On the other hand, people who are authentic, who are more able to function according to their true self, tend to be more centered, balanced, compassionate, forgiving, sensitive, peaceful, secure, and self-confident. They have a more optimistic outlook on life, report a higher level of self-esteem, and feel a greater sense of life satisfaction. And because they feel more alive, they’re more likely to pursue whatever they’re doing with zest and enjoyment, and to be committed to causes they believe in. In addition, they’re realistic about life’s possibilities and thus less likely to engage in self-delusion. In terms of relationships, authentic people tend to be socially engaged, given their capacity to express their emotions in a sincere manner. That quality makes them receptive to others, and vice versa.

Authenticity implies accepting oneself, warts and all. It means acting according to one’s values, preferences, and needs as opposed to acting merely to please others. Authentic people demonstrate behavior that reflects self-determination, autonomy, and choice, as opposed to behavior that’s been imposed on them by others. Valuing openness and truthfulness in their close relationships, they summon the courage to be vulnerable through self-disclosure, so as to develop genuine intimacy and trust, whether among friends or in the workplace ².

So if presenting more of one’s true self makes a person happier, why do so many people—so many leaders, in particular—wear a mask? From a developmental perspective, a major contributing factor is that many of these people (as children) were never permitted to express their real feelings and pursue their own needs. Very little psychological space was given to them when they were growing up. Their stories typically reveal that they were forced to become extensions of whoever was taking care of them. By that I mean that the needs of others became more important than their own. In an environment that they perceived as dangerous, they used pleasing others as a survival tactic. If they were daring enough to express a wish or feeling, it only led to difficulties: anger, perhaps, or abandonment. Unable to express themselves honestly, they failed to establish a wholesome, secure sense of self. For the purpose of emotional survival, they had no choice but to conform and to present a false self, a persona more acceptable to the external world. Normal, adaptive socialization processes were overridden by the child’s survival urge. Thus they would assume a more extreme position on the true-false self axis.

This false self, then, is a form of “protective reaction” against feelings of rejection, pain, and abandonment. It’s a way of avoiding psychological injury. If it continues over time, the developing child has no foundation for a secure sense of identity; instead, the ground is laid for a stunted, disfigured, impoverished sense of self. As time goes by, the true self becomes too weak to stand up to the overbearing false self; it retreats, coming out only in disguise. The false self has in effect become the person. This sort of development creates individuals who are out of tune with themselves, out of touch with what they really are. And because they don’t feel good in their skin, they continue to seek the protection of role-playing and gamesmanship—but unconsciously: the false self has become such an inseparable part of their way of dealing with the external world that they don’t even recognize it as a protective shell. Once formed and functioning, the false self stifles any further development of the true self. The false self has become a proxy for the true self, able to absorb any pain that the caretakers (or later important figures) inflict on it.

Though the true self is all but forgotten, it lives in tension with the false self. Because of this tension, inauthentic people lack spontaneity, curiosity, and creativity, and they’re dependent on the reactions of others. Because of their insecurity, they count on gamesmanship to get ahead, and they prefer short-term expediency over long-term effectiveness. Lacking a strong sense of self, they end up thinking, feeling, and behaving in ways that are contrary to their well-suppressed inner feelings. That breeds more tension, and a strong sense of unreality.

In relating with others, inauthentic people depict emotions, but something seems to be missing. They behave as if they had intense emotional experiences; they behave as if they had a strong emotional life. In reality, though—as the people they deal with soon realize—their emotional experiences are extremely shallow. Thus inauthentic people are incapable of engaging in truly intimate relationships. Although they give the appearance of normality, demonstrating ordinary human emotions, that normality is a pretense; chameleon-like, they adopt whatever emotion or quality the situation seems to call for. Although they pretend to feel or to care, deep inside they feel or care very little. Although they pretend to be interested in others, it’s mostly show. The inability to invest emotionally in anything leads to feelings of self-estrangement: inauthentic people feel disconnected from their environment, empty at the core ³.

This inability to connect makes work, life, and play activities unbalanced for inauthentic people. Not as noticeable early in their career, this problem tends to come to the fore as people age; increasingly they begin to feel unintegrated and depersonalized. As they become more unfocused, empty, and insecure, they may come to realize that something is wrong in their dealings with others; they may find it harder to deny their responsibility in this matter. Eventually, it may dawn on them that it’s they themselves, not others, who are the problem.

Unfortunately, the business setting is a stage where the false self seems to flourish. Presenting a false self may even be a professional advantage, because it facilitates conforming to organizational norms, doing what’s expected. Chameleon-like behavior—the ability to pick up signals from the outside and adjust one’s actions accordingly (exactly as one was trained to do in childhood)—serves the ambitious businessperson well. Given the superficiality of relationships in many organizations, the inability to present a true sense of self makes it easy for both novice office workers and executives to change their role according to the requirements of the situation. They’re perfectly willing to demonstrate “true” commitment to whatever the organization stands for—it’s only a game.

This gamesmanship comes with a price, however. Being out of touch with one’s inner world—being dominated by a false self—produces feelings of distress and alienation. The more successful the inauthentic individual gets to be, the more unreal he or she typically feels. Although they’re successful in doing what’s expected of them, they feel increasingly estranged from their inner world. There’s more and more of a disconnect. As their own feelings of doubt and anxiety grow, their inauthenticity begins to be picked up by their audience. The people to whom they direct their gamesmanship, sensing that something is off, begin to feel manipulated. Those in the “audience” begin to recognize that what they’re seeing is all smoke and mirrors. They realize that they’re victims of true impression management.

AUTHENTICITY: BEYOND THE GULAG ORGANIZATION

Why all this talk of false selves and true selves? Because a sense of true self, of feeling good in one’s skin, an experience of authenticity, is absolutely essential to effective, sustainable leadership. Leaders who want to get the best out of their people need to possess this quality; no ifs, ands or buts. But combining authenticity and leadership results in a very different leadership style from the 20th-century model.

Leadership in the New World of Work

Leaders in the 21st century need to realize that the command, control, compartmentalization organization is a thing of the past. In our postindustrial society, where knowledge workers are the majority, getting the best out of people requires leadership that fosters interaction, information, and innovation. To be successful, organizations need leaders who are able to present themselves as they are, who have confidence in combination with humility, and who are viewed by others as having integrity and being worthy of trust. To be such a leader, people must be aware of (and trust in) their motives, feelings, and desires; recognize their strengths and weaknesses; understand their personality characteristics and emotional states; and know how their unconscious feelings (and the upbringing that caused those feelings) affect their behavior. They must limit “stagecraft” and gamesmanship in interacting with others, responding to people with sincerity and sensitivity because they truly care about others. They must take responsibility for their actions, living the principles they espouse. And they must be willing to face reality as it is, not as they wish it were, rejecting selective perception.

Effective leadership in the 21st century will depend heavily on networking structures, which imply a focus on relationships. That’s why authentic leadership will be crucial to business success in the coming century. Authentic leadership already offers a competitive advantage, because such leadership contributes to an honest assessment of why a particular business exists and what the priorities of the organization will be. Authentic leaders possess a greater dose of emotional intelligence. Because authentic leaders are more in tune with their inner theater (and thus are better able to pay attention to the inner theater of others), they are more equipped to “read” and articulate what lies unspoken in the hearts and minds of their employees. That sense of understanding creates in employees a sense of involvement and commitment. Thus authentic leaders—executives more in touch with their true selves—by speaking to the collective imagination of their people, create a group identity.

Authentic leaders pay great attention to the work environment. They realize that congruence between the needs of the employees and the needs of the organization is essential to organizational effectiveness. They recognize that if the organization’s leadership is able to create such congruence, their people will enjoy a feeling of self-determination; they will feel in control of their destiny. Knowing that they’re powerful only to the extent that they empower other people, they want their staff to have a voice in what they do and where they go. By helping people believe in themselves, and by acknowledging and addressing people’s needs and wishes, authentic leaders are able to pull extraordinary effort and creativity out of their staff.

Although authentic leaders realize that competitive wages are important, they also know that their employees are looking for more than money, because they themselves share the same outlook. Although well paid for their services, they don’t fall victim to the greed factor (as a number of prominent US CEOs have recently done). Rather, they truly want people to believe that they’re making a difference, both to the organization and, in some small sense, to the world. Thus authentic leaders build organizations where the contributions of all employees are valued and recognized. That’s what empowerment is all about.

In addition, authentic leaders go to great lengths to contribute to their people’s sense of competence, helping them gain a feeling of personal growth and development. Because they know that people are stimulated by learning new things, they take responsibility for developing their people. They realize that if their employees are expected to make an extraordinary effort in a rapidly changing world, they need to gain new knowledge and develop new competencies. They also need to share this knowledge with others. Thus shared learning is a key pattern in organizations headed by leaders who are authentic.

Authentic leaders are cultural architects, creating a framework for the kind of values that make an organization a great place to work. They introduce a set of meta-values into their organizations—values that transcend the more traditional, generic listing of values found in most organizations. These values incorporate and use the motivational need systems discussed in Chapter 1.

The first of these meta-values is a sense of community. When employees feel a sense of belonging in the workplace, trust and mutual respect flourish, people are prepared to help others, the work group becomes cohesive, and goal-directedness thrives. An organization’s sense of community can be enhanced in various ways. These include building an organizational architecture that favors small units, pushing decision-making down, ensuring fair process, aspiring toward transparency, and practicing distributed, shared leadership. This last element is a tenet of faith for authentic leaders, who are committed to developing leadership capabilities at every level of the organization. Distributed leadership is a strange beast: it’s made possible by a sense of community, but it also encourages a sense of community. In organizations where everyone takes a part in leadership, authentic leaders take vicarious pleasure in coaching their younger executives and watching their accomplishments. This experience of generativity—of caring for others—is a source of creativity and contributes to feelings of continuity in the mentor, who can see his or her efforts continuing through the work of successors.

Authentic leaders realize that taking people on an exciting, adventurous journey gratifies humankind’s essential motivational need for exploration and assertion. Exploration, enjoyment, entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation are all closely linked. Thus the second meta-value is a sense of enjoyment. In truly effective companies, employees enjoy their work. Indeed, they “have fun”—words not often associated with the workplace. And yet playfulness fosters mental health. Furthermore, authentic leaders realize that happy employees make for happy customers. Employees will find it hard to smile at a customer when they are not happy themselves. They recognize that in far too many companies a sense of enjoyment is either ignored or, worse, discouraged. They know that if employees feel that they’re working in a gulag, they won’t want to make the extra effort for their clientele. Furthermore, they know that in gulag organizations, imagination is stifled and innovation squelched.

Finally, authentic leaders pay attention to the third meta-value: a sense of meaning. They know that people will work for money but will die for a cause. As has been said, the best use for life is to spend it on something that will outlast it. Authentic leaders know that that statement applies to life in organizations too. They realize that when what an organization does is presented in the context of transcending one’s personal needs—presented as improving people’s quality of life, say, or helping people, or contributing something to society—the impact on workers is extremely powerful.

With that understanding, authentic leaders are able to create a sense of meaning that gets the best out of their people, drawing forth imagination and creativity. In such organizations people experience a sense of “flow”—that is, a feeling of total involvement and concentration in whatever they’re doing ⁴. Authentic leaders know that people are at their best, at their happiest, when they’re fully engaged in work that they enjoy on a journey toward a goal that they themselves established.

Authentizotic Organizations

Organizations and leadership that cultivate and honor the above meta-values are what I like to call “authentizotic,” a label that melds the Greek words authenteekos (authentic) and zoteekos (vital to life). In its broadest sense, that first part of the label, authentic, describes something that conforms to fact and is therefore worthy of trust and reliance. As with the executive who is authentic, an authentic workplace is one that has a compelling connective quality for its employees in its vision, mission, culture, and structure. The organization’s leadership has communicated clearly and convincingly not only the how of work but also the why, revealing meaning in each person’s task. The organization’s leadership walks the talk; they set the example.

The zoteekos (vital to life) element of the authentizotic organization refers to those aspects of the workplace that give people the sense of flow mentioned earlier and help build a sense of personal wholeness, making people feel complete and alive. People feel that they’re appreciated, that their contributions are recognized. Zoteekos allows for self-assertion in the workplace and produces a sense of effectiveness and competency, of autonomy, of initiative, creativity, entrepreneurship, and industry; it also responds to the human need for exploration.

The challenge for twenty-first-century leadership is to develop authentic leaders and employees, and to create authentizotic organizations. The acquisition of greater authenticity will take time, but it’s time well spent. The work of understanding one’s own inner theater and that of one’s colleagues will be a challenge, but it’s well worth the effort. The time and energy spent on improving emotional intelligence results not just in personal gratification (though such work is personally rewarding), but also in value for the organization and its people.

Authentizotic organizations, recognizing the value of such work, help their people accomplish it. They encourage their leaders to invite professional help in uncovering their psychological drivers and making the personal shifts necessary for greater authenticity in leadership; and they offer interventions such as those described in Part Two of this book. They recognize the need for transitional space as their people embark on radical change and new beginnings.

Authentizotic organizations acknowledge that happiness isn’t an outside job; it’s an inside job. They recognize that people want not only a job, but also a life, because the quality of life determines the quality of relationships. Thus authentizotic organizations are easily recognized: their employees maintain a healthy balance between personal and organizational life, they take time for self-examination, and they exercise their imagination daily. They’re not only just doing but also being. As the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm once said, “Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.” Authentizotic organizations recognize that all people would like to know before they die what they’re running from, and to, and why.

Authentizotic organizations encourage their people to think, and then—saints preserve us!—encourage them to take revolutionary action. They help people learn to trust the men and women they work for, enjoy what they’re doing, and feel passion for and pride in their work. They minimize secrecy and encourage information-sharing, see diversity of all kinds as a competitive advantage, are open to change, and strive to be the building blocks in creating better societies.

The positive ambiance created by authentic leaders in authentizotic organizations creates “virtuous cycles” for both leaders and followers: in helping others, people help themselves. And those virtuous cycles cultivate both authenticity and passion, which are at the heart of effectiveness in the business world. As noted earlier, people who experience passion are acting in accordance with their true self. The French philosopher Diderot once said, “Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.” Authentic leaders take that credo to heart: they believe that if they create authentizotic organizations, the work that they and their people do will succeed in tomorrow’s marketplace, and that their organizations will ride with grace the new global economy’s surging waves of change.

REFERENCES

1 Winnicott, D. W. (1975). Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. New York, Basic Books.

2 Trilling, L. (1982). Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press.

3 Deutsch, H. (1942). “Some Forms of Emotional Disturbance and their Relationship to Schizophrenia,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11: 301-321.

4 Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row.