3rd Characteristic of a humble leader: Authenticity
Posted on February 22, 2022 by Clario Bonandini, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
Authenticity is a word in the mouth of many people, but rarely becomes something they are.
When leaders do what they need to do to reach their goals, pretending to be something they are not, they are not being authentic, even when they may have success.In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown says authenticity is the antidote to shame. She defines authenticity as “a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.”
In the mind of most leaders authenticity is not something easy to practice. Leaders are brutally honest or extremely nice. Neither of these extremes are useful.
Kim Scott, CEO of “Radical Candor ™.” has a tool that can help us to better understand the idea of authenticity in leadership. You can go to Radical Candor website to view it.
She views guidance in leadership as having two axes: one vertical, Care personally, and one horizontal, Challenge directly.
Leadership is about reaching goals and objectives, making a company or a division successful. Leadership is about valuing and developing people, so they not only make a company or division great, but also grow personally and professionally as they use their talents and expertise to make the company, team or division thrive.
Authenticity and humility meet when I can be real with people and they can be real with me. Because I care personally for them, I’m willing to challenge people directly for the sake of their development. This can be easily misunderstood because leaders tend to go to the extremes.
If you Care Personally but you do not Challenge people Directly you end up having something that she calls “Ruinous Empathy” meaning you are empathetic, but it does not help people to develop because they think they are doing well since they receive praise, but they are not challenged to excellence.
If a leader is low in “Care Personally” and low in “Challenge Directly” they operate in the quadrant of “Manipulative Insincerity”; this is the worst quadrant a leader can be in. These leaders are the ones who don’t care about anybody but themselves and instead of challenging people directly they look for sneaky ways to know what people think.
Challenging people Directly and not Caring for them Personally leaves the leader in the Obnoxious Aggression quadrant. The leader here challenges people, and yet he does not care for their wellbeing. Often people operate between “Ruinous empathy” and “Obnoxious Aggression” with the latter being the less bad of the two.
“To illustrate radical candor in action, Scott shared a story about a time her boss criticized her. “I had just joined Google and gave a presentation to the founders and the CEO about how the AdSense business was doing. I walked in feeling a little nervous, but happily the business was on fire. When we told Larry, Sergey and Eric how many publishers we had added over the previous months, Eric almost fell off his chair and asked what resources they could give us to help continue this amazing success. So… I sort of felt like the meeting went okay.”
But after the meeting, Scott’s boss, Sheryl Sandberg, suggested they take a walk together. She talked about the things she’d liked about the presentation and how impressed she was with the success the team was having — yet Scott could feel a “but” coming. “Finally, she said, ‘But you said um a lot.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, no big deal. I know, I do that. But who cared if I said um when I had the tiger by the tail?’”
Sandberg pushed forward, asking whether Scott’s ums were the result of nervousness. She even suggested that Google could hire a speaking coach to help. Still, Scott brushed off the concern; it didn’t seem like an important issue. “Finally, Sheryl said, ‘You know, Kim, I can tell I’m not really getting through to you. I’m going to have to be clearer here. When you say um every third word, it makes you sound stupid.’”
“Now, that got my attention!” Scott says
Scott continues recalling how that conversation was a turning point in her development. It was a step forward because her boss cared for her enough to confront her truthfully and carefully. She was careful as she told her that she “sounded stupid” and NOT that she was stupid.
