The New Leadership Requirement: Be Yourself

If only there were a perfect list of the most effective leadership characteristics to judge talent. Senior learning executives could use this all-encompassing, quite magical list as a guide for what type of learning to provide to develop that talent. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, not a magical one, and such a list does not exist. However, there is something new on the leadership landscape for senior learning executives to hold onto. According to the authors of “Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?” professors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, if you are your very best self, your chances of becoming a great leader increase.

The book began as an article in the Harvard Business Review and ended with the phrase, “If you want to become a more effective leader, be yourself more with skill.” “That phrase seemed to be memorable for some people, but of course, inside organizations, many people don’t want you to be yourself. They want you to be someone else. They want you to fit against a competence model or they want you to be more like Jack Welch or Lee Iacocca or some other famous leader,” said Gareth Jones, professor and fellow at the Center for Management Development, London Business School. “The issue of authenticity seemed to be so relevant to our times.”

Jones said that there are several reasons why authenticity is critically important. One, employees in today’s organizations are increasingly skeptical. There is a growing awareness and a kind of guard built against being worked or manipulated by leaders. Second, the idea that consistency in role performances and authenticity are opposites is false because leaders do have to play roles. Third, to achieve authenticity one must be comfortable with origins, which means understanding what makes you who you are. And leaders must be comfortable with destinations, which means understanding where you are now. “This is especially true of societies like the United States with relatively high rates of social mobility,” Jones said. “When Rob and I talk to chief executives in organizations and say, ‘What’s your biggest problem?’ They almost universally say, ‘There’s not enough leadership around here.’ We look inside their organizations, and we find structures and cultures that are designed to inhibit the growth of leadership.”