Authenticity at Work

Christine Comaford: We need to feel certainty, safety, freedom from fear. We need to feel that we belong, we fit in somewhere, we have equal value to others, we're part of something beyond ourselves. We need to matter: to be seen, appreciated, acknowledged for our unique gifts. We're not a cog in a wheel; we're not a replaceable part.

Rachel Salaman: For Professor Gareth Jones, authenticity is what lets us bring our best selves to work – and then get the support we need to succeed.

Gareth Jones: When you go to work you want to be able to do your best. You want the organization to give you the chance to show your brightness and cleverness and innovation and creativity. Allowing people to show their skill and flourish is exactly what builds a great business.

Rachel Salaman: On the flipside, Annie McKee told me what a lack of authenticity looks like – and the problems it can cause.

Annie McKee: We have been programmed to put the "game face" on at work. And while it's inauthentic and people usually sniff it out, we're not easily called on it. But at home we drop that game face and we can be short with our family and start having problems in our relationship, and it's coming from unhappiness at work.

And we may put the game face on, and sort of smile and carry on day to day. But people know it's not authentic. And before we know it we've got these sort of shallow, superficial relationships that can't withstand the pressures that are inherent in our workplaces today.

Rachel Salaman: Annie McKee, a Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of "How to Be Happy at Work."

Tim Baker: I'm just talking about people being themselves.

Rachel Salaman: That's Tim Baker – someone else who sees authenticity as the glue between our personal and professional selves.

Tim Baker: Are we being completely authentic, and if not, why not? What are the things that are getting in the way?

Rachel Salaman: Tim's the author of "Bringing the Human Back to Work."

Tim Baker: What we lose sight of is that people are the essence of work. What's happened in the last 100 years is that we've become more and more robotic. So what's happened is that we've got KPIs and "leave your feelings at home," and [we] separate home and work, and all of these kinds of things. So I think human beings have got to reinvent what humanness actually is.

Amy Edmondson: If you recognize that employees everywhere are likely to be playing it safe and holding back, rather than diving in and giving it their all, you can easily recognize the cost to that.

Rachel Salaman: Amy Edmondson again, another strong believer in the power of authenticity to drive success and satisfaction at work.

Amy Edmondson: And of course the intensity and dynamism and need for teamwork and agility, and all of that, has also intensified over the last few years. It turns out that when people don't feel safe, not only do they hold back but they don't feel engaged. You know, their heart's not in it. And sometimes they don't feel as good about themselves.

Rachel Salaman: So authenticity is closely linked to psychological safety. The culture needs to be right for you to bring your full self to work. For Tim Baker, that starts with connecting with others – and having the right kinds of conversations.

Tim Baker: There are people-related conversations and task-related conversations. Well, we're having plenty of task-related conversations, of course. But we're not having enough people-related conversations, and I think that's a dignifying thing to do.

Rachel Salaman: For Tim, dignity helps to embed safety – allowing people to do everything in an authentic way.

Tim Baker: And so, I kind of came up with this idea that workplace dignity is critically important, and we're just trying to treat people in a dignified way.

Frances Frei: The organization cherishes everyone who feels different – and, by the way, the organization is already cherishing people that are similar – the organization also cherishes people who feel different and communicates [that] the most interesting thing about you is what's different than us.

Rachel Salaman: Frances Frei, from Harvard Business School.

Frances Frei: And that's how we're going to get more rigorous decisions; that's how we're going to be able to do things faster; that's how we're going to be able to do things at higher quality.

Rob Goffee: In simple terms, we're really talking about organizations that we can believe in, organizations that we can trust, organizations where we know what they stand for. And, maybe in addition to that, organizations where you can be your best self, where you can express yourself.

Rachel Salaman: That's Rob Goffee, from the London Business School.

Gareth Jones: You know, clearly, if you're working in the housing department of the London Borough of Haringey, you are under different kinds of pressures from somebody working as the marketing director of Dove at Unilever.

Rachel Salaman: That's Gareth Jones, Rob's co-author on the book "Why Should Anyone Work Here?"

Gareth Jones: Having said that, people at work in these varying contexts desire certain things of their organization. They want a sense of fairness for example, that's common. They clearly want the idea that they can be themselves.

Rachel Salaman: And Gareth told me that authentic organizations treat their customers as individuals, too.

Gareth Jones: Wherever customers come up against organizations, they don't want to be processed, they don't want to feel like they're following "standard procedure." We must leave space for people to express their uniqueness, their "characterfulness." And I think that's very, very powerful.

Rachel Salaman: Gareth Jones, on why authenticity isn’t just good for us, but good for business, too. However, many of my guests were also keen to talk about the challenges associated with authenticity.

Gretchen Spreitzer: Some people might say, "Well, maybe that's dangerous, knowing what makes people tick, and we can take advantage of them."

Rachel Salaman: That's Gretchen Spreitzer, a professor at the Ross School of Business.

Gretchen Spreitzer: That might be true – but if we're so worried about that danger, we miss this full potential to help shape people's work so that they're truly excited about it and attracted about it and want to come to work and do their best work.

Rachel Salaman: And Gareth Jones told me about the risks posed by "unlimited" authenticity.

Gareth Jones: We are not just saying "be yourself," because being yourself might be completely inappropriate in that context. You have to be yourself skillfully. Too much difference, and things fall apart. So it's always a balance between the amount of difference which will encourage and promote creativity and innovation, and too much difference which means there's nothing that holds people together.

Rachel Salaman: Gareth Jones, a visiting professor at the IE Business School in Madrid. So it sounds like leaders have an important role to play in creating healthily authentic environments. And that starts with being authentic themselves.

Sabrina Horn: Whether you're a mom, a homemaker or a postal worker, or a CEO or the receptionist, you can't build anything sustainable without a foundation of integrity or honesty.

Frances Frei: You are more likely to trust me if you believe it's the real me speaking to you. And, of course, the opposite of that is true: if you doubt that I believe what I'm saying, you're going to question my authenticity and the first thing to go is trust.

Rachel Salaman: Sabrina Horn and Frances Frei. And Kate Sweetman told me that leading others authentically starts with knowing yourself.

Kate Sweetman: Investing in yourself is the heart of any leader, the heart of leadership code.

Rachel Salaman: That's the name of Kate's book – where investing in the "authentic you" is one of her "five rules to lead by."

Kate Sweetman: Leaders have to be able to continuously learn, particularly around the things that they're most passionate about. And that's why it takes a great deal of self-knowledge, I think, to really be a great leader over the long haul, which is what we're talking about here.

So for some people, that might mean following a meditative practice. For some people, that might be going sailing. For some people, that's going to be just re-grounding themselves and their family every day, or on vacation, or whatever it takes. But I think it's a highly individual thing.

Rachel Salaman: So authentic leaders need time and space to keep "checking in" with themselves. They also need to listen to their people. Here's Tim Baker again.

Tim Baker: Not just doing it, you know, in an ad hoc way. Genuinely engaging people in conversations around how we might make the workplace better, more effective, faster, safer, and all of those sorts of things. That's an obvious way for managers to accept that they don't have the answers to all the problems. Perhaps some of the people they work with, because they're closer to the work, may actually have some great ideas.

Rachel Salaman: So there's humility in authentic leadership.

Tim Baker: What I mean by authentic leadership is just being yourself, showing your vulnerabilities, admitting that you don't know the answer, being humble.

Sabrina Horn: Humility… and admitting that you made a mistake and learning from those mistakes shows strength, not weakness. And how you rebound from that by doing things like talking with your team and doing a postmortem, and asking them, "What could I have done better? How could I help you guys next time?"

Rachel Salaman: Sabrina Horn again. And Frances Frei told me that this kind of authenticity fuels effective feedback, too.

Frances Frei: So, if you want to give me constructive advice – and I think that's great – you've got to build up a reservoir of convincing me that you really see me. And you're convincing me you really see me when you have seen the specific things I've done, and you've already invested in my improvement through positive reinforcement. Not only do other people get better, they're happier and I'm happier.

Rachel Salaman: Authentic leaders know their people well enough to praise them accurately – and to reward them in ways that are meaningful for them. Here's best-selling author Adrian Gostick.

Adrian Gostick: It's not just about, "Hey thanks everybody! Thank you, thank you, thank you." Which is meaningless, unless you know specifically what I've done. What we're seeing with appreciation that's being handled in an effective way is that managers are being trained to actually see value that's being created, to solicit and act on input, done in an effective way. To develop more empathy for their people and the struggles they're going through. And when the challenges are overcome, the successes that are celebrated together.

Rachel Salaman: Adrian wrote the book "Leading With Gratitude." He told me that rewards are a great opportunity to role-model authenticity.

Adrian Gostick: Typically find something that's tangible to give the person, or to do for the person – whether it's time off, or a chance to lead a new project, or a tangible award that might be meaningful to them. If they're a big biker, maybe something that relates to that. We have to figure out ways to tailor rewards that are going to be meaningful to our people.

Rachel Salaman: For Sabrina Horn, authenticity also allows us to have really difficult conversations when we need to.

Sabrina Horn: So, this is why leading with integrity and authenticity is so hard and why it's easier to fake it, right? You're not doing yourself or the other person any good by sugar-coating the truth. As a leader, you have to face the reality of things, and you have to say, "Look, this is going to be a tough conversation and I need to share this with you and have a conversation with you about this." But the key to doing it well is to do it with authenticity and to develop a track record of being that kind of a person.

Amy Edmondson: It's not being "nice."

Rachel Salaman: Amy Edmondson again.

Amy Edmondson: It's not only saying nice things. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Because of course it's about being candid, and that means sometimes we'll have to say things to each other that could feel harsh. So it's not about being nice. It’s really just trying to recognize and put a name on the fact that if we aren't open and candid and willing to take interpersonal risks, our organizations will face much bigger risks.

Rob Goffee: It's about encouraging dissent – you know, the expression of different ideas and views. And it's also about engaging with a wide group of stakeholders: in other words not just shareholders or employees but also customers, suppliers, wider society, and so on.

Rachel Salaman: Rob Goffee – on being comfortable enough to have challenging conversations – with everyone. But what if authenticity gets us questioning ourselves? According to Emma Seppala from Stanford University, we might need to reframe some of our instinctive reactions – especially when things go wrong.

Emma Seppala: When people make a mistake or fail at something, and then they beat themselves up about it and they think, "There's no way I can do a good job at this. I'm not made for this [etc.]." You're creating a situation where you're not allowing yourself to learn, to build new skills, acquire new knowledge. Many of us think that self-criticism is really the road to self-improvement. But research is showing that self-criticism is basically a way to self-sabotage. If you are self-critical, you're again less likely to be resilient in the face of challenge; you're less likely to bounce back in the face of failure.

Rachel Salaman: So authenticity isn't simply "being yourself." It involves understanding yourself – especially the best ways to learn and grow. And that's hard for humans, as author Fred Kiel told me.

Fred Kiel: Well, if you're asking about you assessing your own character, we are notoriously poor at that.

Rachel Salaman: Fred talked to me about his book "Return on Character," and his research into the difficulties we have understanding ourselves.

Fred Kiel: We go throughout life acquiring habits and how we treat other people, and nobody is going to give you feedback, unless they're a very close dear friend or maybe a spouse, or somebody who dares to!

But suppose that you're a person who others see as having "sharp elbows." Chances are you don't know that they view you that way because everybody works around it, or they try to avoid you, one of the two things.

Ashley Goodall: And we are reliable raters of not very much, as it turns out, which is part of the problem here!

Rachel Salaman: That's Ashley Goodall, a senior VP at Cisco, and the author of "Nine Lies About Work."

Ashley Goodall: So the better way is to go, "Where are humans reliable raters?" We're not, for example, reliable raters of our abilities. But we are reliable when you ask us what's going on in our brains in a particular way. If you say, "What are you feeling now?" Or, "What do you intend to do?" We can tell you those things.

Rachel Salaman: So, again, it seems like authenticity involves trusting our feelings. Ashley told me that it's also about finding simple clues about what we're good at, then building our success from there.

Ashley Goodall: If you tell parents that their kid comes home with two As, a C and an F, and asks them which of those grades merit their most intense attention, 75 percent of parents will say it's the F. Which is not to say that the F doesn't need any attention at all, but the future of that kid isn't going to be built on turning the F into an E. The future of the kid is going to be built on turning the A into an A+, into a vocation, into a career, into a passion.

Rachel Salaman: So being authentically ourselves can free us up to focus, rather than trying to be good at everything.

Ashley Goodall: Look at the real world, look at the best people, the most successful performers in any field of endeavor – business, sports, the arts. They're not well-rounded, they don't have all of the things. Instead, you discover that they've learned to make incredible use of what they had in the first place.

Rachel Salaman: For Gretchen Spreitzer, authenticity also involves being honest about what you enjoy – and then crafting a job to match.

Gretchen Spreitzer: While we all have formal job descriptions that define what our job responsibilities are, we also know that within any job there's also opportunities to craft around the edges, to bring more purpose, meaning, fulfillment into the work that you do. So "job crafting" is the idea of taking those pieces of your job that are more discretionary, and bringing more of what's important to you in your work to those pieces.

Rachel Salaman: Job crafting is clearly something that won't happen overnight – or reach a definite end. In fact, authenticity itself is a journey, rather than a destination, according to Frances Frei. She told me how she's still learning how to be – and feel – authentic.

Frances Frei: In the beginning, I tried to change to be more like other people because I knew these people loved me. They were coaching me on how to fit in. And I was like, "Oh, my god! They love me, I'll try to fit in." It was a disaster! I was terrible at fitting in, and I wasn't nearly as effective as the people who were born that way.

And so then, the big unleash came when I was like, "Oh, when somebody is encouraging me to fit in – which is just generically terrible advice, but so many people use it – I just reinterpret what gets into my ear as, they're saying, 'I love you.'"

Rachel Salaman: I asked Frances what happens if, on the journey of self-discovery, you discover that your authentic self isn't all you'd hoped it to be. Can you still be a beacon of authenticity?

Frances Frei: What if my authentic self isn't great? So, first of all, if it really isn't great, I'm just not sure you should be leading! Having said that, what if there are aspects of my authentic self that aren't great? Because that's probably more likely.

And I think it's totally fine – in fact, it's probably good – to trim the amount of authenticity that you bring to the table. If you're like, "Your whole authenticity isn't a problem for your showing up but, wow, we just don't need to see that final 20 percent!" I think it's a totally reasonable thing to do, to keep that 20 percent at home. It won't be inauthentic.

Rachel Salaman: So, you can "trim" your authenticity, and still be true to yourself. Skillful authenticity is not "faking it."

Sabrina Horn: You know, the notion of "fake it till you make it" implies that you can take shortcuts to achieve success and that you don't have to do all the hard work: that, somehow, you'll achieve success faster if you fake it.

Rachel Salaman: Sabrina Horn.

Sabrina Horn: But the inherent problem with that is that, in the process of faking it, you'll ultimately be exposed for your fakery. The truth always comes out. It could be a day, a week, a year or more but, when you exaggerate the truth or distort the facts, people find out. "Fake it till you make it" is the worst business advice ever!

Rachel Salaman: And if we come across other people who seem to be "faking it" for some reason? What can we do to interact more authentically with them? Here's Annie McKee.

Annie McKee: We need to really dig deep and find the courage and the wherewithal to reach across the chasm to those other individuals, to try to understand them. Trust before you are trusted, give before you get – those are the kinds of actions that are going to create strong, positive relationships that will not only infuse us with a sense of meaning and happiness at work, but will help us carry on and get through the challenging times that we all experience in our jobs.

Rachel Salaman: So, what have we learned from our experts about authenticity at work? Well, it looks different in different contexts. And it's based on unique experiences, personalities and values. But there are some common clues that we can follow – if we trust our feelings, and explore our authenticity with care.

We should expect to be supported to do that, in workplaces that celebrate our differences and make us feel safe to be ourselves.

And as teammates and leaders, we can strengthen authenticity where we work by showing integrity, gaining people's trust, being humble, but also being confident enough to have the conversations that matter.

Authenticity builds positive, productive and profitable organizations. It also illuminates what makes individuals successful and satisfied – so that we can keep crafting the right roles for us.

Fred Kiel: The more individuals become what we call "integrated" as human beings, they have a coherent life story, they understand the events in their lives and the impact, have an explanation for how events in their past life and early life have impacted who they are today. That's part of it, but the other part of it is the growing awareness that the world is big and complex, and there's more that I don't know than that I do know!

Adrian Gostick: It used to be we would say, "Well, we treat everybody the same because that's fair." And we've learned that's a terrible way to manage people! Each of our people are very unique and they have unique drivers. And great leaders and great organizations are tunneling and focusing their gratitude toward those unique drivers in people.

Frances Frei: So, when the organization celebrates my unique way of thinking, my unique lived experience, the challenges that I have seen, the failures I have learned from – when I am celebrated and encouraged to bring up my difference, then we really start to gain distance between us and other organizations.

Rachel Salaman: Fred Kiel, Adrian Gostick and Frances Frei, ending this episode of Mind Tools Expert Voices: "Authenticity at Work."

Authenticity is a hot topic at the moment. Keep an ear out for more about it in our Expert Interviews collection in the Mind Tools Club. We're always adding new interviews and book reviews, about a wide range of workplace issues. So you'll find hundreds more conversations with leading writers and thinkers there, plus a wealth of articles, videos and workbooks.

I'll be back soon with another Expert Voices podcast. For now, I'm Rachel Salaman: thanks for listening.