Why authentic leadership

An effective leader will choose their management style based on their strengths and the needs of their team. Authentic leadership is one type of management style in which leaders practice transparent behavior in order to build strong relationships. In this article, we discuss the definition of authentic leadership, the characteristics that authentic leaders share and how to practice authentic leadership in a work environment.

Authentic leadership emphasizes transparency, genuineness and honesty. Authentic leaders build authentic relationships and inspire trust and motivation in their employees. Internalized moral perspective: Authentic leaders put the needs of the company over their own. The success of the organization is an authentic leader's primary objective even when that means the leader may face more challenges and extra work.

This type of genuine leadership style promotes open communication within a team and has wide-reaching benefits within a department. Employee morale is increased when team members feel that their concerns can be voiced and addressed. And productivity is increased when team members work together under a strong leader. Authentic leadership also promotes a healthy company culture and in effect creates a positive brand voice in the marketplace.

In order to be a successful leader and encourage increased employee performance, an authentic leader must possess several characteristics, including:. An authentic leader must commit to ongoing development.

The following are steps you can take to become a more authentic leader:. They are not afraid to dig deep, and they lead their team with courage and empathy that only comes from listening to the heart. Their focus is always long-term. They know that patience and hard work do take time but yield rich results in the long run. Strength of character is essential for an authentic leader. People trust them because they keep their word, no matter what it takes.

Authentic leaders lead with purpose and vision. They always add value to people they interact with and help them realize higher professional goals which lead to better personal lives as well. They push themselves and others around them to raise the bar and aim for excellence.

An authentic leader is always a good listener, even when someone else contradicts their views. In fact, they are even willing to consider those ideas with an open mind and change their opinion if the arguments make sense.

Authentic leaders believe in open communication and combine their directness with empathy, which more often than not brings success. Prepare yourself by learning about and understanding your own values. Dick is from the Caribbean, and on many occasions in the rough-and-tumble of the music business, we have seen him switch from corporate-speak to an island patois liberally sprinkled with expletives.

He is absolutely at home in the cutthroat environment that recording artists and their agents operate in. 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. 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.

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. 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 self-knowledge with others, what we call self-disclosure.

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 self-disclosure, which is probably why they are so hard to imitate. Leaders may be profoundly self-aware and essentially authentic but not because of contemplation or analysis; they are not characters in some Woody Allen film.

So how do authentic leaders acquire these attributes? The relative simplicity of their goals often helps. A great leader is usually trying to accomplish no more than three or four big goals at a time. 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.

After a while on a pedestal, you stop hearing the truth. 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.

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 followers. At a recent retirement celebration, for example, people expected him to deliver a rather sober speech concerning the departing senior executive. Besides possessing self-knowledge and skills in self-disclosure, great leaders have to be able to recognize which aspects of their authentic selves particular groups of followers are looking for. Most great leaders have highly developed social antennae: They use a complex mix of cognitive and observational skills to recognize what followers are consciously—and unconsciously—signaling to them.

The good news is that while some people seem to be born with these discernment skills, others can, in fact, learn them. We have found that individuals who have had a great deal of mobility early in their lives possess these skills to a higher degree than those who have stayed mostly in one place. The living conditions and treatment were barely tolerable, and several of his fellow soldiers attempted suicide.

Brabeck-Letmathe survived by observing his superior officers very closely; the better he anticipated their behavior, the easier it was to stay out of their way. By the time a manager rises to a senior leadership position, he may seem like—and, indeed, may well be—a very different person than he was at the start of his journey.

Authentic leaders use their personal histories to establish common ground with their followers. The desire to establish his bona fides with his employees as a regular, approachable guy probably explains why Niall FitzGerald, a former cochairman at Unilever, speaks often and with insight about his Irish heritage and the influence of his mother on both his moral and political worldviews.

Similarly, Antony Burgmans, a current chairman at Unilever, obstinately remains the Dutch countryman—as demonstrated in his dress, even in his walk—despite his elevated status.

In both cases, these executives are comfortable displaying something of their origins, in a very different context, in order to connect with their followers. An organization whose CEO trumpets his heritage may well be intimidating or offensive to employees—and customers—who hail from elsewhere. We have worked for many years with a senior executive at a U. It is important for leaders to recognize that people frame their backgrounds in different ways and that there are differences among and within cultures.

The salient characteristics that people use to define themselves include gender, class, race, status, and geography. And these may be expressed in many ways—through dress, speech, food, and even in different styles of walking. Given these variables, we should be cautious about making simple generalizations about status and societies, though we can draw some comparisons. Moreover, research shows companies that employ professionals who exhibit high levels of self-awareness tend to perform better financially.

According to Koehn, cultivating this foundational component of emotional intelligence involves asking yourself questions, such as:. Through looking inward and engaging in self-assessment , you can not only gain a deeper understanding of your own emotions and beliefs, but improve your perception of those held by others.

Being an authentic leader requires more than just building self-awareness—you need to put it into practice, too. And that requires discipline. With a stronger sense of your motivations and limitations, you can identify your personal leadership style and chart a professional development plan that capitalizes on your strengths and rectifies your weaknesses. A deep and abiding commitment to a mission is integral to both authentic leadership and business success. According to a recent survey by EY and Harvard Business Review Analytic Services , 89 percent of executives said a sense of collective purpose drives employee engagement, and 84 percent said it leads to greater success in transformational efforts.

As you progress through the different stages of your leadership trajectory, consider what issues and challenges motivate you to take action and empower others to do the same.