Authenticity—Where do we go from here?
Prologue - Why
we are so obsessed with Leadership?
Development Dimensions International (DDI) conducts and publishes its Global Leadership Forecast bi-annually. The below graphic and paragraph have been excerpted from their 2014-2015 Global Leadership Forecast report. This graphic illustrates the overall state of leadership. This trend is disturbing to us and we have authored several UPDATE articles on the topic. See our those articles at www.themacrisgroup.com.
DDI continues as
follows:
“Development
Efforts Have Stalled
When compared to
our last two forecasts, the number of leaders who expressed confidence in the
overall quality of leadership in their organization increased just slightly: 40
percent of leaders rated current quality as high (see illustration above).
According to HR professionals, however, the needle hasn't moved at all. Only
one in four organizations evaluated their overall leader quality as high, the
same percentage as our 2011 forecast.*
Why is leader
quality going nowhere fast? Apparently, because leadership development efforts
have stalled, despite the fact that it is estimated that some $50 billion a
year is being spent on developing leaders worldwide.** As in the last two
forecasts, only 37 percent of leaders in the current study rated their
organization’s leadership development program as effective, indicating no
improvement over the past seven years. The overwhelming majority of leaders are
still saying they are not satisfied with their organization’s development
offerings. It’s no wonder that, with leaders reporting a lack of improvement in
their development, we aren’t seeing a vast difference in overall leader
quality.
If organizations
aren’t doing enough to push the needle, then the outlook for the future is even
gloomier. Only 15 percent of organizations rated their future bench strength as
strong, a slight decrease from our last forecast. Most organizations are not
confident that they have the leadership to address current and future needs.
So, what can they do to improve? The message from leaders is loud and clear:
Organizations need to refocus on improving their development efforts.”
* Boatman, J., &
Wellins, R.S. (2011), Global Leadership Forecast 2011: Time for a Leadership Revolution,
Pittsburgh, PA, Development Dimensions International.
** Kellerman, B. (2012), The End of Leadership, New York,
HarperCollins.
How does the DDI
Global Leadership Forecast tie in with this the second article on Authentic
Leaders? For those who have followed our writings over the past number of
years, we have tried to focus on different aspects of leadership in an attempt
to get our readers thinking about scope and breath of effective leadership,
along with the vast number of factors involved in actually changing or moving
the needle more than what is indicated above. We hope this and our other
articles will give you cause to think about leadership in your organization and
within your span of influence.
Introduction
We thank those of you who took the time to respond
to our last article on Authenticity and leadership – What does it really
mean? We received both written and
verbal comments that present even more questions. Our intention with UPDATE Newsletter articles
is to stimulate thought and dialogue. An
example of a few of our comments are:
General
Comments
Once
again you have peeled back the onion skin to learn about what makes good
leaders, both in context and authenticity....not any easy learning assignment
to say the least but you have used good examples to stimulate the
discussion…
It
all seemed so clear to me when I first thought about the topic: OF COURSE
a leader should be AUTHENTIC on all levels….otherwise she/he is just a puppet,
an actor, a FAKER! But then I kept
getting deeper into more levels as you raised such good questions and my brain
and emotions got activated!
This
article was excellent, I’d love to actually discuss it sometime in the future.
About
Leaders you’ve worked for:
He
taught me many things about his corporate stewardship and core values, but
above all, he mentored me to be honest and frank in disclosing my deliberations
on important corporate matters. To never
be tempted to exaggerate the truth in order to make a case, nor fail to shy
away from telling the truth (as I saw it), in fear of "what others"
(meaning hierarchical executives) might think or conclude, or the possible
retaliatory actions/intimidations they might impose upon me. I was always to behave "in truth to
myself" and my own conscience. This
is what the "old wise man of the sea" taught me. He was authentic and a very real leader to
me....no other has ever come close.
I’ve
been guided in my career both by leaders who possessed a moral compass and some
who I would consider ruthless. I can attest that I learned from both brands of
leaders. I have worked on being aware of how my position affects the many
people who follow me simply as a result of where they are positioned in the
hierarchy. I’ve determined that it is more rewarding as a leader to see the
success in others than to succeed yourself. Maybe the reason is that when you
are successful, the confident you have and the joy you live makes you want to
share that feeling or place in society.
Reflections: Leadership
Authenticity lessons learned
U.S.
Navy – One Commanding Officer was insecure.
His experience had not been with fast attack submarines and he was
assigned to a very sensitive and critical mission. His leadership style was inconsistent on
areas of operations. His leadership made
the life of his wardroom officers; non-nuclear department heads and division
officers somewhat miserable. The nuclear
department officers were exempt – he knew the nuclear side of submarining very
well. As much as he was a good person, I
would not place him in the category of an effective leader. In contrast, another Commanding Officer was
completely transparent. He was a
particularly intelligent person and a very honest Commanding Officer. He plainly stated to his wardroom officers
that there were wartime and peacetime Commanding Officers. While I was young and his comment seemed so
obvious at that time, I gave it little thought.
Several years later I realized the essence of what he was actually
saying. While many in the wardroom
respected the CO for his intelligence, I am not sure many believed he was a
wartime CO. His realization of the
difference was commensurate with his intelligence and has had a significant
impact on my thinking on leadership.
In
my first job following the Navy, I had the good fortune of working for a person
who was quite enlightened in leadership and management concepts, particularly
since this was close to 40 years ago. Things that employees value today like
flex time, initiative leading to higher remuneration and leadership
opportunities, and innovative profit sharing plans, were part of the way he ran
his company. I learned a tremendous
amount about the consulting business there.
But, along with all these positive aspects, there was an Achilles
heel. I might characterize the
vulnerability as inconsistent behavior, and a tendency to be highly volatile
and reactive. Which was authentic
behavior the enlightened person who was ahead of his time or the volatile
tyrant in disguise?
Regarding
Authenticity
One
of our readers brought up an interesting point; the FAKER comment. That comment is based in the Myers Briggs
Personality Profile. The point is
straight forward – some people’s MBTI profile may be inconsistent with the
requirements of their leadership demands. These demands may require a person to
move away from their comfort zone and actually do things that are very
difficult for them to do (fake the way they really are) not being true to
themselves which challenges their authenticity.
“Faking” might not be truly what the word denotes. Even a good authentic leader will find
themselves in situations where they are not comfortable. To achieve organizational and personal goals,
the leader may have to do things differently from what they would naturally
do. It could be faking to survive or it
might be assuming a different response to move the organization along,
but still driving to achieve the same goals.
If it is Jekyll and Hyde behavior, as in the example from above, then
authenticity is probably lost. If it is
moving out
of a comfort zone to keep the organization heading toward stated goals then it
may well be an uncomfortable flexibility that is not really a departure from
true authenticity.
How
does one recognize a real ‘Faker’ though?
A real faker is certainly not authentic.
One way is simple, a faker tries to take the attention away from their
shortcomings by diverting attention to things they think, the people they are
leading, will respond to. What do we
mean here? Fakers assume the people they
are leading may want to see certain things from them. Like a nice office, coffee machines, artwork
on the walls etc. in lieu of their involvement, engagement and leadership. The superficial things have a short
half-life. Another way to recognize a
real Faker which I learned a long time ago, was; that a faker is one who speaks
to an engineer as psychologist and an art collector as a scientist. Once again, camouflaging their shortcomings
or lack of authenticity.
Defining
authenticity is not easy, particularly as we are using it in this and the
preceding article. Who’s to say what or who is authentic? As an example, take a restaurant. If it is Italian or Mexican, we tend to judge
it as being authentic or not. But, who’s
to judge? In this simple example, it is
the experience of the diner who has either experienced what they believe to be
authentic ethnic food, or one who has the same ethnic background with
first-hand experience preparing their ethnic foods. The point here is that authenticity is judged
not by the restaurant owner, but by the patrons. This flies in the face of the ‘true to
oneself theory.’
To
complicate the issue even more, looking at the theory of truth to oneself, this
leaves a wide range for interpretation.
Having worked for authentic leaders (based on observation and
interaction) and for leaders who are leaders only because of the position they
hold and not because of any ability to lead; we find that it is still very
difficult to define, but let’s take a shot.
There
are leaders who command attention by their personalities and their decisive
decision making ability. We have found
these to be people who seek input from all levels, who listen to others, but
then have the ability to distil that into sound decisions. These are people who you want to follow, who
you want to learn from and who you may not initially agree with but respect the
decisions and will carry them out as if they are your own. These are generally leaders who are very
clear about their feelings and convictions.
But they are also, viewed by their people as trustworthy, consistent,
having the best interests of all concerned in mind. These are authentic leaders.
Then
there are other leaders who may not be as dynamic and may not have that
charisma. However, they can be as effective.
These leaders have the support of their organizations and achieve
goals. Sometimes they are outside their
comfort zones but they still build effective teams. Do they have to “fake” some things on
occasion – probably but that does not make them inauthentic. We are not all gifted with the charisma that
some dynamic leaders have. Sometimes we
must move out of our comfort zones to keep an organization moving forward. The key is maintaining personal integrity and
the value system we discussed in our first article. A leader can force him/herself out of a
comfort zone to act in different ways, but as long as they can maintain their
personal integrity and values they stay authentic leaders.
There
is then a third group who are in leadership positions, but who have no real
leadership skills. They tend toward
being dictators who instill no confidence or trust in their employees. When things go wrong, and they do frequently,
scapegoats are generally found and the blame quickly assigned to others for the
failures. This type of organization can
quickly become dysfunctional and trust erodes in the leader and among the
others in the organization. We have
witnessed instances where executive management or a board of directors fails to
recognize the true problems and allows the dysfunction to build and allows the
mantra “off with their heads” to reign until they realize, generally too late,
that the only head that needs to be gone is the leader. It then takes a long time for a new leader to
rebuild trust and function in such an organization.
Mounting
questions
We
suspected that as we drilled into the issue of authenticity and leadership we
would find there to be more questions than answers. We see this as our charge here, in hopes we
may be able to eventually arrive at some algorithm or paradigm that might point
us in a direction to make a change. At
this point the questions mount.
· Can authenticity be taught or even learned?
· How might one actually teach authenticity?
· Does it take practice to achieve authenticity in
leadership?
· How would one know if they are making progress or can one
even achieve an end point?
· Is there an end point?
· What are the measures along this journey?
As we have said before, the dilemma for a leader is that
she cannot be all things to all people, which begs the question: can a leader
be authentic at all? Maybe that’s why the current thinking defaults to
being ‘true to oneself’. A default alternative is the concept of
‘values’, despite the fact that people are motivated or guided by a multitude
of different values, yet objectively can see inconsistencies, double standards
and conflict within a set of values. Referent Power, as we discussed in
our last article, where leaders consistently apply a set of values and goals,
results in respect from subordinates, whether the subordinates like or dislike
the leader as a person. The issue is not
whether employees or followers share the same values, but rather the leader’s
commitment to consistent application of their (and/or the organization’s)
values. Now, let’s look at a current news story about Kim Davis,
the county clerk from Kentucky who would not issue marriage licenses to gay
couples. We use this example to illustrate a point. Was she being true to
herself? Is she authentic? Was her behavior that of an authentic
person who stood by her beliefs? It would seem so. But, if she really was true to herself, and
felt she could not perform the job she was hired for, should she have
resigned? Here again we may deal with a person (in this case not
a leader – to illustrate the point) or leader who must “fake it” where he or
she are not comfortable personally with what is required but they are doing
what is necessary to fulfill their job requirement or to move the organization
toward common goals.
Think
about the things that challenge leaders and their leadership. Politicians are a unique and interesting
group. Despite efforts to establish
ethics guidelines and codes of conduct, it’s the inconsistencies between their
talk and their actions. This inconsistency is highly visible and recognizable
and when they try to sweep it under the rug, it usually comes back to bite
them, followed by the apologies. How many times have you wondered why high
profile people say and do what they say and do?
With all their advisors and speech writers and staffers, one would think
there should be someone who is overseeing whether their ‘guy or gal’ is
speaking consistently or from different sides of their mouth. So can authenticity be taught and learned?
Are politicians a different breed of people?
Should they be? We would like
your take on this.
Along
with that, how might one actually teach authenticity – is a set of principles
or guidelines, a review of ones values?
Again, your thoughts? One of the
premises we cover in our leadership classes is achieving mastery in a
field/profession it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice (from Malcolm
Gadwell’s book Outliers). Particularly in the context of our discussion
of faking it until you make it. Now, how
might one practice their authenticity?
We have a few thoughts, such as self-checking and self-assessment. Mentoring along with objective feedback is
another, but for any of these approaches to be truly effective the person who
is being mentored must recognize the need and want to make changes. Does that become an authenticity issue – might
the new person in fact not be true to themselves by virtue of going through the
process? Finally, the last two questions
above are equally difficult to deal with.
At this point we certainly don’t have our thoughts solidified, but we
see this important enough to continue the dialogue.
Conclusion
In
conclusion, we feel as though we are in a bit of a never ending spiral on this
issue, which further reinforces our feeling that the existing authenticity
thinking is narrow, because any expansion beyond the current thinking presents
far too many variables and dynamics to simply deal with in any kind of
traditional fashion. But, the key point
here is we believe that authenticity in leadership is real and can yield
significant improvements in the functioning and effectiveness of a leader which
parlays into a better work environment, which in turn can be measured with an
improved business result. Stand by and
we once again ask and welcome your comments and thoughts on authenticity in
leadership.
