Real Leadership: The Outworking of Authenticity

No leader actually sets out to be a leader. The leader in caterpillar cast simply sets out to live life and express themselves fully, and when that authentic expression provides value, the butterfly of leadership emerges as a natural byproduct.

“Leaders are influenced by others but they are not made by others”.  – Warren Bennis

To be authentic literally means to be your own author. If we constantly defer to others to give us direction, we cannot possibly be authentic. A poser might spin cotton candy prose and the narcissist a Vermeer narrative, but an authentic anthology is the only available story for a leader.

As authentic self-expression, leadership can’t possibly be about authority or title. Whether an artist, an inmate, a VP, or a hair stylist, there are always those people whom others look to—the ones who generate their own gravitational pull. They are the ones who are true to their purpose and truly themselves. And because no one else can teach you how to be yourself, no one else can actually teach you how to lead.

Taking Inventory

Before you can write your story, you need to take an honest inventory of the author and subject. Warren Bennis in his book “On Becoming a Leader” kicks off the self-discovery process this way.  

• Know what you want, your abilities, and your capabilities, and recognize the difference between the three.
• Know what drives you, knowing what gives you satisfaction and knowing the difference between the two.
• Knowing what your values and priorities are, knowing the values of your organization, and measuring the difference between the two.
• Knowing these gaps – are you willing to overcome those differences? 

These are provocative ideas to ponder. How do my capabilities line up with what I want? What actually drives me, and does that drive actually satisfy? Does the context I find myself in actually align with my values and priorities? The most important question: Am I willing to get uncomfortable and work to overcome the gaps? If the answer is yes, we can move on to encodings.

Discovering Your “Encodings”

Once you have that baseline of self-awareness, you must set out to discover your “encodings.” In his new book What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins describes encodings as your unique talents, endurable capabilities, desires, and values—those things that light you up.

Your encodings are a vast galaxy of stars, pulsing and beaming within your ethereal frame.  While there are stars everywhere, there are clusters and constellations in some parts of the night sky and other parts are less populated.  Some of the sky is shrouded in light pollution and in other sections clouds may obstruct your view. 

At any given moment of your life, you look through a camera frame at those encodings in the night sky. There are times in life when that frame captures a bright constellation of these encodings, and then there are other times when it frames a less populated section of the sky. Tragically, many of us live our entire lives with our frames pointed at a light-polluted horizon, our encodings completely obscured.

The entire galaxy of your encodings is always there, but you can’t capture the whole sky in the frame—only a section of it. If you want to have an impact as a leader, it is up to you to intentionally move your frame to the part of the sky densely populated with stars. Collins calls this being “in-frame.” Think about a hobby where you completely lose track of time or the best year of your career—that feeling of being fully alive is an indicator that you were “in-frame.” To live an authentic life, to maximize the impact of our life, and to emerge as a leader, we must live in-frame.

Clearing the Clouds

Even in-frame, sometimes the clouds of our own personal hang-ups block the view of those stars. Put bluntly: we have to own our s#1t if we are going to shine. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson has a framework that I think is useful to help clear the cloudy sky. He describes the eight stages of life where we meet a crisis that needs to be resolved. If not resolved, we can’t successfully move to the next stage.

1. Infancy:  Basic Trust vs. Basic Mistrust
2. Early Childhood:  Autonomy vs. Shame, Doubt
3. Play Age:  Initiative vs. Guilt 
4. School Age:  Industry vs. Inferiority
5. Adolescence: Identity vs. Identity Confusion
6. Young Adulthood: Intimacy vs. Isolation
7. Adulthood: Generativity vs. stagnation
8. Old Age: Integrity vs. Despair

If we as adults are suffering stagnation or as young adults isolation, we need to work back to see which earlier crisis is not resolved. Perhaps I need to go back and deal with identity confusion and figure out “who I am” so I can then find intimacy, which sets me up for generativity. It seems a lot of the challenges we wrestle with as managers—most of the strange and unproductive proclivities we deal with on our teams—are rooted in unresolved developmental crises.

We are all a sloppy stew of genetics, family, schooling, accidents, luck, etc. With all the power the world has over us in our early years, it is a wonder that any of us manages to resolve any of these crises in a positive way. While we cannot change our past, we can honestly reflect on it to overcome its deterministic grip on our lives.

Great leaders take all of this history and forge it into something uniquely their own. Leaders exercise agency to go from being manipulated by guilt to driven by purpose, shift from inertia to industry, and exchange isolation for intimacy. In doing so, they wake from the stupor of stagnation and become generative in these most productive years.

Active Learning

Even if the clouds clear and your camera is “in-frame,” your stars won’t shine if your lens is out of focus. The hard work of active learning is the key to bringing your natural talents into clear view.

“In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.  The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” – Eric Hoffer

The future belongs to the curious. You must accept total responsibility for your own development because you are your own best teacher. No one else can teach you how to be you; therefore, no one can teach you how to lead. This is why I am so adamantly opposed to the idea of “developing someone.” You can manage someone, you can train them into submission, but you cannot develop an authentic person—a leader.

True understanding requires reflecting on your experiences so deeply that the lessons learned actually result in a changed person. Through this active learning process, our encodings become strengths. As we practice our craft, we build skill and our stars come into focus. We also may actively learn that our frame needs to shift. If you never engage in actively developing your talents, you will never know. If you are simply going through the motions, moving your frame to different parts of the sky looking for something that just clicks into focus, you will likely never find it.

The Authentic Expression

The proof of leadership is nothing more than turning around to find willing followers. When you take the pen to write your own life, you step away from others’ scripts and into the game you were naturally meant to play. Keep backing yourself and owning your ongoing self-discovery—because when you fully embrace your true self, you naturally become the profoundly trustworthy leader others want to follow.