What Is Authentic Leadership?
There are many terms floating around business literature these days that are similar, related, overlapping (though not identical) and often used interchangeably, such as Moral Leadership, Ethical Leadership, Servant Leadership, and Authentic Leadership. All of them get to the same general point â that the most successful leaders in today's dynamic and complex world are the ones who exhibit the strongest character, the best behavior, and are the most caring about all their companies' stakeholders, especially their employees.
Why Now?
You can easily argue that authentic leadership has always been important. While you can certainly build and run a company without regard to ethics or people or good behavior â you can, in fact, build very successful companies founded on bad behavior in the short run â we have all known for years that CEOs and other leaders who engage in bad behavior put their companies and themselves at risk.
But something started happening in society over the last 10 years that has produced a disruptive, fundamental shift in the importance many organizations are placing on leadership behaviors. This isn't just about the #metoo movement, which started as a focal point for women to rally around issues of sexual harassment and sexual assault and has broadened to be more of a movement that supports marginalized people and communities along many dimensions. As with the notion that good behavior has always been good and bad behavior has always been bad, #metoo and related movements mostly serve to heighten awareness (and hopefully reduce the incidence) of the negative and provide support for people who have been victimized.
And things are starting to snowball a bit now. CEOs are getting fired for hints of impropriety, and for smaller infractions than ever before. CEOs are getting fired for having consensual romantic relationships with employees. CEOs are getting fired for spending $75,000 in T&E at strip clubs, even if those outings were with clients or employees. You get the idea.
This focus on purging massive negatives is critically important yet isn't enough. Most CEOs aren't morally bankrupt, thieves, or sexual predators. For most of us, most of the time, this shift in society just means that CEOs are in even more of a fishbowl, under more of a spotlight, under a higherâpowered microscope, than ever before. All of our stakeholders, from employees to board members and investors, to clients and suppliers, are paying much closer attention to the words we use, the decisions we make, and the actions we take as a means of deciding whether they want to be associated with our organizations. At the end of the day, I'm not sure what the dictionary definition of ethics is, but I heard this from a wise friend about decision making: if you wouldn't want your decision to show up on the front page of a newspaper, if the decision would damage your relationship with employees, shareholders, or customers, then it's probably a bad decision.
Think of It as an Opportunity
Two broad themes in this book are being intentional in what you do as a CEO, and being human as a CEO. Those two themes in combination are the backdrop for driving high levels of respect, engagement, and highâperformance work across your organization. They also happen to be the key ingredients in authentic leadership. And the good news is that getting that formula right will certainly be a plus for your business. After all, who doesn't want engaged and highâperforming employees?
While I could probably give 50 examples of specific topics where authentic leadership or a âdo the right thingâ mentality is important, I'll focus on a couple of topics that I found to be some combination of most obvious and most impactful.
Mind the Gap
One of the most important learnings I had in the last 10 years around authentic leadership is that it must start at the top â with you, the CEO. By the nature of the topic, you can't accomplish anything by telling your organization to jump on a bandwagon and not doing it yourself. And you certainly can't get your organization to behave differently, or drive new business processes that might be unconventional, without having and displaying personal commitment to them. Having a âsayâdoâ gap at the top of an organization is corrosive, leads to eyeârolling and whispers of hypocrisy, and completely undermines your authority to lead the business.
What's a sayâdo gap? It's anything and everything where you don't follow your own company's rules or customs. It's:
- Having a policy that says no one in the company can fly business class, then traveling in business class or first class
- Having a value of humility, but bragging to employees about how much money you have, or taking credit for their work
- Giving employees a hard time about coming in late for work and showing up late yourself
- Giving yourself 100 percent of your bonus in a year when the company misses its financial targets while you ding everyone else's bonus for that reason
At the end of the day, there are two simple ways to handle these kinds of situations. Only create policies that you can abide by yourself in the first place. Follow the ones you have. Or if you need to, change them, but change them for everyone. For example, in the above, there's no reason you can't have a policy that says people should generally fly coach but can on occasion fly in business class under certain circumstances. Just don't be ridiculous about them. One CEO I know had a company travel policy that said, âNo one can fly business class except the CEO or president.â So he conformed to the policy, but that hardly fits the definition of authentic leadership!
Diversity and Inclusion and Unconscious Bias
On the topic of diversity and inclusion, it's really easy to get caught up in headlines and hype without digging into substance and what matters. The problem is that that these terms mean different things to different people and many firms focus on the hard metrics of diversity (and selective ones at that) without building an inclusive environment. Big Silicon Valley companies leading the charge by setting quotas for female engineers and making a show of publishing that metric might seem like a good thing to copy, but not if it causes you to think too narrowly about the problem, or too specifically about the problem in ways that aren't meaningful to implement or have unintended consequences (e.g., a mandate to hire only female engineers for a specific role sets the individual up to fail).
So, what exactly is the problem?
We came to the conclusion at Return Path that âthe problemâ around diversity and inclusion wasn't any one thing. We concluded that the problem was actually rooted in something called unconscious bias, which can quietly permeate decisionâmaking even among the bestâintentioned people in the world. The approach we took to rooting out unconscious bias in the workplace was systemic â we tried to hit it at every stage of the employee lifecycle. We did use metrics here, but not as the end goal. The metrics helped us to understand where there was a problem so we could explore that system and understand and mitigate any underlying biases.
- We added a new value to our list of company values, which I drafted personally (the first version and the final version) and which I unveiled to the company personally with anecdotes of why it was important at our annual meeting where we rolled out the company's plan for the coming year. For us, that value was called Opportunity of Equality, and the language behind the value read:
- Differences in background, experience, and thought in our employee population contribute to the best business outcomes for us as a company. We have a strong commitment to being a welcoming environment for candidates and employees that appreciates and maximizes the talents of all employees. We value our employees' different backgrounds, including differences in gender, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious and political views, nationality, age, and socioeconomic status.
- Through our partnership with NCWIT (National Center for Women and Information Technology), we developed and facilitated unconscious bias and âbias bustingâ training courses and workshops and had hundreds of employees and all managers and leaders participate, including additional deeper workshops for my executive team.
- We changed all aspects of our recruiting process to reduce unconscious bias and build inclusion. We expanded our recruiting funnel as wide as possible by expanding our networks, looked for candidates from nontraditional backgrounds, reworded our job descriptions, used blind auditioning technology (Gapjumpers), analyzed candidate data to understand where our biases were showing up and used that data to change interview practices and processes, and trained hiring teams to understand their biases and select the best candidate for the role.
- We changed our compensation practices by mandating a specific starting salary for firstâ and secondâlevel roles and analyzing all compensation data each cycle to eliminate gender or race disparities. We modified our promotion processes to ensure inclusion by posting all roles and ensuring broad funnels of candidates for internal promotions. We also ensured that our training programs were available to all, and when we didn't have diverse trainees in highâimpact programs, we encouraged qualified people in underrepresented groups to attend.
- We modified our performance management practices on a regular basis, and trained managers, teams, and employees to give one another feedback inâtheâmoment. We also had four formal feedback cycles a year â two manager and employee feedback conversations, and two that were live peer feedback with intact teams. For the first, we gave managers guidelines and spotâchecked reviews for biased language or intent. The peer review sessions were facilitated by a trained facilitator who could identify and correct bias in the moment, and also address it with the manager or team in debriefs.
- We also had a strong focus on leadership development across the organization. Our impactful courses really helped employees to have a stronger voice, and leaders to better connect and engage with everyone on their team â not just the team members with whom they had more in common (more on that below).
- We were very transparent and public internally about this work, creating an internal committee to run it, annual company goals around the topic, and a periodic newsletter and slides in our quarterly allâhands meetings to report out on progress against those goals to the company.
I'm not suggesting that we âsolvedâ the unconscious bias problem, nor do I think that's even possible, given the wider cultural context. But it's probably the most worthy goal you can strive for if you want to get an A+ in authentic leadership.
Leadership Development
At Return Path, we knew the importance of having strong authentic leaders intuitively if not empirically from day one, so we always placed a focus on leadership development. The actual courses changed over time, but we generally had three levels of leadership courses or support: individual leadership skills that benefit everyone and help each individual become a moral leader themselves, firstâlevel manager cours...
