Authenticity In Leadership
By WhyNot Partnering
There are all sorts of attributes and skills you’ll need to cultivate over time in order to be an effective leader, but one of the most important (yet perhaps one of the most overlooked) is authenticity.
Simply put, authenticity is when your internal values and beliefs align with your actions and behaviour in the external world, where the decisions you make reflect your personality, your ethics and your moral viewpoint.
In order to be a successful leader, you’ll need to work and live authentically, making sure that you’re doing your job to the best of your ability, without compromising on what you hold dear, what you value the most highly.
As Polonius famously said in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
“This above all; to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Being true to your natural self will inevitably build trust among your workforce, and the more your employees trust you, the more engaged they’ll be, the more willing they’ll be to fulfil their roles, the more eager they’ll be to go above and beyond, and the more productive the workforce will become as a result.
By being an authentic and inclusive leader, you’ll inspire others to follow suit and your members of staff will feel far more accepted and secure in their positions, so they too will soon feel more comfortable in being true to themselves at work. The end result will be a workplace culture built on mutual respect and honesty.
Authentic leaders are passionate about their jobs and are fully committed to their organisation, with one eye on the future at all times, adopting a growth mindset for the benefit of all.
They’re always guided by their principles, with people at the heart of all the decisions they make, embracing key skills like self-awareness, humility, empathy and modesty to help drive success for the organisation as a whole.
From an organisational and safety culture perspective, authenticity in leadership serves to promote a positive work environment by building strong relationships across the board. It sets the tone and creates the environment for psychological safety, for people to speak up and to share their concerns, and when people feel free to say how they feel, and they most critically feel they are heard, this results in them stepping up and taking more responsibility.
Authentic leaders are transparent in all that they do, putting their trust in employees while encouraging positive behaviours through knowledge sharing, engagement and the promotion of a blame-free environment. Such demonstration of leadership paves the way for others within your organisation, teaching and inspiring them to lead in a similar way.
Of course, this takes courage, being open to being vulnerable, to letting go of control and admitting you don’t have all the answers. And it can be very challenging to show up as a genuine caring leader if the work environment has traditionally been one where employees have experienced a more traditional top-down approach to communication and engagement. But it is possible to create this shift in leadership style and to have it be authentically experienced by others at all levels, on both an individual basis and on an organisation-wide one.
If you’d like to understand more about how we go about developing authentic leadership at all levels and embedding the principles and practices in the culture, get in touch with the WhyNot team.
