On ‘being’ an authentic leader

Welcome to our new series of the Advanced Executive Leadership Podcast. We’ve had a break, but we’ve not been resting on our laurels. We’ve been working to create a series of podcast episodes that we think will resonate with you. And we’re reverting back to our ongoing fortnightly podcast format to bring you more episodes that includes interviews with seasoned executives, authors and thought leaders and some solo episodes from me on things that are timely in leadership.

About this episode

Now, over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working on refining a leadership development programme that we’ve delivered for a client over a few years and which we love.

I was a bit allergic to doing leadership development for a long time because I felt that so much of it was aimed at homogenising leaders towards an organisation’s ‘one best way’. And, in the process something ESSSENTIAL was missed out of what leadership is actually all about.

I get that organisations need to have some sort of framework to help leaders understand expectations, but we now operate in contexts with so much disruption and challenge that we need to whole myriad of skills, abilities, outlooks, worldviews, and perspectives that are available in a diverse leadership community in order to see the problems in all their complexity.

How do we help leaders to explore the context for their thinking, speaking and doing that is organisationally sound but arises from a leaders own unique character?

In a beautiful article by Chip Souba, who is one of the US’s top cancer doctors, he asks an essential question: “When someone is being an effective leader, what is their underlying foundational ‘being-ness’?”

This is not to say were want to replace, minimise or undervalue leadership that is focused on results. We get that being and doing are distinct but inseparable. But the question is really at the heart of what we might call ‘authentic’ leadership.

Pushback on Authentic Leadership

There’s been quite a lot of pushback against the idea of authentic leadership. A developmental approach that allows a leader to work out for themselves their essential being-ness or authenticity has the downside that it can in fact allow for quite a lot of dysfunctional and downright bad behaviour.

For example, the organisational psychologist Adam Grant, did an excellent podcast  based on a meta-analysis of authentic leadership that demonstrated that the more people showed themselves to be themselves at work the lower their performance reviews and less overall successful.

If you scratch the surface of this analysis, I think the issue is in how people are thinking about authenticity in the workplace.

Some argue that we’re being authentic when we show emotional vulnerability. I don’t know about you, but to my mind inappropriate or overdone shows of vulnerability in the workplace can be very disruptive. It turns out, according to this research, that there’s a sweet spot of vulnerability which other people can manage. Not too much as to overwhelm others, but just enough to endear us to what’s real about a person. This is linked to other research that says we like our leaders to be strong and warm. Too strong and you’re seen as heavy handed, too warm, they don’t have what it takes to make tough decisions. The other thing that people need to have if they want to show vulnerability is competence. Apparently, we grant way more leeway to people being vulnerable if they’ve already demonstrated that they’re competent.

I don’t believe that authenticity is about putting it all out there. When we meet people who overshare before we’ve gotten to know them, or who go straight to their feelings, it can leave us feeling put off. That’s because what’s missing in this type of authenticity is attunement.

I joined some people for dinner the other day and one of the party arrived late. When they sat down, they launched into a tirade about how stressed and tired they were.

Instead of it evoking concern or connection, I found it really off putting. They were late. And they hadn’t attuned to the conversation that was already taking place. Those of us that were already there were interrupted and we immediately had to turn our attention to this person.

Attunement trumps emotional over-sharing every time. So that’s one of the ways we define authenticity. Emotional vulnerability with good boundaries.

Another criticism of authenticity is that it gives carte blanche to people being blunt, unfiltered and basically saying exactly what they think. The excuse it “that’s just how I am, I say it like I see it”.

Like over sharing, you can’t use a cloak of authenticity as an excuse not to manage a message and consider the impact it will have on those receiving it. Leaders don’t operate in a vacuum and of course they have to consider the feelings of others. So, honesty needs discernment. Authenticity needs discernment.

There’s a fine line here. That we don’t want to have to hide who we really are at a deep level.

Can I, for example, show up as a mid-life woman with all of my interests and my challenges? Can I get away with not engaging in long conversations about what happened at the football at the weekend because I honestly couldn’t care less? Or do I have to play some sort of game where I endure a culture that doesn’t care that the social chat is exclusionary?

This is what’s referred to as a likeability trap. Having to be what other people want you to be. That’s not authentic and we shouldn’t have to perform in that way in organisations.

It turns out there’s an actual thing called the Perceived Weirdness Index. It’s a guide to how different (weird) one is in relation to a system. Agents of change (or in this case leaders) need to model a different way of being, thinking, and behaving. Otherwise, what value do they bring? Winston Churchill said, “Show me two men who think exactly alike, and I’ll show you one man I don’t need.” But too weird, and you lose people.

Again, in this scenario, there’s some space for authenticity, but it also has a boundary on it. The longer a person is in an organisation and the more the people know the nuance of them, the greater the acceptance of a bit of weirdness. And again, competence matters. People who have a reputation for being highly capable are given more scope to push the envelope, allowed to be a bit wired or idiosyncratic.

Lastly, authenticity isn’t an excuse to treat people in any way you like so long as you get the job done. I can recall a leader in one organisation I consulted to who was technically and intellectually brilliant but who was a garden variety bully. The excuse for his behaviour was that he got things done. He solved problems.

The reality was that for every problem that he solved; he left a dozen others in his wake.

Ultimately, I’ve seen more people like this exited despite their brilliance. If your competence is at the expense of an organisation’s culture, then, in my experience, your time is limited. And the exit is usually pretty painful. Authentic or not: the world doesn’t need any more bullies.

That’s what authenticity is not

These are some of the things that authenticity is not. So, what do we really mean when we encourage leaders in the being-ness – in their authenticity?

In our reading of it, the stive for authenticity is understanding the unique contribution that each of us can make. Part of our development, then, is to come to understand what this is and who we are being called to be in our lives and in our organisations. When we see out unique contribution, competitiveness falls away.

Many years ago, when I was an MBA student, a group of us entered the UK MBAs competition where we were up against other groups in MBAs throughout the UK. Our group – one of a number on my own MBA course, got through the local heats and we ended up being invited to the final with the other half a dozen UK teams to Leipzig in Germany. When we were there, the subject of the final challenge was something none of us knew anything about. But we set about working it out and then presented our findings alongside the other groups. We were runner up. For the record, we were from Strathclyde and the winners were a group from Cranfield.

Thing is, they weren’t just better – they were an order of magnitude better.

Now some of them were environmental chemists or had a background in other specialisms that did give them an advantage in the business challenge we were all set. But that wasn’t the only reason they won. When we saw their presentation, I was blow away by it. And I went and congratulated them on their win.

But some people in my own team and from some of the other teams who didn’t win, were full of reasons as to why they were robbed or reasons why it wasn’t fair.

And it was such a shame. Because if they’d just allowed themselves to see how brilliant these guys were for that unique challenge we were set, they could both gotten curious about how they might go about solving a challenge like that next time and they could have seen that with a different challenge, we could have been amazing.

As Simon Sinek would say, their strengths revealed our weakness. It wasn’t our day. Being gracious in their win took absolutely nothing away from us. And it wasn’t that these guys were universally better than everyone. I know if the challenge had been about organisational behaviour, we’d have had the upper hand. How could we have been better not of them but of ourselves in that kind of challenge? That would make us worthy runners up and maybe next time, worthy winners.

Being and becoming

There’s something in how we are being IN authenticity that feels important.

Our way of being in this or that moment emerges from our consciousness – that is, our awareness of ourselves and the world we live in. It’s about our commitment to something that transcends the self, our relational congruency with ourselves and with others.

“The word “authentic” originates from the Greek word authentes meaning “one acting on one’s own authority.” An accountable author of one’s actions and behaviours. To do this, we need awareness, of what of Chip Souba says “speaks to the concept of human “being” as an observer who is perceptive and present in the moment. This includes being attentive to our filters and blind spots, and of the limitations and distortions created by that ever-present voice in our head that’s thinking for us and biasing us.

“Our mental models are not so much views and beliefs that we hold tightly as they are views and beliefs that tightly hold us”.

So, we have to be careful that what we think is essential or authentic to us, isn’t actually a set of untested assumptions about the world.

Much of the criticisms of authenticity that I outlined earlier are based on us not taking others into consideration enough. Being authentic is being and acting consistent with who you hold yourself to be not just for yourself, but for others and for the purpose that you’re doing leadership for.

Each human represents a unique and profound possibility yearning to be fulfilled.  You are one of these possibilities.  And within this, there are many pathways of connection and expression, all waiting to be discovered and explored. This form of authenticity speaks to the evolutionary impulse alive in all of us. To fulfil our potential. The impulse of the universe is towards greater creativity, synergy and complexity.

Knowing what is essentially us and how this can be put to good use in the world is what we mean by authentic leadership.