The real thing

By Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove

Imagine you are CEO of a major corporation. The information you have suggests major problems lie ahead. Sales are falling. Market share is under threat. Talking to the world, do you honestly express your serious concerns about the business or do you put a protective gloss on reality? The latter is virtually always the answer.

Faced with a patient, a doctor is more likely to offer an optimistic scenario than a negative one. When a politician meets a voter in the flesh, many voters express a deep commitment to voting for the politician in
front of them. Often they fail to carry this through.

Leaders tailor their messages all the time. They don’t need spin doctors; it is human nature. Truth bends. This is not deception – well, usually not – but a kind of leadership artifice, realization that leadership is a show.

Think of how a teacher grabs a class’s attention. Think of how you might take a meeting by storm. Think of how a leader enters the room and raises the atmosphere. Leadership may not be show business, but the leader tends to wear some greasepaint.

There is no denying the theatrical element necessary to succeed as a leader. ‘The example I use with the executives that I work with is a Broadway or a West End play. People in a show do not say, oh my foot hurts, I don’t feel too good today, I’m in a bad mood. Why? Because it is show time. I tell the executives that the kid on the stage is making 2 percent of what you’re making. If they can go out there, night after night after night, and be a professional, then so can you,’ says the executive coach Marshall Goldsmith,

How a leader behaves makes a difference. If they are miserable, their mood is infectious. A casual offhand remark can spread through the organization like wildfire. Every moment. Every move. Every word and every communication has an audience and has an impact on that audience.

But, and this is a considerable impediment, at the same time the loudest leadership chorus of recent years has championed the case of the authentic leader. The torch bearers for the idea include former CEO of Medtronic, Bill George, and business school academics such as Rob Goffee and Liz Mellon (author of Inside the Leader’s Mind).

With authentic leadership, the best leaders make the most of the qualities they already possess. They trade on their strengths and understand their weaknesses. Authentic leadership is definitely not about adopting the styles or traits of other successful leaders. It is about honestly and consistently being yourself.

This is all very well, but counters most of the received wisdom of recent decades which has been about learning from and emulating the traits of the leadership greats. From Churchill to Jobs, leaders have been entreated to watch, learn and copy.

‘We realize that the missing ingredients in corporations are ethical leaders committed to building authentic organizations for the long term,’ said Bill George. ‘We need authentic leaders, people of the highest integrity, committed to building enduring organizations. We need leaders who have a deep sense of purpose and are true to their core values. We need leaders with the courage to build their companies to meet the needs of all their stakeholders, and who recognize the importance of their service to society.’

According to George, authentic leaders: understand their purpose, and have the passion for that purpose that comes from being highly motivated by their work; have solid values, of which integrity should be one, and practice those values testing themselves in different situations; should be able to lead with their heart, treating followers with compassion, and firing up employees to achieve great things; must forge common purpose and build a sense of connectedness so that they develop enduring relationships with, and inspire loyalty and trust from, their employees; and authentic leadership requires a high degree of selfdiscipline – this means dealing with stress effectively and maintaining wellbeing.

This is all well and good. Authenticity feels like the right thing to do. It feels good. The trouble is that it sits uncomfortably with the inauthentic nature of a great deal of necessary leadership behavior. Leaders have
to appear unworried even if they know that disaster is looming – because if their smile breaks, disaster will arrive all the quicker.

And then there is the ‘show time’ element. Some amount of artifice, of behaving counter to your habitual behavior, is often necessary to communicate and engage with people.

For leaders this is one of the great dilemmas: how can they square manifestly inauthentic behavior with the need to be themselves? In the end their most authentic thing may be their response to this question.

Resources

Bill George’s ideas are best expressed in Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value (Jossey-Bass, 2003) and his co-authored article ‘Discovering Your Authentic Leadership’ (Harvard Business Review, February, 2007).