Authentic leadership starts when people stop performing and begin leading as themselves. Claire Brumby argues that L&D must rethink how it develops leaders, creating safer spaces for real questions, unconventional thinking and human insight, while challenging the polished behaviours and careful positioning that can suppress trust, creativity and organisational impact.
Think about the leaders who have made the biggest impact on you throughout your career. I’d be willing to bet they weren’t the ones who said and did what was expected of them. More likely, they were the ones who brought something entirely their own to the table. Something which couldn’t be copied because it came from a place uniquely theirs. That’s authenticity in action. In a world drowning in bland corporate speak and careful orchestrated positioning, it cuts through like nothing else.
Most of us learned early in our careers what ‘professional’ looked like. We observed, then adapted to fit the mould. We figured out what we got rewarded for and leaned into that. That likely brought promotions and labels like ‘safe pair of hands’ and ‘easy to work with’. Which felt good for a while, but the cracks then appear.
Performance impact
For many leaders, who I’ve both coached and spoken to, there is a point where this ‘performance’ starts to feel heavy. Things look as they ‘should’ on the outside, but internally things don’t feel right. That is misalignment, and it has a cost, both personally and for the organisations these leaders are trying to lead.
When someone is performing rather than being, everyone around them feels it. People maybe won’t articulate in words, but they will feel it and know that they are getting a diluted version of someone.
Authenticity has become a leadership competency
There’s been an increase in noise in leadership and development circles about ‘bringing your whole self to work’. Authenticity has become a leadership competency, a workshop module or values statement on a wall. And yet, the way organisations actually develop people often does the opposite, with training on how to present, package and position, rather than show up and speak their truth.
Human insight
The irony is that we’re training out of people the very attributes which make them genuinely effective. Things like their passion, intensity, and unconventional thinking. These have in the past been deemed as weaknesses, liabilities, or even flaws. When in fact they are skills which we need to develop. This is coming through at an even faster pace now, due to the increase in AI and automation.
Authenticity isn’t just being yourself for the sake of it. It goes way further that that. It’s about being yourself in service of something bigger. This is where leadership and development has a real and meaningful role to play, in creating conditions and the environment for people to find a way back to who they actually are.
When people stop performing a role and start being, energy changes. There’s shift that occurs. They radiate a presence through being fully real and there. This in turn aids clearer communication, because there’s no filtering to be done around ‘how will this sound’. Decisions become easier because they are drawing on their full range of intelligence. Not just the analytical, but the intuitive too. The parts which come with breakthrough insights that data alone simply can’t reach.
Perhaps most importantly for L&D professionals thinking about culture and team effectiveness; authentic leadership is contagious. When someone shows up as a real person with real thoughts and feelings, they give everyone around them permission to do the same. This is where physiological safety comes from, not from policy, but from the person going first.
Development re-invention
If we are serious about the authenticity revolution, it starts with what we choose to develop in people and how. It means creating learning environments where people feel safe enough to bring a real question rather than a polished one; to feel like they have the support to ask the questions in the first place.
It means shifting the conversation in leadership development from ‘how do you want to be perceived’ to ‘who do you actually want to be’. From ‘building a personal brand’ to uncovering the real one. And it means recognising that some of what the organisations have spent years training people to do, the filtering, the careful positioning and managing perception, may in fact be precisely what is getting in the way of the leadership we need.
Organisations flourish when people feel safe to bring their whole selves to work. Think about how much potential sits untapped when people are sitting on ideas they’ve pre-labelled as daft, or softening opinions they’ve already censored, or leading from a version of themselves they constructed for someone else’s approval.
Authenticity is magnetic. This is because it’s extremely rare in todays world. We live in environments of carefully curated personas, so when someone is genuinely themselves, it stands out immediately. Authenticity revolution starts with action. One-person deciding that who they are is actually enough, allowing all of their natural skills to come through and develop further, and lead from there.
Claire Brumby is a leadership coach, trainer, entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author of Forget Normal – I Want Magic: The 5 Rules of Leadership
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