In her memoir, Ursula Burns describes herself with the bluntness she's famous for: a Black woman engineer from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who doesn't play golf, doesn't belong to a country club, doesn't listen to country music. Line up the candidates for the next CEO of Xerox against a wall, she writes, and she'd be "the first one voted off the island."
In 2009, she got the job anyway.
She had been at Xerox for twenty-nine years by then — from summer intern to the corner office, the first Black woman ever to lead a Fortune 500 company. She knew the business from the inside: the culture, the people, the operations, the politics. By any measure, the role was hers.
And yet the woman who took that seat was still, in some real way, the sharp insider who said what others wouldn't — of the team, not above it. The title arrived on schedule. Growing into it took longer.
Where You Are Is Not Who You Are
Burns titled her memoir with something her mother used to say. Olga Burns was a single mother raising her children in tenement housing, a licensed child-care provider whose best year of income was $4,400. She cleaned offices. And she told her kids: where you are is not who you are. The projects would not define them.
Here's what makes the phrase remarkable: it kept working as Burns rose. She has said her mother's words also meant not getting too big for her britches — remembering that the circumstances of her success were only a portion of who she was, and that the people around her, whether they had less or more, were worthy of attention.
Where you are is not who you are. It's true at the bottom, and it's true at the top. Identity is not location. That means when your location changes — suddenly, dramatically, with a press release and a new nameplate — your identity doesn't automatically change with it.
Almost no one warns you about that gap.
The Gap Has a Name
There's a particular identity lag that happens when you rise from within. When you're hired from outside, you arrive as the new person — everyone expects you to be different, to need time, to find your footing. There's built-in permission to not yet be fully yourself in the role.
When you're promoted from within, none of that applies. The people around you knew you before the title. They ate lunch with you. They came to you with things. They know which battles you fought and which ones you walked away from. You know which decisions got made for the right reasons and which ones just calcified into habit — because you were there for all of it.
The title changes. The relationships don't. Not immediately. And you're still carrying your own image of who you were in the room before you became the one running it.
The title can arrive before your identity does. That's not a failure. It's the beginning of the most important work.
What Got You Here Can Hold You Here
Here's the paradox that makes this hard: the very qualities that earned you the role are often the ones that slow the transition down.
You're deeply operational, so you keep reaching in to do things you know how to do. You have long relationships, so it's hard to let people relate to you differently. You know exactly what needs to change — you've watched it for years from the inside — and that clarity can make you move in ways that catch people off guard. They knew you. They didn't know this version of you yet.
Burns never resolved this by becoming someone else. Her directness — the quality that could have been sanded off in the C-suite — stayed. She has said she realized she was most convincing, to herself and to everyone listening, when she said what she actually thought rather than what people wanted to hear. The role didn't require less of her. It required more of her, more deliberately deployed.
The qualities don't have to disappear. They have to grow.
Putting On the Garment
I sometimes describe this to clients as putting on a garment. The new role has a shape, a weight, a way it fits. You can try it on. You can wear it uncomfortably for a while. Or you can do the work of inhabiting it so fully that it starts to feel like yours.
The key word is inhabit. Not perform. Not imitate. Not become the version of an executive you imagined from the outside looking up.
Inhabiting it means bringing yourself — your values, your directness, your depth, your relationships — into the new shape. Whatever kept you grounded before doesn't have to go in a drawer. But the garment goes on. And over time, if you do the work, the gap between the title and the person closes.
That's not a guarantee. It's a practice.
The Question Worth Sitting With
If you're sitting somewhere similar right now — new title, familiar faces, an identity that hasn't quite caught up with the nameplate on the door — the question isn't whether you deserve it.
You do.
The question is whether you're willing to do the interior work of becoming it. Not performing it. Becoming it. That work is quieter than most people expect and harder than most leadership books admit. But it's the work that matters most.
And it starts where Burns started — with a truth sturdy enough to carry you in both directions:
Where you are is not who you are. Who you are is what you bring to where you are.
