BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 44
Managing Authenticity
Rob Goffee (rgoffee@london.edu) is a
professor of organizational behavior at
London Business School in England.
Gareth Jones (garethj@btinternet
.com) is a visiting professor at Insead in
Fontainebleau, France, and a fellow of
the Centre for Management Development at London Business School. He is
also a former professor of organizational development at Henley Management College in Oxfordshire, England.
Goffee and Jones are the founding
partners of Creative Management Associates, an organizational consulting
firm in London.
ing teams. His technical abilities and his honesty were his biggest leadership attributes.
Things started to unravel when Bill moved
to the head office and became an adviser to
some of the most senior executives in the company. HR suggested to Bill that this new job
would be good preparation for a major leadership position back on the front lines. But the
head office was political, and Bill found that
his straight talk hit many wrong notes. He
started to get feedback that he didn’t fully understand the complexity of situations and that
he should develop better skills for influencing
others. Bill tried to curb his directness, but he
could never mimic his superiors’ politically
savvy behaviors. He started to lose his way. He
alternated between indecision, while he tried
to understand the office politics, and sudden
bursts of outright aggression as he struggled
with his old forthrightness. He began to seriously doubt his abilities.
Bill is still at the utility company, but he will
not progress further there. Most of you have
probably met more than one failed leader like
Bill in your organizations. His story illustrates
perfectly how difficult it is for leaders to find a
balance between expressing their personalities
and managing those of the people they aspire
to lead or at least influence. Yet the ability to
strike that balance—and to preserve one’s authenticity in the process—is precisely what distinguishes great leaders from other executives.
The challenge of great leadership is exactly
that of managing one’s authenticity, paradoxical though it undoubtedly sounds.
Let us be absolutely clear: Authenticity is
not the product of pure manipulation. It accurately reflects aspects of the leader’s inner self,
so it can’t be an act. But great leaders seem to
know which personality traits they should reveal to whom and when. They are like chameleons, capable of adapting to the demands of
the situations they face and the people they
lead, yet they do not lose their identities in the
process. Authentic leaders remain focused on
where they are going but never lose sight of
where they came from. Highly attuned to their
environments, they rely on an intuition born
of formative, sometimes harsh experiences to
understand the expectations and concerns of
the people they seek to influence. They retain
their distinctiveness as individuals, yet they
know how to win acceptance in strong corporate and social cultures and how to use ele-
harvard business review • december 2005
ments of those cultures as a basis for radical
change.
In the following article, we’ll explore the
qualities of authentic leadership, drawing on
our five years of research as well as our work
consulting to leaders at all levels of organizations in diverse industries. To illustrate our
points, we will recount some of the experiences and reflections of the authentic leaders
we have known and studied. We don’t pretend
to have the final word on the subject, of
course. Artists, philosophers, and social scientists have debated the concept of authenticity
for centuries, and it would be foolish for us to
imagine that this discussion could be synthesized by us or anyone else. Nonetheless, we believe that our reflections will contribute to a
better understanding of the relationship between the expression of self and the exercise of
leadership. Leaders who know how to manage
their authenticity will be all the more effective
for it, better able to both energize and retain
loyal followers.
Managing the Perception
Establishing your authenticity as a leader is a
two-part challenge. First, you have to ensure
that your words are consistent with your deeds;
otherwise, followers will never accept you as
authentic. Everyone acknowledges and understands the need for consistency when establishing authenticity, but a great leader does a lot
more than just pay lip service to it. He will live
it every moment of the day. Indeed, it’s not an
exaggeration to say that a great leader is obsessive about embodying his beliefs.
Consider the case of John Latham, who was
until recently the head teacher of an awardwinning state school in the United Kingdom.
Latham was passionate about creating an academic institution where students, teachers,
and administrators respected one another and
their environment. As at any school, litter and
graffiti were major issues. So who picked up
the trash and scrubbed the walls? Latham did.
If you visited the school at break times, you
would probably have found Latham on the
grounds picking up litter rather than in his office behind a desk. “It’s the simple, mundane
things that matter,” he told us, “and I personally fix many of them before day is done.” This
kind of demonstrated personal commitment to
a few basic principles is essential to authentic
leadership.
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