BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 46
Managing Authenticity
celebrities with whom he must also deal. All
these facets of his personality ring true; his skill
is in deciding which to reveal to whom and
when.
Playing multiple roles usually demands a lot
of thought and work. “Before I go into a situation, I try to understand what it is [people] will
be thinking. I prepare what I am going to say
and who I am going to be in that context,” explains Jean Tomlin, former HR director at
Marks & Spencer and one of the most influential black businesswomen in Britain. “I want to
be me, but I am channeling parts of me to context. What you get is a segment of me. It is not
a fabrication or a facade—just the bits that are
relevant for that situation.”
Let’s look more closely at just what makes it
possible for Brabeck-Letmathe, Tomlin, and executives like them to present fragments of
themselves—without seeming inauthentic.
Know Yourself and Others
No leader can look into a
mirror and say, “I am
authentic.” A person
cannot be authentic on
his or her own.
It goes almost without saying that the exercise
of leadership is complex and requires both
skills and practice. Over time, and through various life experiences, a leader develops an extensive repertoire of roles, which can make
her seem very different to different people in
different situations. Indeed, if a leader doesn’t
acquire this complexity, she will be able to recruit as followers only those people with
whom she already shares some common
ground.
But it is one thing to develop this complexity and another thing entirely to wield it effectively. Using your complex self (or, rather,
selves) requires a degree of self-knowledge and
the willingness and ability to share that selfknowledge with others, what we call selfdisclosure. This is not to say that authentic
leaders spend a lot of time exploring their
inner lives through meditation or therapy.
They may be profoundly self-aware and essentially authentic (in the sense that we are giving the term here), but not because of contemplation or analysis; they are not
characters in some Woody Allen film. Few authentic leaders will even be conscious that
they are engaged in self-expression and selfdisclosure, which is probably why they are so
hard to imitate.
So how do authentic leaders acquire these
attributes? The relative simplicity of their goals
often helps. A great leader is usually trying to
harvard business review • december 2005
accomplish no more than three or four big
goals at a time. He is unwavering about these
goals; he doesn’t question them any more than
he questions himself. That’s because the goals
are usually connected in some way to one or
another of the leader’s authentic selves. His
pursuit of the goals, and the way he communicates them to followers, is intense—which naturally promotes the kind of self-disclosure we
are talking about and educates him further
about his various selves.
We have also found that great leaders keep
close to them people who will give them honest feedback. As Roche Pharmaceuticals head
Bill Burns told us, “You have to keep your feet
on the ground when others want to put you on
a pedestal. After a while on a pedestal, you
stop hearing the truth. It’s filtered by the
henchmen, and they read you so well they
know what you want to hear. You end up as
the queen bee in the hive, with no relationships with the worker bees. My wife and secretary are fully empowered, if they ever see me
getting a bit uppity, to give me a thumping
great hit over the head.”
As consultants, we often have been called in
to do precisely that for senior executives, acting both as priests and spies as we try to make
leaders more open to truths about themselves
and their relationships with others. This does
not necessarily mean helping these leaders develop more of what psychologist Dan Goleman
calls emotional intelligence; rather, it means
helping them to sharpen their skills in disclosing the emotional intelligence they already
have so they can give better performances for
their followers.
Consider an executive we’ll call Josh, the
CEO of one of the world’s largest TV production companies for the past ten years. When
we first met him, Josh was one of the early innovators in the field of documentary TV. Over
the years, as he moved up the corporate ladder,
he matured into a highly knowledgeable and
effective executive who, in the process, became
rather serious—even distant and austere—in
the eyes of some of his employees. These perceptions were weakening his ability to attract
and retain followers, so we coached Josh to return to the mischievous sense of humor that
he had displayed more readily earlier in his career. He has an amazing sense of comic timing,
which he has learned to use to devastating effect to disarm opponents and delight his fol-
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