THE AUTHENTICITY CODE: Skewed Perspectives

By Casey Erin Clark and Julie Fogh

This is part six of a multi-part series. Read more here.

Authenticity: Not false or copied; genuine; real. Entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience; reliable; trustworthy

MYTH: We misunderstand or underestimate how bias affects our perception.

TRUTH: Bias underlies every human interaction, including our perception of authenticity.

How are we, the audience, seeing the person in front of us? 

Are they a leader? Are they trustworthy? Are they intelligent, talented, diligent? Do people gravitate toward them? Do they fit in? Are they being authentic?

Previously, we introduced you to your gut brain (primal, fast, emotional) and your reasoning brain (slower, logical). While we discuss the problems of perception, there are a few important things to remember.

• Survival is the first and most powerful goal of our brain.
• Our brains love to create stories—both cause and effect chains and intention—because it helps us make sense of the world.
• Your brain wants to be comfortable, because that means preserving precious energy – our brains have a vested interest in confirming our own ideas and beliefs, because challenging them is difficult.
• No matter how intelligent and educated we are, our gut brain represents the vast majority of our thinking.

ADAPT TO SURVIVE, ADAPT TO SUCCEED

No one can be authentic by trying to imitate someone else,” Bill George and his colleagues told us in their widely-read Harvard Business Review article Discovering Your Authentic Leadership—except that observation, mimicry, and adaptation is an essential survival skill. It’s how we learn to fit in to cultures that we don’t inherently “match.”

We’ll call those invisible rules that guide success Dominant Culture. While we all consciously and subconsciously adapt across the different arenas of our lives, the purposeful adaptation that allows you to fit more comfortably into a dominant culture is often referred to as code-switching.

Broadly, code-switching involves adjusting one’s style of speech, appearance, behavior, and expression in ways that will optimize the comfort of others in exchange for fair treatment, quality service, and employment opportunities. Research suggests that code-switching often occurs in spaces where negative stereotypes of black people run counter to what are considered “appropriate” behaviors and norms for a specific environment.

– The Costs of Code-Switching, Harvard Business Review

Imagine spending your entire day at work walking a tightrope – maybe the tightrope is only a few feet off the ground and the fall wouldn’t hurt much . . . maybe the tightrope is over shark-infested waters. This constant vigilance, adaptation, and hyper-awareness of how other people receive you is exhausting, even when you get used to it. 

Though code switching culturally is often associated with Black people, there are other groups who employ code-switching to fit into the dominant culture: other POC, LGBTQ+ folks, women, and bilingual people.

Our ability (or lack thereof) to fit into dominant culture affects us at every stage of our work lives: getting an interview, getting hired, how we get feedback, who wants to mentor us, whether we’re seen as a “high potential employee” or not, and whether we are seen as a leader.

WHAT DOES LEADERSHIP LOOK LIKE?

"To an extent, leadership is like beauty: It's hard to define, but you know it when you see it."

– Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

“We know it when we see it.” Who is “we”? What are they seeing? And what is the result of either the confirmation of what you want to or expect to see, or the opposite? 

Non-white non-men are woefully underrepresented in leadership at every level in the US. There are three possible explanations for this.

1. Non-white non-men are less equipped to be leaders.
2. Non-white non-men lack the desire to be leaders.
3. There are barriers in place that make it more difficult for non-white non-men to be leaders.

Recent studies (not to mention plain common sense) have debunked explanation #1. Explanation #2 may be slightly more complex, but there are plenty of women and minority folk who would tell you that they would like to be leaders – which might explain why so many of them are starting and leading their own ventures. So that leaves us with #3. What barriers are we looking at?

Close your eyes. Picture a leader—modern or historical. We’ll wait.

We won’t ask you who you pictured, but we are going to ask: Were they male? Were they white? Regardless of gender or race, how many of these characteristics did they have: strong jaw, full head of hair, tall, clean cut, an air of gravitas, a deep voice, a steady gaze, a slight smile?

This may seem like a silly exercise, except that our ideas of “who looks like a leader” are remarkably predictive of who will actually become a leader. Remember that our gut brains are making those “friend or foe” assessments very quickly, and it turns out that our key primal indicators for the person we want leading our tribe are strength/dominance (primarily represented by face shape - that strong jaw/square chin!) and trustworthiness (facial symmetry, attractiveness, presence or absence of a smile, gaze). Both children and adults, in multiple studies, are consistently able to pick who will win political elections by looking at photos of their faces.

Beyond the cues of appearance, the perception of confidence is a powerful indicator for who we see as a leader – much more, in fact, than actual data on success or failure. Even when a confident individual’s performance doesn’t match their confidence, we tend to believe what they told us about how awesome they are (thanks for the confirmation bias, gut brain).

If you’re looking for the outward manifestations of leadership, look no further than guides to cultivating executive presence—you will find all kinds of tips and tricks to more effectively mimic these behaviors. They are all based on the idea that leadership, and executive presence are ideas based in bedrock that we must learn in order to play the game. Of course, whether or not someone looks and acts like a leader is not predictive of how well they will do as a leader. How confident someone appears to be does not always correlate with their level of competence.

This fundamental bias of perception affects those who wish to be leaders very early on. Whether or not they are “authentic”, they may just not match our unconscious ideas of leadership. You can bring your full, authentic self to work, but if you don’t resonate with the biases above, you may not advance. Even worse, the individuals in charge might not even know WHY they are holding you back. "We know it when we see it" — or don't.

There is another critical piece of this perception puzzle: how we feel subconsciously about effort. The basis of most articles laying out how we shoot our own leadership in the foot is that we create a discord between our intentions and our actions. If a leader is supposed to take space, but you constrict, you give away your authority. If you are supposed to hold someone’s gaze but you look away too much, you aren’t demonstrating confidence. If you gesture too much, or use vocal fillers like um, uh, or like, you’ve murdered your own gravitas.

But depending on how naturally these skills come to you, or how far they are from your own predisposition, they may take time to learn and adopt. And while you’re in the learning process, those behaviors will lack one of the popular markers of authenticity: effortlessness. The timing mismatch that comes as we consciously remember to make the “correct” behavioral choices can signal a lack of trustworthiness in our audience’s gut brain. And trustworthiness is a key component of authenticity. 

In spite of what the proponents of authentic leadership might say, imitating the people who already have power is as natural as breathing. As humans, we imitate what works to enhance our physical, emotional and mental safety.

We quickly learn that the way to success is often not to bring more of ourselves to work, but to more carefully craft our work personas.  

The Catch-22 of authenticity is dizzying when you start to look through the lens of bias. Dominant Culture has rules of engagement. The language of those rules is unspoken but powerful. To advance you are expected to intuit and adhere to those rules, but must do it so masterfully as to give no hint of performance. 

You must learn to perform authenticity, but not too much, and all effortlessly.

To make all of this even more crazy-making, there is a subset of people who are allowed—even encouraged—to break rules. This authentically rule-breaking rockstar shows up especially often in the tech world: the DISRUPTER.

The disrupter is so “authentically rebellious” that they may believe that because they can break the rules, the rules don’t exist. They may simultaneously reinforce rules for the people who report to them. Sound confusing? Want to rip your hair out? Well, keep going (and we know a great wig store).

When actors research a role in a period piece, one of the first things we do is look at “the rules” of the world of the show. What are they? Who makes them? Who is allowed to break them? Figuring out who must “know their place” and who gets to make and break the rules shows us who has status and privilege.

The ingredient we’ve been hinting at, the catalyst that affects all of us and all of this, is POWER.

Tomorrow we'll get into how power forms the structure and the unseen foundation of how our authenticity is received—or not. Read more of THE AUTHENTICITY CODE here.