4] Bye, D. (2018). Millennial leadership: Stop complaining, start coaching. TEDx Talks. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WwL5q7mMRA

[5] Grant, A. (2023). Adam Grant’s #1 phrase to unlock big potential. Big Think+. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJWFxu6k1g4

[6] Yeung, R. (2022). The emerging leader. AB Magazine. URL: https://abmagazine.accaglobal.com/global/articles/2022/oct/careers/the-emerging-leader.html