Functional vs Authentic Leadership

I like public speaking. There is something special about an audience who have an expectation to learn and be entertained and me, as a speaker, who must keep my audience interested. And every time I give a speech, I return to the speaking skills I learned 20 years ago when I went to a speaking course. Here is what I learned.

The training I took, led by the fantastic teacher Erik Mattsson (ordrum.se), was (and still is) called “Speak So Others Want to Listen". The basic idea of the education is that the listeners in the audience, at any time, can just stop to listen, while your task as a speaker is to make them continue stay tuned. Erik describes the challenge of speaking as a constant struggle between you as a speaker and the impatient audience that at any cost must be kept interested. I especially remember one classmate, let’s call him John. Much can be said about John, but he was not a very charismatic person. He was rather a bit shy not to say dull. In one of the exercises, we were to give a short speech for the rest of the class. When it was John’s turn, he went up on stage looking down on his feet, almost turned away from his audience, and mumbled his speech.

When our master Erik gave him feedback, he said:

-?????? John, I want you to look the audience in the eyes, have a more positive posture, turn towards the listeners and speak up a bit.

John replied:

-?????? But that is not me. I am a shy low-key person. To do what you ask for would be to pretend I am someone else.

Then Erik said something that has stayed with me ever since:

-?????? It is not a question about what is comfortable for you John. It is what is functional for the task you have. Your task is to make the audience keep listening. If you behave in the way you just did, you make it easy for the listeners to stop listening to you and then you have miss delivered on your task.

The conflict between to behave functional for the task at hand and doing what is comfortable can be transferred to everyday life in general and leadership especially. Here is how I think.

Functional leadership behavior

Leadership is about influencing people. Not against their will - that is manipulation - but in a way that they want to be led by you. In that sense it is very similar to the speaker-audience situation. Just like the audience at any time can stop listening,

the people you lead can at any time stop allow to be led by you. When that happens, you only have hierarchy and management left to influence, which is a safe way to dysfunctionality.

So, what is in the toolbox to make your tribe want to follow your leadership? According to me, the only things you have at your disposal are your behaviors. In essence, that boils down to five things:

1.???? what you say

2.???? how you say it

3.???? our facial expression

4.???? your body language

5.???? your job product i.e., whatever you produced and leave for other to see (it can be you PM, your presentation etc.).

Depending on the task you have at hand you can and must adjust and nudge your five behaviors in a way that you influence the people you lead. You can choose your words differently, you can nudge your facial expression and body language etc., all to be as functional for the task, the mission and purpose of your leadership. Your task as a leader is to behave as functional as possible to make your team perform. That is not inauthentic or manipulation, that is leadership in practice. But can it be too much? Can you morph your behaviors to achieve the effect you want for the task but still lose out on good leadership? ?What happens when leadership slips over to manipulation and inauthenticity? I believe you can be too “plastic” in your behavior in your ambition to be functional. But how do you know where the limit is? Perhaps, Dalai Lama captured it in his statements about the conflicts in life. He said:

there are only one conflict in the world, that is the conflict between short-term and long-term

(for the record I have tried to confirm the correctness of attributing Dalai Lama the quote but not succeeded).

Paraphrasing this, one might say:

the thin line to walk as a leader is the one between short-term functional leadership and long-term authentic leadership.

Therefore, to keep your flexible and morphing functional leadership ambition within bounds, you have to understand your personal authenticity compass.

Authentic leadership - Your Life story and HalfTime

Two researchers who can give some guidance in how to be authentic and coherent as leaders are Hermina Ibarra (London Business School) and Kent Lineback. They wrote in their HBR article “What’s your story” (HBR 2005) that, in order to understand yourself and your leadership, as well as guide you in the future, a defined “life story” is of essence. This consistent and guiding life-story is what explained your behavior and outcome when you study your life in retrospect. At the same time, your coherent life story is what will guide the decisions you will take when you are standing in the crossroads of life.

Another person who has described how to be true to your beliefs and to be coherent is Bob Buford, author of the book HalfTime. The concept of HalfTime is the following. The first half of life is characterized by building success. You build an education, a career, a family and a home. However, sometime in the middle of life, you realize that the time and energy you have left in life to spend is less that what you already have consumed. That is when the HalfTime-space of life occurs, and you start to ponder over what endeavor will be worth the rest of you time and energy. For many, that second half is not about more success but rather significance.

?In the halftime process, Bob recommends defining your personal mission statement (very similar to the concept of a coherent life story). It is a statement in the form:

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With my:______________ (your unique strengths’ and talents)

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I want to:______________ (where do you want to direct your remaining time and energy - your passion and purpose)

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To leave the world:_______(in that way will it make the world a better place -? the result)

Connecting the dots

So, how do all this connect? I believe that you,

as a leader, must morph and nudge your behavior to be as functional as possible for the task. However, you should not stretch to the extent that you violate your life story or your mission statement.

If you do that, you will over time be experienced as inauthentic and unreliable, even inconsistent. This is where it connects back to the quote from Dalai Lama. Short-term, there might be a need to adjust your behavior to reach your task as a leader, but if that cost you in the long run, perhaps you should adjust your behavior less, although your task effectiveness might go down.

Let your long-term authenticity and coherence set the boundaries within which you can stretch your behavior to be as functional as possible as a leader.?

Hopefully, these lines can help you find your balance between being functional while not losing your long-term authenticity. For me, I think I need to put more emphasize on the long-term trustworthiness.

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