I was part of a conversation recently about great leaders. Not leadership models, frameworks or competencies, but actual leaders; the people we had worked for, worked alongside, or watched from a distance and thought, they are really good at this.
One word kept coming up: authenticity.
Initially that made me slightly uncomfortable, because authenticity has become one of those words that gets thrown around so much that I’m not sure we always know what we mean by it anymore.
“Bring your whole self to work.” “Be vulnerable.” “Show people the real you.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but that wasn’t the authenticity we were talking about. We were talking about leaders who knew who they were and, perhaps more importantly, had done the work to understand who they wanted to be.
I Am Who I Choose To Become
I don’t have a quote tattooed on me, but if I did, it would be this from Karl Jung: “I am not what has happened to. me, I am what I choose to become.”.
As a leader, and as an individual, I recognise that I am not simply the product of the events in my life, rather I make a conscious decision every day to be the person that I have chosen to be. To respond rather than react, to take ownership rather than assign blame, to put my family first, and to focus on productivity rather than business.
The point here is; you cannot really be authentic if you don’t know what you are being authentic to.
What do you believe? What matters to you? What are the principles you are unwilling to compromise? How do you want to behave when things get difficult? What do you want people to be able to rely on you for?
These aren’t easy questions, and I suspect most of us spend considerably more time thinking about what we want to achieve than who we want to be while achieving it. We have career plans, objectives, development plans and targets, but spend much less time defining the principles that sit underneath them.
The leaders who came up in that conversation seemed to have done exactly that. They knew who they had chosen to be.
Authenticity Isn’t Personality
This is where I think we sometimes get authenticity wrong.
Being authentic doesn’t mean behaving exactly as you feel in every situation. If I’m frustrated, authenticity doesn’t require me to make everyone else experience my frustration. If I’m worried, I don’t have to transfer that anxiety to the rest of the team. If I disagree with someone, authenticity doesn’t give me permission to be disrespectful.
Leadership still requires judgement, emotional intelligence and an understanding of the impact you have on other people. Authenticity isn’t the absence of a filter; it is alignment between what you say you believe and how you actually behave.
And that alignment requires work.
You have to examine your own behaviour, understand your strengths and weaknesses and notice the situations that make you defensive or threaten your ego. You have to seek feedback and actually listen to it. You have to be willing to accept that the version of yourself you carry around in your head isn’t necessarily the version everyone else experiences.
Sometimes you have to ask yourself; “Am I the asshole?”
That can be uncomfortable, but without doing that work you don’t really have principles, you have preferences.
And preferences have a habit of changing when they become inconvenient.
When Values Become Real
Anyone can have values when there is no cost attached to them.
It is easy to say you trust your team when everything is going well, to encourage challenge when everyone agrees with you, or to talk about work-life balance when there isn’t a deadline approaching. The test comes when those things become inconvenient; when someone challenges you publicly, somebody makes a mistake, a deadline is going to be missed, or your boss is putting pressure on you.
That is when values stop being words and become something real.
People are remarkably good at spotting the gap. Tell people you want them to speak up, then react badly when they do, and they notice. Tell them mistakes are part of learning, then look for someone to blame when something goes wrong, and they notice. Tell them you trust them, then insist on being involved in every decision, and they notice that too.
Over time people adjust their behaviour. They stop challenging, stop taking risks and stop telling you things you might not want to hear. Eventually you can find yourself surrounded by people behaving exactly as you have trained them to behave, while wondering why nobody is doing the things you told them you valued.
Principles, Not a Script
Knowing what you stand for doesn’t mean refusing to change. In fact, I think the opposite is true.
If you understand your principles, you can be incredibly flexible about everything else. You can change your mind, admit you were wrong, adapt your approach or respond differently to different people because different people need different things. Your behaviour can change while your principles remain intact.
A leader who values fairness doesn’t necessarily treat everyone identically. A leader who values honesty doesn’t have to say every thought that enters their head. A leader who values accountability can still show compassion when someone makes a mistake.
Principles give you an anchor, not a script.
And that matters because the worst time to decide what you stand for is when it is being tested. When the pressure arrives, emotions are high and the consequences are real, you don’t want to be inventing your principles in the moment. You want to already know who you are, what you believe and how you want to behave.
You won’t always get it right. None of us do. But you have something against which you can judge your own behaviour and recognise when you have fallen short; something that allows you to say, that wasn’t who I choose to be, and then do something about it.
The Work Continues
Maybe that is the part of authenticity we don’t talk about enough. It isn’t something you discover once, write down as five values in a notebook and consider the job done.
We change. Our experiences change us, responsibility changes us, success changes us and failure definitely changes us. So we have to keep asking the questions, testing our assumptions, listening to feedback and paying attention to the distance between the person we believe ourselves to be and the person other people actually experience.
Perhaps great leadership isn’t really about bringing your whole self to work. Perhaps it is about doing the work to understand yourself first; knowing what you believe, knowing what you value and knowing what you want to stand for.
Then, particularly when it becomes difficult, having the courage to act accordingly.
That’s authenticity.
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