Alison Davis-Blake is currently the dean of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, a top-ten ranked business school and frequently the highest-ranked public business school in the United States. Prior to joining Michigan, Davis-Blake was the dean of the business school at the University of Minnesota. She is the first woman to hold either of these positions, and it should scarcely be news that there aren’t loads of women serving as business school deans or, for that matter, in senior roles in higher education. Alison Davis-Blake achieved much in just her first two years at Ross, including hiring twenty-one new faculty members, expanding the number of bachelor’s students by 20 percent, introducing new master’s programs, increasing the school’s visibility in India and Southeast Asia, and, most important, facilitating the raising of one of the largest gifts in the history of the University of Michigan, $100 million for the business school and another $100 million for the athletic department during her first year on the job.1
But if you were to ask people who knew Davis-Blake when she was still Alison Davis, a doctoral student in organizational behavior in the 1980s, if they expected her to become a business school dean, they would all tell you the same thing: No way. Out of any set of possible people who might become a future dean, she would have ranked last on that list. Alison Davis-Blake was an introvert, very quiet and unassuming. She was so quiet that at her first-year doctoral student evaluation, her adviser told her that while she was doing great in her courses, the faculty were wondering when she was going to speak up in class. “You need to speak,” he said.
Obviously, being a business school dean would seem to require qualities and behaviors pretty much the opposite of introversion and a reluctance to speak. In fact, deans and other leaders speak all the time—it’s sort of the primary component of their job. For Davis-Blake to become the effective leader that she clearly is, she has had to master an important skill, to behave in ways that, to at least some degree, are inconsistent with her natural inclinations and predispositions. Although she will tell you the many ways in which being less outgoing can be helpful—for instance, being a better listener helps in listening to people talk about their favorite topic, themselves, and it also facilitates learning important insights about those you need to influence—Davis-Blake will also talk about her journey of personal development in which she has acquired the behaviors and skills required of a leader.
Leaders must be able to put on a show, to display energy and pay attention to others, regardless of how they may feel at the time. On the day in the winter of 2004 that Gary Loveman, the CEO of the casino company Caesars, attended a business school class where students were discussing him, he had the flu and was running a temperature of about 101 degrees. As a sentient, normal human being, Loveman would probably have preferred to be anywhere but in front of not one but two successive sections of students from 8:00 a.m. until 12:00 noon. But Loveman was well prepared for his performance that day. As the leader of a company with tens of thousands of employees, he understood that many people in the company would see him at most once a year, and often for only a brief moment of interaction. Loveman knew that those small interactions were important, and that, regardless of how he felt, what else was going on in his life or in the company, or how tired he was, he had to be fully present and engaged in those interactions. He had to show people he had energy, both intellectual and sheer physical energy, that he was engaged and committed, and that he could lead the company to success. So, regardless of how he felt in the moment or what he wanted to be doing, Loveman, just like Davis-Blake, had to be able to put on the public face of a leader.
These two leaders, and many others, understand that the last thing a leader needs to be at crucial moments is “authentic”—at least if authentic means being both in touch with and exhibiting their true feelings. In fact, being authentic is pretty much the opposite of what leaders must do. Leaders do not need to be true to themselves. Rather, leaders need to be true to what the situation and what those around them want and need from them. And often what others want and need is the reassurance that things will work out and the confidence that they are on the right track.
Gina Bianchini, who cofounded Ning with Netscape’s Marc Andreesen, and who more recently started Mightybell, both companies in the social networking space, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and a woman listed in Fortune’s list of most powerful women. As an entrepreneur, Bianchini well understands the importance of exuding confidence to attract employee talent and, for that matter, customers and capital. Start-ups invariably experience ups and downs, and there are times that Bianchini, just like any other founder, feels frustrated and discouraged and is confronted with difficult problems that test her considerable competence. Although she has a few confidants with whom she can be completely candid, she is relentlessly upbeat and positive in public. Partly that reflects her genuine enthusiasm about her company’s mission and partly that’s because being enthusiastic and confident is an essential quality for entrepreneurs, regardless of what they may be feeling on the inside.
But it’s not just leaders who have to exhibit qualities they may not be feeling. The ability to not succumb to personal feelings or predilections seems like a crucial trait for high performers in many domains. In sports, players often “play through the pain,” in that they put aside the aches, pains, exhaustion, and discouragement and summon reserves of strength they may not have even known they had to surmount obstacles. Great achievement frequently requires surmounting, not giving in, to situational exigencies—not to mention resisting the urge to be entirely oneself.
The sociologist Arlie Hochschild has written about the many occupations in which frontline people such as salespeople, customer service agents, flight attendants, and, for sure, employees at Disneyworld (which bills itself as the “happiest place on earth,” even though its employees may not be)2 are called upon, as part of their everyday work, to display positive emotions that they may not be feeling at the time.3 She notes:
Emotion . . . can be and often is subject to acts of management. The individual often works on inducing or inhibiting feelings so as to render them “appropriate” to a situation. . . . Meaning-making jobs . . . put more premium on the individual’s capacity to do emotion work. A reexamination of class differences in child rearing suggests that middle-class families prepare their children for emotion management more and working-class families prepare them less.4
Hochschild’s research shows that jobs that require employees to display (positive) emotions that they may not actually be feeling can be psychologically demanding and stressful. But she also shows that such work is often financially rewarding. Hochschild argues that one of the ways in which social class reproduces itself is by middle-class families doing a better job than lower-class families of preparing their children to manage their emotions, particularly the emotions they display to others.
None of this is intended to say that learning to manage one’s emotions and self-presentation is always good and that inauthenticity is desirable—only that inauthenticity is incredibly common and seemingly an important requirement for effective leadership.
Authentic leadership seems to be yet another leadership craze, as evidenced by numerous books, seminars, and even a sixteen-item Authentic Leadership Questionnaire, which asks people to rate how often a leader exhibits various behaviors such as (1) soliciting views that challenge the leader’s deeply held positions; (2) saying exactly what he or she means; and (3) demonstrating beliefs that are consistent with actions.5 There are, of course, places that will train you in authentic leadership skills, such as the Authentic Leadership Institute, whose website promises to “transform” leaders and help people develop their authentic leadership.6 The idea that one would and could be trained to become or at least appear authentic oozes with delicious irony. This is sort of like the famous quote from the late comedian George Burns: “Sincerity—if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”7
The idea of authentic leadership epitomizes almost everything that I believe characterizes the leadership industry generally, much of which does not help either science or practice: (1) a well-intentioned, values-laden (2) set of prescriptions—lots of “shoulds” and “oughts”—(3) that are mostly not representative of most people in leadership roles, and (4) are recommendations that are almost certainly not implementable and may be fundamentally misguided.
It is hard to determine exactly when the authentic leadership movement began, but in 2004 the Gallup Leadership Institute sponsored an inaugural conference at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on authentic leadership development. That conference resulted in a volume of published papers as well as a special issue of the Leadership Quarterly, an academic journal focused on leadership studies. The conference and the papers provide important insights into the authentic leadership movement.
First, the motivations of the contributors to this movement are honorable and well-intentioned. The quest for authentic leadership begins with the acknowledgment of the many contemporary problems laid on the door of leadership. Leadership failures, even before the latest financial crisis, were common. Moreover, the challenges confronting a world of increasing inequality in both income and life expectancy, rapid technological change, and growing global interdependence along many dimensions (ranging from economic integration to the rapid spread of contagious diseases, such as SARS) are substantial. These failures and challenges call for better, more effective leaders, to do good and make things better.
The authentic leadership movement is not only filled with pure motives—“a renewed focus on restoring confidence, hope and optimism”—but it is also values-laden. As one example, authentic leadership derives from the positive psychology movement and also from humanistic psychologists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.8 The movement shares some of its intellectual leaders and many of its core ideas.
Second, the authentic leadership movement is filled with prescriptions and calls to action. For example, from an article on authentic leadership from the special issue of the Leadership Quarterly, “Bill George . . . succinctly states, ‘We need leaders who lead with purpose, values, and integrity; leaders who build enduring organizations.”9 A few pages later: “Leaders must promote an inclusive organizational climate that enables themselves and followers to continually learn and grow.”10 And so it goes, with the “need,” “musts,” and “shoulds” omnipresent. As such, the authentic leadership literature is a good example of the lay preaching, filled with admonishments, promises of better times, and warnings about what will happen if the prescriptions aren’t followed, that characterizes much of the leadership industry.
One might reasonably assume that authentic leadership is relatively rare, given all the leadership problems that presumably would be solved if there were more authentic leaders and if the need for authentic leadership development had been met. If authentic leadership were common or easily achieved, less research and other efforts would presumably be required on its behalf.
What the writing and speaking about authentic leadership does not do is attempt to empirically estimate base rates—how frequent or pervasive authentic leadership is. It is important to estimate base rates to assess whether authentic leadership is rare or widespread, and if it is rare, why that might be so; as I’ve previously argued, base rates are also important to judge the effects of change and improvement efforts. Put simply, how would one know if authentic leadership development, leadership training, writing, speaking, coaching, or teaching was doing any good if there were no comparisons between the initial state of the world and what happened as a consequence of all of these activities?
Although an assumption that authentic leadership is scarce and rare seems to follow from the attention to talking about and developing it, it is virtually impossible to estimate the frequency of the occurrence of authentic leadership. A search of Google Scholar, which, as you may recall, has more than two million entries on “leadership,” produces precisely zero entries for the total of the search terms “proportion of authentic leaders,” “percentage of authentic leaders,” “occurrence of authentic leadership,” and “amount of authentic leadership.” Searching Google itself produces zero results for the query “How many authentic leaders are there?” but if you remove the quotes, there are literally millions of articles and links providing advice on how to develop your authentic leadership qualities and why you might want to do so. By the way, one can, in the medical domain, find incidence rates for virtually all diseases and medical conditions, because in medicine, people seem to believe that it might be important to understand the scope, ecology, and geographic incidence of a phenomenon, none of which seems to be of concern to the leadership industry.
What is authentic leadership, anyway? If you do a search on this term and click on many of the websites that first appear, authentic leadership is apparently a seemingly endless list of positive attributes including ethics and energy and a long list of behaviors including having impact, exercising integrity, exerting influence, demonstrating initiative,11 dreaming, taking care of yourself, exhibiting courage, building teams12—a set of undoubtedly positive actions that have at best a tangential relationship to any commonsense notion of authenticity as contrasted with positive or effective leadership or living in general. Consulting the scholarly literature provides a tighter and somewhat more useful definition: “individuals who are ‘in tune’ with their basic nature and clearly and accurately see themselves and their lives.” Or, in a similar vein, “owning one’s personal experiences, be they thoughts, emotions, needs, wants, preferences, or beliefs, processes captured by the injunction to ‘know oneself.’”
By this definition, the former New York congressman and New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, famous for sending pictures of his private parts to various women he met on the Internet, was, if nothing else, authentic. He was certainly “owning” his thoughts, needs, and wants. As this extreme example suggests, getting along, let alone being successful in the world, often requires a large amount of inauthenticity and self-regulation. Leaders need to be and do what their followers and society require, not what the leader feels like being or doing at the moment.
A friend’s daughter fell in with the wrong crowd at college and wound up with a boyfriend who was also a drug dealer. She took an overdose, fell into a coma, and eventually died several months later. The pain of this experience can hardly be imagined. My friend, a senior-level college administrator, naturally received sympathy from his colleagues while he was going through this heartbreaking experience and afterward. But the fact is, the large organization in which he had an important leadership role did not cease its operations while his personal tragedy was unfolding, and his subordinates, bosses, and peers needed him not only to do his job but also, on occasion, to provide them with the motivation and encouragement they needed. In short, as he told me, “The experience of losing a daughter is part of my soul, a sadness I will never get over. But you also have to go on doing your job for the institution and people who are counting on you, regardless of how you may feel on a particular day.”
Is he inauthentic? I will let you decide. But the simple fact is that as a prescription for leadership, being true to your role, fulfilling your obligations regardless of your wants and desires, doing what will make you successful in the environment in which you are working, are behaviors likely to be much more useful than being true to yourself and your feelings at the moment. After all, what if your real self is an asshole?
Moreover, as Gary Loveman has stated, there comes a time in your career, as you move up, when critical relationships simply have to work. When you are in school, if you don’t like a particular classmate, that is fine. Don’t hang out with that person; don’t even talk to the individual if you don’t want to. But if you are both senior executives in an organization in a relationship that inevitably entails a high degree of interdependence, you cannot afford to not “like” the other person. Moreover, your personal feelings are largely irrelevant to your need to make the relationship successful. So one of the things that happens as you move up the organizational ladder, Loveman suggests, is that you lose the freedom to act on your personal beliefs, feelings, and predilections—your “authentic self”—and you have to direct your behavior according much more to what you need to do to be successful, regardless of how you feel at the moment.
Here’s another problem with the prescription to be your authentic self: People change and grow all the time as a result of their work experiences. No one is born a doctor, lawyer, nurse, professional golfer, carpenter, or, for that matter, as a creature that walks and talks. We learn not only skills, but also the values and the culture that surround our particular jobs and organizations. We become what we do, in terms of not just skills but also preferences and values. One of the more robust findings in social psychology is that attitudes follow behaviors.13 After you have been a doctor, or a tax accountant, or a professor for long enough, you probably come to like what you have to do every day, and in many respects you also become the role you have been doing.
Learning and adapting to what we do never stops. So what does it mean to be true to yourself? Is that your high school self? Your college self? Your postcollege self? Your role as a friend? A family member? An employee? A leader?
People need to figure out how to be effective, regardless of their wants, needs, upbringing, and so forth. They need to learn how to be successful in the environments they confront, or they must learn how to find different and better environments. People need to grow, develop, and change, not get stuck in their temporarily authentic selves.
Sitting in my office is a young woman born in Taiwan and raised by parents who taught her to respect authority, to be modest and self-effacing, to avoid conflict, and to work hard in order to succeed. She has come to see me because a peer who has the same boss at her iconic Silicon Valley employer has made a move to absorb her business unit into the one he leads. Should she follow the dictates of her upbringing and what she has come to define as her fundamental persona and be modest and nice, or should she fight for herself using tactics that she might have in the past seen as inconsistent with who she is?
After about fifteen minutes of listening, I remark about how frequently she has described herself in her situation as being the youngest of her peers, the person with the least tenure in the company, and the only woman reporting directly to her boss. “I’m sure that is all true,” I say, “but let me give you three other adjectives you might use to describe yourself: the smartest, the most analytically skilled, and the person among your peers who has run the project that has had the biggest financial impact.” She hesitates—she was raised to be modest, of course. Then, sitting up a little straighter in her chair, she remarks that yes, I am probably correct. “So,” I continue, “there are, as we now see, at least six adjectives to describe you. All of them are true and accurate. You get to pick which of the three you carry around in your head. But your choice has enormous consequences for your sense of what you deserve and what you are going to be willing to do.” I am pleased to report that she largely got over herself and her upbringing and navigated the situation successfully.
This story or some variant thereof, although often without the happy ending, repeats itself endlessly and helps explain why women are underrepresented at senior levels in corporations and law firms. As we saw in the last chapter, confidence as much as competence determines success, and successful people are not bashful about promoting themselves and eschewing any feelings of modesty in the process. Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, founded a movement, Lean In, on the basis of the insight that women are often not quite pushy enough—but that with support from others, with practice, with knowledge of the relevant social science literature, women can change their behavior and become more successful.
Does this imply that women need to become less “authentic” to be successful? Quite possibly, if women’s typical behavior, such as eschewing competition, not negotiating as hard as men, not asking for promotions, and not trying to stand out, holds their careers back. One could easily read Sandberg’s book Lean In14 and similar books as pleas for women to do what it takes to be successful, regardless of how they feel, how they have been trained, or what seems to be comfortable in the moment. For women, and for men, being true to oneself is useful only to the extent that someone’s true self has the qualities that make people successful. Otherwise, people need to put on, to assume, the qualities required to present themselves in the most favorable light.
Or to take another example, many people around the world consider the former U.S. president John F. Kennedy to have been an inspiring figure, a great speaker, and a charismatic leader. He wrote a well-regarded book about courage and overcame physical ailments to win the presidency. He gave one of the most-quoted inaugural addresses. But as a review of a book on Kennedy by the author Thurston Clarke noted:
As Mr. Clarke points out, Kennedy was “one of the most complicated and enigmatic men ever to occupy the White House”: a man who compartmentalized different aspects of his life and who frequently said and did contradictory things. His most essential quality, the literary critic Alfred Kazin is quoted as saying, was “that of the man who is always making and remaking himself.”15
Does this make Kennedy any less of a successful leader? I don’t think so. Nor is it unusual. People make and remake themselves all the time and adjust their behaviors to the situations they face.
Or consider Nelson Mandela, the highly revered father of South Africa who served more than twenty years in prison under the apartheid regime before emerging to become South Africa’s first black president. Like Kennedy, Mandela was a man of contradictions, as documented by Bill Keller, the former editor of and now a columnist for the New York Times. Keller, who knew Mandela personally for a long time, wrote:
First, Mandela’s brief membership in the South African Communist Party, and his long-term alliance with more devout Communists, says less about his ideology than about his pragmatism. He was at various times a black nationalist and a nonracialist, an opponent of armed struggle and an advocate of violence, a hothead and the calmest man in the room, a consumer of Marxist tracts and an admirer of Western democracy, a close partner of Communists and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists.16
Does this make Nelson Mandela inauthentic? And if so, who cares?
One of the most important leadership skills is the ability to put on a show, to act like a leader, to act in a way that inspires confidence and garners support—even if the person doing the performance does not actually feel confident or powerful. Deborah Gruenfeld, a social psychologist, teaches a class at Stanford Business School called Acting with Power, which is designed to build these important leadership skills. The course description aptly presents why acting is such an important leadership skill, particularly for people inside hierarchical organizations:
Many people struggle with “authority issues” that make certain hierarchical roles and positions difficult for them. This course draws on the craft of acting and the science of psychology to help students learn to use themselves to develop the characters that can play these roles effectively. This class is designed specifically for students who have trouble “playing” authoritative roles; those who find it difficult to act with power, status and authority.
Gruenfeld’s class recognizes an essential truth that, as the sociologist Erving Goffman described decades ago, people are inevitably putting on a show as they present various facets of themselves to others during social interactions.17 The issue is how to become more effective in this self-presentation activity.
Acting is essential to effective leadership. For the eleven years from 1986 to 1997, Harriet Rubin was not just a writer but also an editor at Currency books, an imprint of a larger publishing house. During that time Rubin both published and, more important, got to know many famous, iconic leaders very well—people like Dee Hock, who was instrumental in the founding of Visa, Andy Grove of Intel, Phil Knight of Nike, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Max De Pree of Herman Miller. As Rubin tried to discern what made these individuals so successful in their leadership roles, she came to discover the importance of inauthenticity, of being able to play a role:
It [their success] always had to do with pretense, playing a role, and the theatrical arts. I was intrigued . . . by a story told at Intel about Grove’s time as leader. Grove insisted that his brilliant but shy managers attend a seminar they called “wolf school.” Attendees learned how to lean into a superior’s face and shout out an idea or proposal. By dramatically showing a fierce belief in themselves, they would convince Intel’s hard-nosed managers of the value of their idea. If they didn’t feel fierce, they had to pretend. The message: Act powerful and you become powerful.
Teach your murmuring voice to howl. Oddly enough, many leaders I met seemed to be at their strongest when they were most inauthentic. If was as if their reserves of character had been created not by digging out their authentic selves, but by playing a character.18
Rubin argued that when people enter into leadership roles, they might not see the qualities that reside within them. Instead, she sensibly argued, people develop leadership qualities by practicing them, by acting them out and rehearsing them until they become natural and part of the individual. Harriet Rubin and the leaders she got to know came to appreciate the complexity and multidimensionality of people, and they understood how leadership positions required certain behaviors and personas, regardless of how someone felt at that moment or what his or her “true” persona was.
Not only is authentic leadership often not very useful, it may be almost impossible to do. If we have learned anything from all of the social science research over the past several decades—and actually we have learned quite a bit—it is that people’s attitudes and behaviors are profoundly affected by the situations in which they are embedded. So to the extent that being true to oneself entails ignoring or resisting situational constraints, the prescriptions of authentic leadership are at variance with how people act.
A classic study demonstrated the effect of situations on people’s behavior and why the idea of behaving authentically is unlikely. Seymour Lieberman of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan surveyed the attitudes of nearly all the employees at a four thousand–person, unionized home appliance manufacturer in the Midwest. Then twenty-three employees became foremen and thirty-five employees became union stewards. A new survey was conducted. Not surprisingly, the people who had moved into management (who had become foremen) exhibited more favorable attitudes toward the company and its incentive system, while those who had been elected stewards showed more favorable attitudes toward the union and also changed to be more favorable to the seniority system. A control group of people did not show any change in attitudes, as would be expected. Then the U.S. entered a recession and some of the foremen became frontline employees again, as did some of the shop stewards. The people who returned to their original roles exhibited changes in attitudes back toward their original values—with the former stewards becoming less pro-union and the former foremen becoming less pro-management.19
The basic idea motivating this research—“a person’s role will have an impact on his attitudes”—is a fundamental tenet of role theory and has been tested numerous times over the ensuing years. In one demonstration of the idea relevant to leadership, the late Gerald Salancik and I studied fifty-three supervisors in the housing office of a large state university. We found that supervisory behavior could be explained by the expectations of others with whom the individual interacted, with the expectations of subordinates more important for affecting social behaviors and the expectations of bosses more important for explaining the leaders’ task-relevant behaviors.20 All of this makes sense: Where someone stands on a variety of issues and attitudes depends on where that individual “sits” in an organization. Position affects the information people receive, the structure of the rewards and evaluations they face, the social interactions they encounter as part of their work, and their identities. So of course people are affected by job roles.
But given this effect of position on behavior, then what does it mean to say that someone is “authentic”? In the case of the Lieberman study, people who were promoted to stewards became more authentic union members; people who became foremen became more authentic company leaders—that is, until their roles changed and so did their attitudes. The idea that people are unchanged and unchanging across situations, or even that they should be, seems inconsistent with most of what we know about human psychology.
And it is not just attitudes that adjust to situations—so do fundamental dimensions of people’s personality. Many people believe that personality is fixed once someone reaches adulthood or maybe sooner, but that is not the case. The sociologists Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler conducted numerous studies investigating the effects of someone’s occupation and job conditions on such dimensions of their personality as their cognitive flexibility. They consistently found a pattern of reciprocal relationships such that personality affected the type of jobs and occupations people chose, but that once in those jobs, personality was also affected by the job and occupational conditions.21 If something as fundamental as one’s personality changes in response to job conditions, then the notion of being true to one’s authentic self makes no empirical sense—because that self is changing in response to the individual’s environment, including the work environment.
We have seen in this chapter that the idea of behaving authentically as a leader is almost certainly rare, because this is a concept that is at once both psychologically impossible—because of situational effects on personality and behavior—and also not very useful, because of the requirements for acting as a leader regardless of how one may feel at the moment. The fact that there are lots of prescriptions for leaders to be authentic is, however, not surprising. As many of the chapters in this book illustrate, the leadership industry is rife with prescriptions that are neither commonly adopted nor completely useful. Which, to reprise a frequent refrain, is why the leadership industry has had such a small effect on the organizational world.