Leaders of businesses come in all guises. The call for them to be 'authentic' when they communicate might be missing a bigger point...
Greg2600, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
In a couple of days I'm going to post about Succession - either you know what that means, or you don't care, but the point is that it surrounds a toxic leader and his equally toxic would-be successors. Ultimately, for those of us who follow how businesses work, the joy and purpose of the show is that we get to see behind the boardroom door, the unvarnished, shocking, feral, knife-fight of corporate existence.
It's not like this in every boardroom and on every founder-CEO's yacht. Obviously. (We hope).
But I've been in enough of those boardrooms and discussions and one-on-ones with CEOs and company chairs to know that there is sometimes a very necessary transition between what is being said in those moments, and what is being said when the individuals get in front of cameras, shareholders, customers, colleagues.
That's where I come in, in fact. I've been father-confessor, therapist, and comms sand-box for ideas and responses and venting that is far better done in front of me, than any of those stakeholders.
I'm not saying that any of those leaders are 'difficult' or even toxic - but they are human. Their unmediated thoughts are not for public consumption. The gap - the 'a-hole' of the deliberately provocative headline above - is often not filled by unbridled authenticity per se. There are hard-charging, impatient leaders who need to find a little empathy. There are collegiate, kind leaders who might need to find a bit of grit. So you don't want them to be exactly authentic - but you don't want inauthentic either.
I'm not sure there is a single word that stands in for it, but having done a lot of work with emerging leaders over the last four months, people have suggested they want to see clarity, openness, empathy, honesty. Now, even some of these concepts are clearly difficult too - you can't be fully 'open' sometimes because information is privileged or restricted for totally solid reasons, such as legal proceedings.
My advice in all these is two fold: first, start with the truth and see where it gets you. That doesn't mean abandon it as soon as it becomes difficult: it means the starting point, and the guiding principles, must always be based in the truth of a situation.
The second piece of advice for leaders is to find the right version of themselves. But be themselves. Going back to the A-word, you cannot be in-authentic because you'll be compromised and the audience will immediately see and hear it. But being fully 'authentic' might land you in trouble too.
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