Randy Martinez on the identity you borrow from your employer

What this conversation is about

Randy Martinez and Glenn Llopis have been friends for about fifteen years, since Martinez’s days at CVS Health. He went on to senior roles at Pizza Hut Global, and he wrote the Afterword to Glenn’s book Earning Conviction. The line at the top of this page is from that Afterword, read back to him on air.

What makes the conversation unusual is that he is describing the inside of a career that looked, from the outside, like everything an organization wants in a leader. His reason for doing it is practical:

He wants people to figure out their purpose before a layoff or a retirement forces the question, because at his level people set everything personal aside, and then one day they are outside asking who they are.

The burden at the top

The word he used in the Afterword was not stressed or challenged. It was burdened. Reaching those levels takes ambition and the ability to navigate a complex environment, and he wanted the responsibility: to make decisions, to innovate, to help people feel they had achieved something.

Then the role arrived. Everyone looks up at you for answers. In middle management you can turn to peers and work a problem out together; at the top the expectation is that you already know. He was flying across the country every other week, absorbing problems on both ends of the trip, and being challenged from inside his own team. He describes it as a lonely place, and waking up to do it again.

He had expected something else: alignment with other leaders, his work integrated into the larger strategy. What he found was leaders jousting to have their idea be the one that wins. Within eighteen months at one company, he says, most of the leadership team around him was gone.

The identity you borrowed

Asked why high performers keep saying yes when everything inside says no, he traced it to where his identity was sitting:

"you do it because you think you're doing something good for the place where your identity sits and what you're missing is that you're not doing for you for your own identity, for the personal you, you're doing it for something else's identity." — Randy Martinez · 00:19:16

Glenn gave it a name:

"So it was the identity that you borrowed from the institution or the organization's brand, not necessarily your own." — Glenn Llopis · 00:20:56

Martinez took it further:

"It's the identity that you're conditioned to be to serve and perform in an environment that at the end of the day really doesn't care about you." — Randy Martinez · 00:21:04

He is just as clear that he played the part himself:

"For me to excel in that environment, I had to play a role. We all have to play a role. We have to play the role of our title. It's a script. We read values and missions and vision statements. Those are our scripts." — Randy Martinez · 00:29:41

He noticed it most in younger talent, who became one person after five o’clock and another in the meeting, measuring every word against the playbook. Show up outside the playbook, he says, and you get judged for it.

What it cost

The culture work he led after the murder of George Floyd finally brought the weight to a head. He was trying to help people be heard while becoming, in his words, the corporate face of initiatives that many felt were not enough, all during the isolation of the pandemic. He worked fifteen-hour days. He stopped wanting to get up. His days felt foggy and his words started to slur.

He hit burnout, took time at the holidays, went back at it, and the following year slipped into burnout again and then into depression. A colleague told him plainly to call a doctor. That, he says, was the real beginning. Years later the program he had built no longer exists in the form he built it, which raises his question: you burn yourself out for who, and for what?

His health told the same story before he was ready to listen: warning numbers at an annual checkup, then treatment, then a new diagnosis. After the layoff in May 2024, with sleep, exercise and a plan, the numbers came back into range. His advice to anyone hearing something similar from their body is to address it, because he wants to be there for the milestones ahead in his family.

The corporate detox

What followed was what he calls a corporate detox. Twenty years of living on a calendar built for someone else left him without the discipline to do it for himself:

"I realized that I was struggling doing for me what I did excellent for something else. And so I had to rebuild discipline and consistency and persistence for me." — Randy Martinez · 00:35:08

He kept reaching for the familiar, applying for roles and sitting through interviews that described the same problems he had just left. About eighteen months in, he saw a job he would have been excellent at and, for the first time, knew he did not want it and did not need it. He wrote The Art of Transformation, started a podcast and began coaching.

Glenn closed by asking the difference between a leader earning conviction and one surviving the performance. Martinez’s answer: the survivor is not paying attention to their own ecosystem, their health, their family, their people; the leader who is not surviving makes sure that ecosystem is cared for. He says he has met very few of them.

Glenn drew four lessons from this conversation and another in Forbes: Two Case Studies Reveal 4 Lessons That Leadership Is About Conviction Not Survival.