Abstract
This autoethnography studies leadership identity work through a practice lens. The focus of this paper is on the identity struggles that, especially the expectations for heroic leadership, cause to the identity work for a manager who tries to leave behind the individual, heroic notions of leadership and sees leadership as a collective accomplishment located in practices. More specifically, this paper studies identity work through a leadership-as-practice approach. This paper contributes to the rarely explored topic of the struggles that leaders face in their attempt to take a collective, processual view on leadership. The paper also makes a methodological contribution to autoethnography on how it can be used for studying identity through a practice lens, where the influences of practices and socio-materiality play a central role in identity work and where the identity work may also influence the practices.