The Art of Authenticity

Tools to Become an Authentic Leader and Your Best Self

Karissa Thacker

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119153542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Leverage your authentic self into a valuable leadership strategy

The Art of Authenticity is a guide to becoming a better leader by achieving your best self. All people bring different sides of themselves to various situations. This book will show you how to broaden and deepen your effectiveness by presenting the most appropriate side of yourself. Dr. Karissa Thacker is the management psychologist called on by over two hundred Fortune 500 companies to work with high potential leaders. This book provides you with her expert guidance, based on validated psychological research and artful application of psychological principles to actual business situations, to help you become an authentic leader. You'll learn how to lead through reflection, action, and conscious choice, and how to maintain your guiding principles while effectively leading your team. By replacing habitual reactions with authentic ones, you'll find that you're modeling good behavior and effective decision-making—and that authenticity is contagious. This guide equips you with the tools and skills you need to be the catalyst of positive change your organization needs.

How do you remain authentic while being an effective leader? This book argues that the question isn't a duality. Authenticity is the best way to lead, and the only way to maintain sustainable success as an organization. This insightful guide shows you how to find your authentic self, and leverage that into an effective, executable leadership strategy.

• Become authentic in a way that befits your values
• Show loyalty, honesty, ethics, and consideration
• Maintain authenticity in leadership roles
• Make conscious choices instead of blind reactions

Some are born to lead, other must be taught, but all leaders must work to retain their own values and basic sense of self. A simple pause can mean the difference between a knee-jerk reaction and an authentic decision, and the effects ripple throughout your organization. The Art of Authenticity is your guidebook to finding the true authentic leader within, and leading from the inside out for the long haul.

Part I

A New Vision of Authenticity

1

The Digital Era of Freedom and Fear

In effect, managing one's self demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer. Furthermore, the shift from manual workers who do as they are told to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges the social structure. Every existing society, even the most individualistic one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously; that organizations outlive workers and most people stay put. But today, the opposite is true. Knowledge workers outlive organizations and they are mobile. The need to manage oneself is therefore creating a revolution in human affairs.¹

—Peter Drucker

Excelling at leading a business is an amazing gift. We have lost sight of the enormous contribution made by the vast majority of people who lead organizations that produce goods or services. I have always been amazed by the extraordinary talents of my clients. Laughingly, I call them all action addicts. Truly authentic leaders are people who know how to make sure the stuff that really matters gets done and raise the performance of thousands of people (including themselves) to a higher standard through their presence, impact, and well-chosen actions.

I've learned from some of the best. What have I learned? Finding the balance between being yourself and relating effectively within a demanding context is not easy. Successful organizations are social systems with tremendous pressures toward specific behaviors that have led to the organization's success in the past.² “Just be who you are and live your values” sounds deceptively simple. Leaders must pay attention, adjust, and adapt to complex situations both inside the organization and in the marketplace or they will not be leaders for long. Finding the balance between being your true self and adapting to the cacophony of pressures is a complex, very personal equation. Platitudes are just not enough.

We live in a time of intense pressure to produce quarterly earnings amid constant, unpredictable market forces. For every glitzy empty suit that you've seen on television being carted away for fraud or exiled for a golden office toilet, I have had the privilege of working closely with at least 20 other talented executives. The less glitzy ones that you do not see on television are struggling to embody their values, lead toward the common good, and deliver economic results in an incredibly turbulent global marketplace. This book is an invitation to join the struggle and become one of “them” in a good way.

The Call to Authenticity

We are all leaders and we are all followers in this digital era. Things have changed a lot during the first 15 years in this new century. In 1999, Peter Drucker, the sage of the business world, predicted that we would all need to learn to manage ourselves like Da Vinci, Mozart, and Napoleon.

The truth is that we all need to learn to lead ourselves and answer the call to be authentic. The essence of authenticity is being yourself fully. It requires courage. Being an authentic leader is not just about making the right ethical decision when the heat is on. It is primarily about doing the work every day to bring your best self forward into the world so that you are in shape when the heat is on and the pressure is high. Being authentic is just like being in shape physically. It is a daily decision and there is no substitute for doing the work. This book serves as a guidebook for those who want to do the work.

Why does authenticity matter now? How is authentic leadership different from leadership—or the lack thereof we hear so much about? We live in an era in which fear is a huge force, and we hear about it all the time due to our unprecedented ability to communicate incessantly. The situational press of fear, negativity, and cynicism is deafening. The World Economic Forum lists deepening income disparities, persistent structural unemployment, diminishing confidence in economic policies, and a lack of leadership as part of its top 10 global trends for the year 2015.

We're not living in easy times, but when have they ever been easy? The challenges are just different. One hundred years ago in 1915, the Great War was raging. Unlike in 1915, blending in below the radar with a predictable job may not be possible today.

On Becoming More Authentic

Becoming more authentic may be a key to reaching your external dreams and achieving internal well-being. People who have something unique to say and are willing to step up and say it are increasingly finding success. Many would not have predicted the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Obama used his personal story and the facts of his biography in an inspired, authentic manner. The electorate responded. Obama's message of personal authenticity resonated deeply with the younger demographic. Regardless of your opinion regarding Obama's results as president, his story is indicative of someone who led himself and chose his own path. Choosing your own path with an understanding of external forces is at the heart of psychological authenticity. The vast majority of people may never choose to lead themselves and be authentic. But a percentage of people in every generation do choose the path.

Authenticity is not a new idea. Historically, being authentic generally meant being true to yourself. Being genuine or real. It has generally been accepted across philosophical traditions and cultures to be a state to which one aspires. It is assumed that being authentic is a good thing. It's likely that when you describe someone as “authentic,” you admire them.

The drive toward being genuine or real also appears to be innate. We first experience the awareness that we are being real or being fake in early adolescence. Research by developmental psychologist Susan Harter clarifies that adolescents report negative psychological states associated with being fake and prefer to be themselves.³

So why does authenticity really matter now? Perhaps it is adaptive in the external environment to be authentic for the first time. To be sure, the forces toward conformity that are part of the human condition still exist. However, the opportunities for jobs in which you just do the same thing every day are going away. The Industrial Era was a time of great opportunity and a level of financial security if you were willing to consistently work hard at basically the same thing every day. Our current world places little value on rote tasks that can be easily accomplished through the use of technology. You are more likely to be successful in the world of work and leadership by being authentic as it is defined in this book than by blending in and going along with the crowd.

The drive toward authenticity requires you—like Mozart, Da Vinci, and Napoleon—to think for yourself. It requires you to do the hard work of figuring out what you really, really want to do. You must dig in and notice your passions, your strengths, your shortcomings, and relentlessly pursue opportunities.

Success will go to the people who know how to work with other people in order to get difficult and important things done. The level of psychological sophistication and depth required to connect, relate, and achieve in partnership with others has escalated in the last 15 years. Due to flatter organizations, we no longer have role authority to rely on—role authority meaning the assumption that people will just do what we say. Having or nurturing new ideas, collaborating to win, and figuring out how to do what no one else has figured out how to do yet are the winning strategies in this new world. Cultivating authenticity and tuning into yourself in your world at a deeper level are required to accomplish such lofty goals on a daily basis.

People across the world can access your social media posts—and you can access theirs. The notion of privacy seems more of a fantasy than a reality. Anyone anywhere can capture your worst moments of any day on a video or a photo. But you can also use those same tools to craft relationships and learn in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago.

Cultivating authenticity is the key to flourishing in our current era of freedom and fear. The authentic are brave enough to be themselves despite all of the fear within as well as all of the fear in the atmosphere.

To be sure, being authentic sounds really trite as an answer to the compelling workplace dilemmas of today. Just be yourself. Know yourself. Haven't we all heard this before in one form or another? But what if truly being yourself is much easier to say than to actually do? What if truly being yourself requires particular focused work, unusual idiosyncratic discipline, and keen powers of self-observation? What if authenticity is the key to flourishing in this digital era of freedom and fear?

The idea of authenticity can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy with often-repeated phrases such as know thyself. However, there is no coherent, consistent or well-organized body of knowledge on authenticity. The knowledge base on authenticity is more like unconnected islands that address the concept in a fragmented fashion.

This text will connect the islands of knowledge on authenticity in the psychological literature and the practice-oriented leadership literature from the world of business. Advances in the last 15 years in the world of scientific psychology have made it clear that being authentic and being an authentic leader are not just one thing. Authentic leadership in psychological terms consists of multiple, interrelated, complex skills and ways of making sense of ...