How to find your authentic leadership style?

When you are female and leading in Tech, you will find some of the leadership behaviors of your successful white male peers in conflict with what you care about. Their leadership style works for them, yet it is simply not what you want to copy or how you want to be as a leader. Your intuition is telling you loud and clear, that this is NOT who you authentically are, nor do you want to be this way. By simply observing leaders around me, it was easy to spot how I did NOT want to be like as a leader, despite seeing their outcomes. It was harder to develop how I authentically DO want to show up in my leadership roles, be true to myself and be highly effective with my outcomes at the same time.

The reason why this is so hard is, because it is a deeply personal journey to discover how to authentically be you in a leadership role. What works for another person is not going to be exactly what will work for you. And part of this has to do with the unchangeable parts of your identity. Like for example being female, or being an immigrant living in another culture.

There are lots of expectations of you in a leadership role, some of them will be explicit, e.g. in your role description or your organization’s leadership guidelines and obviously around your part in leading towards specific outcomes. The trickier part is, that a lot of additional expectations are unconscious: your team members, peers and managers think of leaders and women a certain way. They will compare your behaviors against their expectations of how a leader, and how you as a woman, should behave.

This presents contradiction we are often not consciously aware of: we value assertiveness in leaders, but assertive females are experienced as “bitchy”, “loud” or “arrogant”. We expect leaders to be competent, but competent women are disliked. We want decisive leaders, but label women who are making unpopular decisions as “cold”, “cutthroat” or “lacking empathy” – in other words, “not pleasing enough” or “not considerate or nurturing enough”. We want leaders to be fast and intelligent, but women asking fast and intelligent questions, risk getting labelled as “condescending” or “arrogant” and are asked to “tone it down” and not speak as much.

Clearly there are systemic issues, making it ineffective for female leaders to simply act the way their successful male peers are showing up in the world. This is also why it is often really bad advice to simply copy the behavior of somebody who presents very differently from you. This is true for any of the dimensions of identity we may carry: gender, race, neurodiversity, religion, nationality, language, sexual orientation, socio-economic background, etc… Your personal mix of intersecting identities makes authentic and effective leadership a multi-faceted Rubics cube to navigate. Which makes it even more important to find out how to authentically lead from who YOU are.

What does authenticity even mean?

There are a number of definitions of authenticity in general as well as authenticity in leadership. They all share, that a person aligns their actions with their core values, desires and beliefs. Brené Brown defines authenticity as “the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character”, “made or done the same way as an original” as well as “not false or an imitation”. All of this points at the need to reflect, introspect and find out who you truly are, what matters to you, and how to be in relationship with yourself and others. The psychologists Michael Kernis and Brian Goldman identified the following four components to authenticity:

1. Self Awareness: Knowledge and trust in one’s own motives, emotions, preferences and abilities
2. Unbiased processing: Clarity in evaluating your strengths and your weaknesses without denial or blame
3. Behavior: Acting in ways congruent with your own values and needs
4. Relational orientation: close relationships, which inherently require openness and honesty

Why care about authenticity in leadership?

We tend to trust a person more, when we witness integrity between their actions and statements. Trust is a key building block to psychological safety, which in turn is the #1 predictor of high performing teams. To show up congruent with my words and actions requires that I have thought about who I am as a person and how I want to be.

When my team can trust that I am unbiased in judging performance, and stay away from blame or denial, people can know that I am genuinely interested in their development and our joint success as a team. They can clearly see whether I am evaluating my own and their strengths and weaknesses fairly, accurately and without denial or blame. And they are much more likely to respond to constructive feedback with curiosity and a willingness to embrace it, rather than defensiveness, aggression or denial. That trust and openness is at the core of effective people development and mentoring as a leader.

When I show up vulnerable and aware of my own weaknesses, I can role model ways to constructively engage with feedback (by inviting it for my own growth). This builds the trust and encouragement for my entire team to follow along a path of learning, finding the gifts in failures, and continuously being engaged with their growth and mastery. The perfect mindset in contexts of high volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). We can only stay innovative and forward oriented in VUCA contexts when we show up courageous, strong, resilient and continuously optimistic in spite of the many challenges and uncertainties we face. As leaders we act as role models and multipliers of mindsets and behaviors that can help us thrive in uncertainty.

These three examples show how role modelling Self Awareness, Unbiased Processing, Congruent Behaviors and a Relational Orientation (the four building blocks of authenticity) can help build trust, psychological safety and a culture of learning and mastery into your team.

What can you do to find a leadership style that is authentic for you?

To me this first is about finding out who and how you want to be as a person, what you care about, what your strengths are, where your power and wisdom are, and what impact you look to create with those. And then it is about the context in which you act, how can you positively influence that context from your unique perspective and strengths.

Here are some practical items you can focus on to gain more self-awareness and clarity about yourself:

• Reflect and figure out what your values are
• Reflect and figure out what brings you joy and what your life purpose might be
• Get to know that wise inner voice that knows how you want to be at your best, and who you want to become as the best version of yourself
• Invite feedback, understand and become able to articulate what your strengths and weaknesses are. Practice reflecting how your actions and behaviors line up with your values and vision for the life you want to have.
• Understand how the parts of your identity that you can’t change are powerful and unique as strengths. Your unique identity is an asset as a perspective in a team that knows how diverse perspectives help innovate and come to better decisions.
  To give an example: As a woman I have access to multiple energies along the weeks of my cycle, a cyclical and regenerative approach to life, and an upbringing that makes my access to emotions easier than for humans socialized as men in a patriarchy. This allows for different ways of thinking, feeling and acting, which is a great asset in contributing a more holistic viewpoint into decisions that impact diverse groups of people. It also means I can lead in an entirely different way, and I can give myself full permission to do so. This is what will lead to me authentically leading from who I am. And yes, that may present surprising moments for my peers. It may even lead to some friction. I get to choose the degree in which I want to engage with that, or when I might choose to conform with expectations to conserve some energy.

Personally I chose to work with a coach to have a sparring partner in figuring out my values, life purpose, and inner leader voice. I consciously spent time reflecting on my strengths and weaknesses and how my actions and impact are influenced by aspects of my identity. I look at this as an ongoing learning journey in relationship with myself and the people around me. To understand the identity part of my actions and impact I’m also looking at the context in which I live, create and work.

What to watch for in your context

There are a number of things to be aware of in your context, so you can effectively navigate your impact as a leader. There might be contradictions between people’s expectations of leaders in general, and their expectations of people with your identities. Being in dialogue about this, is your best shot at leading authentically from who you are, while also creating effective outcomes. Here is what to be aware of (so you can choose to influence this) in your context:

• Be clear on what systemic expectations are held for people with your mix of identities (e.g. being a leader and female, or being a leader and a person of color, or being a leader and lesbian, or being a leader and neurodiverse). There are great resources on intersectionality, they can help you understand the different biases and expectations we have of people with identities different than ours. They can point to sources of challenge, as well as effective ways to powerfully work with your unique set of identity characteristics. Reflecting on identity and intersectionality also enables you to see and challenge your own biases, and to show up with more empathy for the humans around you.
• Regularly check in with your team and ask for feedback of how they perceive you in your leadership role. This allows you to be in dialogue about your desired impact, vs. your perceived impact. It shows that you care to grow as a person and want to become a better leader for your team. You also role model the courage and openness you want to foster in the team around sharing and receiving constructive feedback.
• Clearly communicating your values and vision. This allows people to see how you are acting in integrity with them, or when they might see a gap. An open conversation around these perceived (or actual) gaps allows for connection, growth and an appreciation of each other. It also helps you find your blind spots and what your team can see you doing exceptionally well.
• Celebrate different perspectives, diversity, failures and resilience. They are present around you all the time. The way you engage with them with courage, joy, ease, curiosity is setting the tone for the culture you want to create in your team.

I wish authenticity in leadership was less dependent on the context you are in, but the truth is: authenticity in leadership is always also about being in relationship with the people around you.

As a leader you get to create safe spaces for people – including yourself – to authentically show up. Spaces that celebrate diversity, authenticity, learning from failure, equality and inclusion. And you are still paradoxically always also engaged with the unconscious and often unreflected assumptions and expectations people have about humans who present different from a white male heterosexual leader.

If it’s not in your own team, it might be with your business partners, your board members or your client base. The art is to dance with authenticity in spaces with varying degrees of openness and safety. Centering vulnerability, a sense for our shared humanity and trust, one interaction, one conversation, one meeting, one social media post, one negotiation at a time. It’s the kind of leader I choose to be. I’d love to invite you to explore what kind of leader you want to authentically be – reach out and schedule a free chemistry call if you’d like to look at this with me as your coach!

Photo credit: Tyler Daviaux on Unsplash

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If you would like to explore this more: reach out for a free discovery session with me.
I coach, speak, do workshops and blog about #leadership, #product leadership, #innovation, the #importance of creating a culture of belonging and how to succeed with your #hybrid or #remote teams.

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