For many of you, I’m about to touch a third rail. I’m going to take on topic with such an aura of sacredness to it that you might think I’m putting on a tin foil hat and claiming, “rivers aren’t wet.” But this must be done.
So, let’s have at it: there’s probably no term so abused in the English language as “authenticity.” I can think of few other words where so much supportive head nodding but so little examination of what’s meant happens. For its ties to skilled communication and leadership development, however, it’s time to get precise.
The Genuinely Good and the Stubbornly Bad
On the noble side, authenticity has become a one-stop station for talking about how much genuineness a person exemplifies, their transparency and truthfulness, and their value commitments and consistencies. With authenticity there’s a sense that who we see on the outside is a good match with who that person is on the inside. These are, as Olaf from Frozen likes to say, “all good things.”
On the dark side, however, lies stubbornness, excuses for not growing, and some practical questions in need of answers. Let’s mix them all together to start. What if there’s a bully in your workplace who dominates conversations, shoots down others’ ideas at every turn, and shouts at subordinates for minor mistakes. Couldn’t this person say, “I’m being authentic, this is who I am!”
With most understandings of authenticity there’s nothing that can be done here. This person is channeling some “true self” as an authentic jerk. Yet you and I can see “I’m being authentic” simply covers for a stubborn way of being, a conscious stopping point for adapting and learning, and excuse for not growing out of and beyond these terrible behaviors. As Postman once highlighted, claims to “authenticity” can even “endow the most barbarous behavior with a purity of motive that obscures its consequences,” so much that “getting in touch with your feelings often amounts to losing touch with the feelings of others” (101).
More questions are begged. As raised in one book, when such different figures as Donald Trump, Michelle Obama, Taylor Swift, and the Pope are all described as authentic, where do we even land with that? And when in one country charisma means enthusiasm and energy while in another it means a serious and rational demeanor, whatever “authenticity” means clearly has little universal application.
On a different note, are you the same person as you were at 11 years of age? No, you continued to learn, develop, and grow beyond your 11-year-old “self” because new and greater roles were demanded as time went on. If someone said, “I’m being authentic to my 11 year old self” and continued to act that way until age 45, we’d think they’d lost it. So clearly if authenticity is to have any meaning at all, understanding what role change should have amid one’s consistencies and commitments is needed.
This isn’t just an intellectual exercise. As I’m about to show, with a great deal of help from others, many of the problems that plague our planet can be traced to conceptions of leadership and communication grounded in stubborn notions of “authenticity.”
Photo by Brady Knoll from Pexels
An Emerging Consensus on Authenticity
In my book, I pose a question heard from many participants in classes and workshops: “Don’t we all have ‘core’ identifies after all? Isn’t it duplicitous to maintain anything but our essential selves in different situations?” To address this, let’s get by with a little help from others.
In Leadership BS, Jeffrey Pfeffer finds that common notions of “authenticity” lead people down entirely wrong paths. Leadership requires amplifying energy when that’s useful, paying close attention to others, speaking and performing in elevated ways that initially may feel inauthentic but that are utterly necessary to adapt to people and situational demands (87).
You may not be feeling it, but expanding beyond feelings is needed for people “to grow, develop, and change, not get stuck in their temporarily authentic selves,” so “the idea that people are unchanged and unchanging across situations, or even that they should be, seems inconsistent with most of what we know about human psychology” (95, 102).
As Pfeffer relates, no one is born a doctor, baker, or social worker. These all took character and role development beyond wherever one was at. Even when not feeling confidence, there are times when performing beyond one’s current scope and being “usefully inauthentic” is the task of leadership communication. If the point of leadership is to elevate the work of individuals and teams, we should follow the evidence trail of what actually works. Joining the chorus of us critiquing authenticity, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is worth quoting at length:
“Decades of research leave little doubt: the most consistent predictors are the Big Five personality traits (especially conscientiousness, openness, and extraversion — and to a lesser degree, emotional stability and agreeableness), intelligence (the ability to learn, reason, and solve problems), technical expertise (knowing what you’re doing), and emotional intelligence, which, despite the name, is less about ‘being in touch with your feelings’ and more about managing impressions — doing almost the opposite of what the authenticity cult prescribes. Effective leaders are rarely those who are brutally honest, self-absorbed, or preoccupied with their own values. Nor are they the ones who ‘bring their whole selves to work,’ since that includes the moody, insecure, and irrelevant parts that others wish had stayed at home. Instead, good leaders do what good actors, diplomats, and therapists do: they regulate themselves for the benefit of others.
Even if authentic leadership was conceived with good intentions, it perpetuates the childish, romantic, and ultimately toxic idea that anyone can lead simply by ‘being themselves.’ That may sound liberating, but it’s as naïve as believing that you can become a concert pianist by banging the keys with feeling. Leadership, like music, requires skill, practice, and the ability to perform — not self-expression, but self-control. The irony is that the more obsessed we become with ‘authenticity,’ the further we drift from what leadership actually demands: the capacity to adapt, to manage appearances, and to get the best out of others, even when it means pretending. After all, if ‘just being yourself’ were enough to make people follow you, most families, companies, and nations would be in far better shape than they are.”
In the same way, in Performance Breakthrough Cathy Salit advises us all to “be more of who you are by performing who you’re not” (21). Just like kids on a playground experimenting with new roles, professional development can’t happen without stretching. Hermania Ibarra further shares how:
“In my twenty-five years of teaching on leadership, I have found that one thing that has remained unchanged: people’s strong and unflinching desire to be true to themselves, and their equally strong aversion to doing things that make them feel like fakes. One of the most important motivators of any behavior is the belief that it’s a fundamental expression of ourselves. That is exactly what gets us into trouble” (117).
Ibarra notes how “authenticity” is the chief obstacle to helping people become a still true but different and better, expanded self. How? This gets to the very core of all this: “The biggest problem with the true-to-self approach is that it defines authenticity according to the past and, by consequence, defines change as a loss” (128). I explore all this further here, but if change, growth, and development are out the window, maybe it’s just time to ditch the concept of authenticity altogether?
A Simple Shift that the World Needs
In a way, so many problems in the world come from fixed ways of acting, thinking, and being. If an authority figure decides the climate crisis isn’t real because that would mean giving up their long held, committed views or going against it’s what their tribe wants to hear—over and over again ignoring a consensus among experts—common notions of “authenticity” certainly provide a foundation for doing so.
In other words, there’s authorities who see never changing as a virtue, which is really a way of saying they’ve decided to stop learning. Once learning stops, they’re not even looking at incoming and disconfirming data, evidence, or insights that define the scope of challenges accurately.
And without that learning, that sense of “I might need to grow in my understandings and behaviors,” that commitment to looking outward for support for claims, of looking to both the past and future, of actually stepping up to become more of oneself through expansive leading and communicating, we’ll see nothing but solutions in search of problems.
If we’re to retain any notion of authenticity, then, let it be a forward looking, dynamic authenticity rather than a chained to the past, stationary kind. This is before we even get to the complex, multifaceted, and enormously consequential therapeutic applications of this topic, which I’ll save for another time. (Watching Inside Out gives a good head start though).
For now, ask yourself, what are my understandings of authenticity? And what does that lead me to do or not do in life? Addressing these questions may be one of the most important tasks you ever address.