Authentic Leadership Rediscovered
Is becoming an "authentic leader"
just an excuse for practicing a rigid management style? Bill George, who
pioneered the idea, says critics don't understand what really constitutes an authentic
leader.
“Authenticity has become the gold standard for leadership”
—Harvard Business Review, January 2015
In the last 10 years, authenticity has become the gold standard of
leadership. This is a sea change from 2003 when I wrote Authentic Leadership. Back then, many
people asked what it meant to be authentic.
Authentic Leadership was intended as a clarion call to the new
generation to learn from negative examples like Enron, WorldCom and Tyco. In
it, I defined authentic leaders as genuine, moral and character-based leaders:
"People of the highest integrity, committed to building enduring organizations
… who have a deep sense of purpose and are true to their core values who have
the courage to build their companies to meet the needs of all their
stakeholders, and who recognize the importance of their service to
society."
Authentic leaders demonstrate these five qualities:
Understanding their purpose
Practicing solid values
Leading with heart
Establishing connected relationships
Demonstrating self-discipline
The following year the Gallup Institute and Professor Bruce Avolio, a
well-known leadership scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, organized
a definitive conference on authentic leadership in which the
importance of leaders’ life stories became paramount.
In spite of widespread acceptance of authentic leadership—or perhaps
because of it—several authors have recently challenged the value of being
authentic, claiming it is an excuse for being locked into a rigid view of one’s
leadership, being rude and insensitive, refusing to change, or not adapting to
one’s style to the situation. These arguments appear to demonstrate a
fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes an authentic leader.
Recommendations that leaders should accept narcissism, embrace their inner
jerk, or focus on themselves will not work in the long-run.
In light of this public discussion, it’s important to rediscover
authentic leadership as well as examine some of the recent mischaracterizations
of it.
Authentic leadership is built on your character, not your style. My
mentor Warren Bennis said, “Leadership is character. It is not just a
superficial question of style. It has to do with who we are as human beings and
the forces that shaped us.
Style is the outward manifestation of one’s authentic leadership, not
one’s inner self. To become authentic leaders, people must adopt flexible
styles that fit the situation and capabilities of their teammates. At times,
authentic leaders are coaches and mentors, inspiring others and empowering
their teammates to lead through the most important tasks without a great deal
of supervision. At other times, authentic leaders must make very difficult
decisions, terminating people and going against the will of the majority, as
required to meet the situational imperative. These difficult actions can be
taken while still retaining their authenticity.
Authentic leaders are real and genuine. You cannot “fake it till you make it” by putting on a
show as a leader or being a chameleon in your style. People sense very quickly
who is authentic and who is not. Some leaders may pull it off for a while, but
ultimately they will not gain the trust of their teammates, especially when
dealing with difficult situations. The widespread adoption of LinkedIn, Google
and increasingly networked communities means that every leader has the informal
equivalent of a “Yelp” score that will come to light. If people see their leaders
as trustworthy and willing to learn, followers will respond very positively to
requests for help in getting through difficult times.
Authentic leaders are constantly growing. They do not have a rigid view
of themselves and their leadership. Becoming authentic is a developmental state
that enables leaders to progress through multiple roles, as they learn and grow
from their experiences. Like superior performances in athletics or music,
becoming an authentic leader requires years of practice in challenging
situations.
Authentic leaders match their behavior to their context, an essential
part of emotional intelligence (EQ). They do not burst out with whatever they
may be thinking or feeling. Rather, they exhibit self-monitoring, understand
how they are being perceived, and use emotional intelligence (EQ) to
communicate effectively.
Authentic leaders are not perfect, nor do they try to be. They make
mistakes, but they are willing to admit their errors and learn from them. They
know how to ask others for help. Nor are authentic leaders always humble or
modest. It takes a great deal of self-confidence to lead through very difficult
situations.
Authentic leaders are sensitive to the needs of others. One author has postulated, and I paraphrase,
“What if your real self is a jerk?” People are not born as jerks, nor does this
behavior reflect their authentic selves. Rather, these individuals likely had
very negative experiences early in their lives that cause them to have
difficulty in managing their anger, in part because they feel like victims or
feel inadequate.
Situations like these indicate the importance of processing one’s
crucibles: people need not feel like victims or stuff their experiences deep
inside themselves. Rather, by understanding themselves and reframing their
experiences, they can find the pearl inside that represents their authentic
selves. That’s why exploring who they are and getting honest feedback from
their colleagues are essential elements of becoming authentic leaders. That’s
what Starbucks’ Howard Schultz did in coping with the severe challenges of his
youth. It is also what made the difference for Steve Jobs when he returned to
Apple nine years after his 1986 termination.
For all these reasons, authentic leaders constitute the vast majority of
people chosen today for the key roles in business and nonprofits. Their
emergence as the predominant way of leading has resulted from all we have
discovered about leadership in the past decade.
A Human-Centered Approach to Leadership Development
My 2007 book, True North, showed people how
they could develop themselves as authentic leaders. Whereas Authentic
Leadership was based on my personal experiences in leading, True North was
built on field research drawn from in-person interviews with 125 leaders. With
3,000 pages of transcripts, it remains as the largest in-depth study of leaders
ever conducted, based on first-person interviews.
Having examined the literature containing more than 1,000 studies of
leaders, most of which employed third-person approaches of observations and
questionnaires, our research team concluded that learning directly from these
leaders about what was important to them and how they had developed would give
us much richer insights than prior studies. Indeed, this proved to be the case,
as we discovered the paramount importance of leaders’ life stories and the
crucibles they had faced. We also learned from them how people develop into
authentic leaders.
In our research, we embraced the richness of understanding leadership as
a fully human endeavor. This approach built upon the pioneering work of Abraham
Maslow, Carl Rogers, Douglas McGregor, Daniel Goleman and Warren
Bennis. True North assembled this developmental process in an
original approach that enabled people to develop themselves as authentic
leaders.
In order to see how leadership has changed in the past decade, we
initiated research in 2014 that focused on 47 new leaders who were more global
and diverse than the original cohort. We also followed up on 90 leaders
featured in True North to see how they have fared since their 2005-06
interviews. With only a couple of exceptions, we learned these leaders had
remained true to their authentic selves, and had performed very well in myriad
roles.
This research led to my new book, Discover Your True North, which profiles 101
leaders and describes how they developed. It also draws heavily upon classroom
experiences in the Authentic Leadership Development courses at Harvard Business
School, where 6,000 MBAs and executives have participated in this developmental
process.
Most significantly, we learned that authentic leaders are constantly
growing and learning from their leadership experiences. By taking on new
challenges, they become more effective as authentic leaders. When they find
themselves in entirely new situations, authentic leaders draw upon their true
selves, what they have learned in past life experiences, especially their
crucibles, and they learn from their new colleagues. This enables them to
become more effective as leaders. This approach is similar to Stanford’s Carol
Dweck's “growth mindset.”
If you want to be an authentic leader and have a meaningful life, you
need to do the difficult inner work to develop yourself, have a strong moral
compass based on your beliefs and values, and work on problems that matter to
you. When you look back on your life it may not be perfect, but it will be
authentically yours.
by Bill George
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/authentic-leadership-rediscovered?cid=spmailing-12435478-WK%20Newsletter%2011-18-2015%20(1)-November%2018,%202015
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