Being authentic is key for leadership
Authenticity and leadership often present a conflict in itself. How can someone be an effective leader while at the same time fulfil all their commitments to achieving company goals and ensuring long term growth? Authenticity requires managers to draw on core characteristics and strengths while at the same time stick to their own values and believes to seem grounded to their staff. However, if these strengths are expressed in an inflexible, non-convincing way, the leader will quickly loose buy-in and will fail to meet the demands of an ever-changing business environment. Hence, authenticity is a key characteristic a leader has to have which I will cover in this post with the authentic leadership model which modern leaders apply regularly in their decision making.
The key component of authentic leadership is the degree of reflective awareness that managers need to integrate in their everyday exercise of leadership. They can play on their strengths as well as own up to their gaps and potential weaknesses, to portray an honest and rounded image of themselves to their peers. One other important aspect is for leaders to know themselves well, having a high level of self-awareness. Authentic leadership therefore is not defined by a particular style, but by consciousness as well as integrative and reflective self-awareness that influences a manager’s choices and defines their way of acting and decision making towards their peers.
Contrasts to authentic leadership provide defiant and compliant forms of leadership. Those less reflective forms of leadership tend to lead to a more defensive leadership style. In the position of defiant leadership, the manager is focused on personal positions rather than on what is the best approach for the individual person and the business as a whole. Often, he appears controlling and distant here. He seems charismatic but fails to draw out the best in others. In compliant leadership, the manager is mainly focused on others, at the expense of self-expression, often lacking creativity.
Authentic leadership development is a core skill that managers can further develop through coaching. The first step here is to create a safe space in which established patterns can be loosened. Secondly, during the session, the coach will then form hypothesises about authentic, defiant, or compliant behavioural patterns of the coachee.
A common tool to discover those three forms of behaviours is the use of ACE patterns during sessions. (Action, Cognition and Emotion). It form the basis for planning strategies for a more authentic way of leading. Actions relate to what you say or do, cognition to what you think, and emotions relate to what you feel. This should be divided into conscious and unconscious. ACE can help to shift perceptual positions and expresses how authenticity of a leader through actions, thoughts and feeling would be experiences by others. It buys into the earlier idea of self- awareness, being the first step of moving towards authentic leadership.
As we discovered in this post, authenticity is a key element of modern leadership. Many leaders rely on compliant or defiant ways of management; however, this often does not lead to developing people to their best abilities, authenticity is key here. Authenticity does not have to stay in conflict with leadership as such, rather through reflective self-awareness it allows manages to be effective in facing challenges in ever changing business environments. Using models such as ACE, the leader becomes more aware of their behavioural decision making to be able to make better and conscious choices about which leadership position (defiant, compliant, or authentic) will be the best in different contexts.
