Unleash your authenticity
Ian Browne
Early careers professional - Apprenticeships - Helping rising leaders nail your first 90 days
If I give you a choice between authentic leadership and inauthentic leadership, chances are you’re going to side with me and say I am, or I want to be an authentic leader.
?
If I ask you what that means, chances are there’ll be a moment of silence, a bit of waffle or a creeping grin and realisation that we talk about authentic leadership, this thing we desire, this mantle we want to wear and be seen wearing and we’re not clear what it is.
?
It’s worth saying again.? There is this thing we want, we crave and if you read very worthy articles in Forbes, HBR – we really need right now – and we don’t know what it is.
?
And sure as the sun rises – if we don’t know what something is, then we surely can’t be doing things to achieve it.
?
Let this article and some further ones in this series to unleash your potential change all that.
?
?
Can you just define yourself as authentic?
?
Take Georgia, VP at a media company – her view is ‘what you see it what you get’.?? ‘I am my authentic self’, ‘No airbrushing, no airs and graces I am what I am’.
?
In Georgia’s world, authenticity is a kind of transparency to the inner soul.? But it’s also unchanging.?? And there’s a clear tension therefore between what’s needed of Georgia daily and this steadfast, unchanging authentic self.
?
Send Georgia into a supplier negotiation with some tough terms to negotiate out and she’s your ‘take no prisoners’ kind of woman.?? Send Georgia in to a more delicate and finely balanced review with a critical employee who’s a flight risk and who knows what the outcome would be.
?
We need leaders to grow, learn and adapt.? They will and must change as they grow.? Authenticity cannot mean something unchanging.
?
?
Can you just mirror someone’s past template of success?
?
Take Mike, VP in logistics.?? He loves leadership books and from an early age studied Jack Welch and more lately luminaries such as Gary Vee and hopes to one day step out of corporate life to run his own haulage firm.
?
Mike’s view is these guys that have gone before him have already experienced the bumps in the road and smoothed out the way.?? They’ve clearly been successful; they have shone light on the pathway to achievement.?? If you believe in them whole-heartedly then what’s wrong with drinking the Kool-Aid and just mirroring what they’ve done.
?
What’s past is in the past.? The past helps guide us through choices we make in the future but we have to live in the present.?? As Mike is faced with dilemmas and challenges not in his leadership disciple book, those around him, potential investors in his new business start to lose faith.? Something’s off – the figures are all right, the strategy is good, but they get the sense it’s not 100% Mike.
?
?
Can you sit above taking a position and float on the winds of change?
?
Muriel has a great opportunity to take on her first big leadership position.? It’s a huge step having starting off as a personal assistant and then worked her way up supporting leaders with their roles, she’s been a keen observer of office politics.
?
And she’s observed how some leaders take different positions depending on who they are speaking with and who they are working for.?? She’s also got quite experienced at behaving herself like the chameleon.? As each leader she’s worked for has different preferences, interest and working styles – she’s adapted with ease and been loved by those she’s worked for in the process.
?
Muriel’s first month as a leader turns out to be much tougher than she expected.?? Tried and tested bad-ass techniques she aped from bosses of the past bombed entirely and she got scared and full-scale rebellion was on the cards.?? So she pulled out the muffin-basket card another leader she’d worked for had used – the muffins all got eaten joyfully but people still weren’t bonding with her.
?
The fact her team didn’t know who Muriel was and what she stood for wasn’t surprising because Muriel didn’t know herself.? And once people suss that someone is playing a role, the game is up.
?
?
All the world’s a stage and one man plays many parts
?
And women we should add, since Bill Shakespeare missed them out of that quote.
?
We’ve established that we don’t want:
?
-????????????? Leaders that just buy a badge saying ‘I am authentic’
-????????????? Leaders that try to act as the mirror image of someone else
-????????????? Leaders that stick unwaveringly to ‘I am what I am’
-????????????? Leaders that change constantly in the wind
?
Because the leaders we admire the most have a core that is understood but it shows itself in different ways depending on the context.?? Take a kaleidoscope if you’ve ever laid your hands on one – the core is the same but as you twist it, you benefit from different viewpoints all from the same core.
?
So let’s look at some better strategies.
?
?
We value leaders whose actions reflect their life story
?
You can’t change where you were born but at a certain point you get to make choices that influence how you live.?? We are particularly attracted to leaders whose actions draw context from their life experiences.
?
If you look at Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks.? His origin story involved his father losing his job and the family immediately losing healthcare coverage.?? And then when the family needed medical care they had to borrow.? And he resolved with Starbucks to buck the norm of hiring part-time employees and offer them healthcare coverage.
?
?
We value leaders with the humility to learn from those better than them
?
If you’ve been in work for some time, you’ve probably had to work for someone who plays the glory game, the one that is quick to talk up their achievements and the team achievements when things are going well and even faster to castigate their team and throw them to the wolves when things go badly.
?
We probably all know folk who’ll climb over the dead bodies to get that promotion and we’ve all met those who have accelerated so quickly they jettisoned aspects of wider life to prioritise career.?? They live an imbalanced life, impatient with those ‘burdened’ by things that distract from work focus.
?
And as they accelerate so quickly consuming the glory due to others they have few true friends and networks to help them see the leader they are becoming until eventually it becomes obvious to all that they cannot create followership without the stick of coercion.
?
Authentic leaders are attuned to and comfortable with what they don’t know.? They use their self-awareness to develop, grow and bring others with them in the process.
?
?
We value leaders that letting us see and benefit from a little part of them each day
?
Think Nestle and think Switzerland, clear skies, fresh mountain air.?? But also a place of great wealth and commerce.? And one the pages of one of Nestle’s annual report is a photograph of Peter Brabeck-Letmathe.? Actually two photographs.? One is of Peter in a dark suit outside the headquarters of Nestle and the other of Peter in mountaineering gear.
?
The cynics might look for the PR stunt but Peter’s hobby happens to be mountaineering.? Not something he necessarily had to demonstrate in the board room but in an annual report, investors got to see another side to Peter that was also authentically consistent with the story of Nestle.
?
?
We value leaders that walk the walk
?
As I write this in 2024 there are numerous big elections around the world and one of the frequent complaints in all campaigns is that of political leaders leading lives that are detached and different from others and making decisions based on a partial world view.
?
Your role as authentic leader is of course to make decisions and things happen and it’s neither right or fair to constrain those to only the popular ones.?
?
Authentic leaders walk the walk and don’t ask people to do things they’d not themselves do.?? In 2024 the big word has been hybrid working as a post covid environment has prompted companies to ask people to use offices more for collaboration.
?
And it’s fair to say there have been some very outspoken and clearly authentic, no sugar-coating here views from leaders particularly in big consulting firms that those workers not willing to come in to the office should find work elsewhere.
?
Authentic – in the sense it is genuinely and in an unfiltered way exactly what they believe.
?
But equally inauthentic, because the arguments that the benefits outweigh the sacrifice of coming in aren’t fully experienced by those same leaders.?? Few gave up their isolated quiet corner offices to sit on a floor of noise with cancelling headphones on.? Most retained their chauffeur to avoid using metros and buses.? Most weren’t raiding the fridge the night before to pack random things into Tupperware because most retained their support team that would happily run to collect lunch, drinks and snacks on demand and on company expense.
?
It's of course not an argument for or against hybrid working.?? Authenticity isn’t about showing all your cards, saying everything you believe.? It’s about picking from a wide deck you hold and choosing the cards most fitting the occasion.? And it’s about demonstrating an understanding beyond self-interest.
?
?
?
Authentic leadership is a fundamental shift
In how you perceive yourself, how you relate to others, how you understand and integrate the world around you.
?
To unleash your potential, are you ready for the challenge?
?
Found this useful?? Please share it.
These articles are written for everyone who is new to leadership or transitioning to their next leadership position.
As more is expected with you, what got you this far is just the start.? And you can help others by sharing this article.? You can also find others on this website www.ianbrowne.com
?
Do you have more potential?
There are thousands of self-improvement books.
Common to all of them is the single biggest thing that holds every leader back from truly being great – and that’s themselves.
All of us, every day, do things that sabotage our potential success.? We don’t always know we’re doing it.? You need a special mirror to know what these things are.??
And the good news is if you follow this link, I’ll send you a questionnaire that’ll help you understand what your saboteurs are.?? It’s free, it’ll take ten minutes, it’ll unlock your performance.
?
Are you ready to unleash your potential?
If you’re driven, determined and ambitious to make your leadership the best it could be then why not consider Positive Intelligence, that’s helped over half a million people increase their confidence, productivity, conflict management, decision making and leadership at a fundamental level.
Every two months I invite a small group of no more than six leaders to join me on a six-week programme that’ll transform your leadership capability, productivity, and performance.?
Drop me a line for a no-obligation chat
[email protected] ?and learn how to unleash your potential here www.letsunleash.it