Leadership, Authenticity, and the Unknown World

Michael Harvey is the John S. Toll Professor in the Department of Business Management and Director of the First-Year Seminar Program at Washington College (Chestertown, Maryland).

The best leaders are authentic. This is true even though leadership itself is a performance: a dramatically resonant effort to persuade, inspire, and reassure followers that they are on the right path, while minimizing the confusions and uncertainties of the world around them—confusions and uncertainties that good leaders feel acutely.

This seems like a tension in what it means to lead—and it is. Leadership is a tension between the performance of simplicity, clarity, and unity, and the inner experience of complexity, confusion, and conflict. Dig into the story of any true leader, from Moses to Mandela, from the ancient world to today, and you will perceive this double nature, the tension between confident exterior show and doubting inner life.

At the same time, and complicating matters further for would-be leaders, authenticity is crucial to effective leadership. This seems strange. If leadership is so performative, why does authenticity matter? If leaders must play a role—a confident, decisive, ‘I-know-the-way’ self—why does it matter what’s going on beneath the role?*

There are two reasons authenticity is so central to leadership: one having to do with us, and the other with the world around us.

Let’s start with us. Leadership is not a job title. Plenty of bosses are miserable leaders. Leadership is, rather, a tapestry of relationships that is woven, slowly and painstakingly, from your interactions with others. The stronger the threads of your relationships, the stronger your leadership can become. And the strongest relationships are built on honesty—beginning with honest self-understanding. If you do not know or accept who you are, there will be a measure of hesitancy and doubt in your own sense of self.

Others will detect that doubt—and doubt you as well. Doubt is the beginning of mistrust, and mistrust is the end of leadership. Authenticity strengthens the leader by strengthening how much they are trusted by followers and allies, who are constantly calibrating how much they will commit to their relationships with the leader.

Remember, while anyone can be appointed to a formal position of authority—or simply seize power and demand obedience—leadership is not so simple. The leader’s role depends on acceptance by followers, and they can change their minds at any time.

The unknown world

The second reason authenticity matters so much for effective leadership is because of the world around us. Some of the world we inhabit is known. The known world, full of reasonably familiar constraints, tasks, and opportunities, is where most members of most groups spend most of their time and do most of their work. Accidents happen and even big problems can arise, but they don’t tend to challenge groups’ fundamental beliefs about their identity, purpose, or place in the world. In the known world, groups rely primarily on routines, rules, norms, and habits—the lessons of the past (culture) or of rational analysis (bureaucracy)—to help guide their work.

Let me restate this because it is so important in understanding how groups work and what leaders do: Most group members doing their regular work rely for guidance not on leadership, but on the reassuringly familiar patterns of their group’s bureaucracy (the group’s written rules, plans, procedures, and formal division of labor), and its culture (the group’s unwritten rules and values; what feels ‘normal’). In other words, groups in the known world mainly need managers and veteran workers, not leaders. That is why there’s a long-standing academic debate about ‘managers’ versus ‘leaders’—it’s a recognition of the different demands of guiding the life and work of groups in the two worlds, the known and the unknown.

But that known world of familiar answers is not where leaders live. They inhabit the unknown world. What does that mean? It means that when a group faces new problems, unfamiliar challenges, unforeseen competitive dynamics—when it finds itself thrust into the shock of a strange and frightening world—that’s when it urgently needs leadership. Then, somebody needs to figure out the path forward. That person may not be the ‘job-title-in-chief,’ but whoever steps forward and does it, that’s the real leader. (The danger for the group is distinguishing the true guides from those who are fraudulent, deluded, or simply wrong.)

In navigating a path through the unknown world, the leader is like the pilot of a ship navigating through shoals and whirlpools. What matters is not belief or hope, but reality: what’s really there? How can the ship sail past the dangers? That’s what the pilot needs to discern for the ship. And that’s what the leader needs to discern for the group: what’s really there. “Face reality” is the leader’s mantra.

Inauthentic leaders who inhabit fantasy worlds, or habitually tell lies to their followers, or shrink from seeing or speaking the truth, are betraying their fundamental trust: to guide the group through the unknown world to reach a safe harbor, where things can become familiar and ‘normal’ again. (It is in the nature of things, of course, that all safe harbors are temporary, so the work of leadership always recurs.)

The authentic leader

Alert leaders, I have suggested, are attuned to how they are perceived. They labor to build confidence, to smooth over anxiety and doubt, to convey clarity and unity rather than confusion and conflict. And they learn to act and speak, usually, in ways that resonate with their group’s beliefs and values, showing respect and even reverence for the group’s culture, traditions, and sense of place in the world. At worst, this can become a nostalgic and reality-avoiding leadership of easy answers, hollow affirmations, and stereotyped denunciations. It is all too easy to tell people what they want to hear.

Thus men and women who seek to lead are constantly pulled in the direction of inauthenticity. But, while would-be leaders cannot (and should not) reject the performative nature of leadership, they can reject the path of easy answers and ready lies. They can tell the truth—starting with the truth about themselves. In a 2013 Harvard Business Review article, Lisa Rosh and Lynn Offermann suggest that authentic leadership means to “be yourself, but carefully.” This is a good foundation for authenticity.

But authentic leadership stretches beyond how the leader presents themself. It is about the leader’s total relationship with truth. Authentic leaders are committed to facing reality and sharing the truths they learn—carefully, yes, but also courageously. Seeking truth about the world, they question the group’s received wisdom and help it recognize and grapple with new or long-neglected challenges and opportunities.

Seeking truth about the group and its members, they dare to expose hypocrisy and help the group come closer to its claimed values. (In other words, a truly authentic leader helps the group itself embrace authenticity.)

And, at bottom, by seeking to understand and accept their own personal story, authentic leaders build a foundation of trust based on honesty. Leadership is a relentless discipline of asking questions about your group, your people, and the world—and that begins with questions about yourself.

Thus the ancient tradition that stretches back to Socrates and Plato—that wisdom begins with the admonition, “Know thyself”—is still the best way to begin the education of a leader.

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* Machiavelli, for all his brilliance in exposing the dual truth-seeking and performative nature of leadership, avoided this psychological puzzle; it was left to Shakespeare to take the exploration further, in his acute interrogations of male leaders from Richard II to Henry V to Hamlet to Lear and Prospero.