THE AUTHENTICITY CODE: Behind the Fable, Failure, and Future of Authenticity at Work

By Casey Erin Clark and Julie Fogh, co-founders of Vital Voice Training

(Part One of a multi-part series — read more here)

What is authenticity?

What does it mean for individuals to have an authentic voice, authentic presence, and authentic power?

What can organizations do to support every voice in feeling heard and understood?

We live in a time where everything is being questioned and unveiled. Amidst all of the confusion and the justifiable anger and pain over broken systems, we see an opportunity. Now is the time to reexamine everything we know about how we communicate, how we lead, and how we show up as humans in the world for ourselves and each other. This series offers a framework for a future where every voice in an organization is valued.

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.” — Oprah Winfrey

THE POWER OF AUTHENTICITY

The concept of authenticity — the state of being authentic — has incredible allure.

We may fancy ourselves, as Nietzsche did, in a heroic struggle to “own ourselves” against the powerful influence of a group that wants us to conform. We may imagine that we, like Oprah, must only be our authentic selves to finally be successful and rich. We may believe that, in “just being ourselves”, we will finally find the people who believe in us and care for us, and the place where we truly belong. We may believe that the state of authenticity will lead us to our ultimate destiny or the core truth of who we are.

These are the most human of all goals: for purpose, for success, for belonging, for self-actualization.

With the rise of social media, we live our lives more visibly than ever, with ever more opportunities to put our beliefs, our taste, our adventures, and our commentary in front of others. Whether or not you believe that someone #wokeuplikethis, we’re all trying to show the world SOMETHING that feels uniquely us. Along with an increasingly sophisticated curation of our social media selves has come a craving for something more real, more human. People are sick of overly filtered photos and careful flat lays of perfect cappuccinos next to pristine laptops.

In the last 15 years, we’ve seen a workplace revolution around authenticity as well.The American economy continues to shift toward knowledge work, creativity-based, and team-based output. More and more people go into business for themselves as freelancers, and women and minorities are increasingly opting for an entrepreneurial path.

We also know that the robots are coming for an untold number of jobs. Managers no longer need workers to be cogs in a machine — we have computers for that, or we will soon. The good news for us non-robots is that there is plenty that computers can’t do. According to our client, future-of-work expert Kelly Monahan, “what artificial intelligence is not so good at and where humans thrive is in generalized intelligence — the ability to be creative, to be playful, to make sense of context, to take knowledge from one domain and apply it to another.”

We need human innovation, human creativity, human strategy, human leadership and healthy, high-functioning, engaged, authentically human teams. We want our employees to bring their whole selves to work and we celebrate their uniqueness feels like The Right Thing to Do, especially as CEOs publicly commit to fostering diversity and inclusion practices.

And not only do organizations now want more authenticity from their workers, the organizations themselves want to be seen as authentic.

Thanks, again, to social media, never before have a brand’s voice and values been more on display to the public. As more consumers choose to spend money with companies that share their values, we’ve seen more companies put social good, rather than just profit, at the center of their public mission. With all this new engagement, whether or not the public sees a company’s voice, values, and beliefs as authentic can make or break the bottom line and the future of the organization.

Authenticity is a sexy buzzword. It connotes honesty and trust. It sounds modern and unstuffy. Authenticity indicates both that we are not pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes, AND we can spot when others try to. We’re told it will deliver success, happiness, belonging, and self-actualization for the individual, a healthier and more productive workforce, diverse and inclusive workplaces, proof of inherent goodness and honesty for organizations, find us the perfect customers and ideal relationships, and make all of us bullshit-proof.

That’s a lot to deliver.

A few months ago, the world as we knew it came to a screeching halt.

Between a global pandemic and a long-overdue reckoning on race, both individuals and organizations are dealing with massive change and the discomfort that accompanies it.

We’ve seen companies attempting to navigate a wholesale ex- and im-plosion of where and how their employees work. They’ve had to create a new culture based around digital connection, while they attempt to audit, clarify, or create their practices around diversity and inclusion.

Individuals are reexamining their part in a system that has been revealed (or confirmed) as intrinsically broken. Many of them are caring full-time for their families while trying to work. Even those lucky enough to have kept their jobs are watching their industries crumble, and reexamining who they are and who they want to be when all of this is, someday, past us.

Once we realized our 2020 goals were in tatters, many of us took a breath and realized that normal wasn’t actually worth going back to. “Normal” hasn’t worked for most people for a long time.

One of the most profound realizations of this time is just how many people have NEVER felt — or been allowed to be — authentic as we navigate our lives in public. BIPOC, in particular, have been trying to express how profoundly this affects them for a long time. The reckoning has come and the conversation can’t be ignored.

In order to understand authenticity, we have to talk about culture and the systems that underlie all human interaction. In order to understand culture and human interaction, we have to start by understanding how we process communication.

Read the rest of The Authenticity Code here.