thank you for joining me for this episode of management cafe have you already got your coffee or cup of tea or anything else you fancy right let's find a comfortable place to sit in right how about that table over there this is indeed the first episode of season two so i've changed the format ever so slightly so what i'm going to do in this new series of episodes is i'd like to invite you to read an article or two and then join me for the discussion so look out listen out for the name of today's article it will come in a second but before that if we haven't met before my name is pilar orti and i'm the director of virtual not distant we're a london-based company where we help teams and organizations make the transition from co-located to remote mainly by helping the managers through coaching training and then team facilitation um yeah virtualnotdistant.com you can find everything about us there if you are a regular listener then hey great to have the pleasure of your company i'm glad that you have decided to join me for the second season uh in management cafe in this podcast i cover leadership issues that managers might come across in organizations and i try to cover stuff that is relevant to both the co-located space so those setups where we're working next to each other in the office and a remote one at the end of the day how we execute how we deal with these issues is different but we all the issues are the same when we're managing people we just need to approach them in slightly different ways so that's why i have come up with management cafe so let's get started let me start by guiding you to the article that has inspired today's episode should we be authentic leaders that is the title of the episode the title of the article is the truth about authentic leaders and it was written by bill george who is the author of authentic leadership the book and it was written back in the 6th on the 6th of july 2016 for the harvard business school working knowledge website so i will stick the link in the show notes so if you're listening on your mobile or your podcast application just tap on the artwork you will see the show notes there and by the way don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode because if you're a regular listener you'll know that i'm quite irregular with these episodes if you prefer the show notes and the link to the audio to go straight into your inbox then go to managementcafepodcast.com managementcafepodcast.com and you can subscribe there that site is only for the podcast right if you want to read the article feel free to pause the podcast now did you read it what did you think what did you take from it what are your questions observations reservations agreements if you haven't read it don't worry i'll go through stuff now but it's just better if you've read it so that you can you can have a good thing before you can run on about it because i have some strong opinions about some stuff which you probably know if you've been listening before so here's what i took from it and my thoughts the first thing i wanted to say is that i first came across the term authentic leadership during a presentation of an event by a local branch of the cipt which is a chartered institute for personal development i think it is so hr hr and training and um yes this lady represents she was doing her thesis around authentic leadership and i thought i didn't know what i felt about the term this uh first start it's labeling leadership again which is you know for marketing purposes it's useful and i suppose it's guidance for when we don't know what to do or when we are new to a management position or when we are not getting the results we want and we're thinking well is it something that i'm doing that i can change oh i've heard of this authentic leadership let me see what it's about so i think that the first thing to cover here is that what does authentic leadership mean and rather than go back to some definition and even rather than going back to the article although i agree with the article in its essence i'll give you what i think it is and for me authentic leadership being authentic in this context because context is everything it's about not pretending with someone we're not it's about not pretending we know everything so that's the thing it's not that we don't want to do if we want to be authentic it's also about letting our personality and values through at work and at work i mean our interactions with people we work with because personality um bits of our personality because i'll go into that in a second when i'm saying authentic i'm not saying be yourself all the time and yourself can be you know you have different selves remember so the personality let that let that through a bit more because if you're constantly checking you know pulling back in your in on your instincts that is that can be quite intensive that can that can be you're suppressing lots of stuff that's going to come back to bite you at some point also our values our values guide our decisions so let those come through sometimes they might not be in alignment with what we're doing or what we're deciding but if we're constantly having to suppress them again that can be very difficult so for me authentic leadership is letting your personality and values come through in our interactions and it's also about making unpopular decisions that align with our values so it's about really understanding who we are and letting our behavior be in line with that now this is really really tricky for middle managers because a lot of the time having to make decisions that maybe are not in line with our values but are in line with what the organization needs or actually we have no choice in the kind of decisions we have to make so you see it's not that simple i can't just come here and say yeah let's all be authentic leaders because sometimes it's really tricky to be doing that but again if we're having to make decisions that don't align with our values we can maybe let our values uh come through we can express those values but then also say well in this case i'm gonna have to just go with something that doesn't sit that well with me for reason a b or c so that's for me what it is and the reason i want to talk about this is that even though i don't like the label very much i think it's a great alternative to this heroic leadership you know this image that when we lead a team we are at the front we we pull out the cart we motivate everyone we're constantly there you know getting the troops up to speed and i think we can go beyond that now so anything that's an alternative to that i quite like so i think when we're talking about authentic leadership we need to remember that it's not about being rigid and i think the article points this out it's about being flexible and also it's about bringing different parts of ourselves to work i'll come to that in a second so it's but we also need a lot of self-awareness because we we want to bring some of our personality and we want to let our values we need to know what they are we need to know what parts are useful to bring to work because we don't want those parts of our personality that we know get in the way to flourish at work so a lot of self-awareness and i would even say a degree of vulnerability now i'm always very careful when i speak of vulnerability because making ourselves vulnerable in the wrong context can lead to lots of problems so if i am in a culture in a highly competitive culture for example and i show my vulnerability that might be um misused by other people to help their competitiveness i hope you understand what i mean i'm off script for this season i forgot to tell you that season one everything was neatly scripted but i think for season two because i'm reacting to something i thought i just let myself free on the mic so i have a structure so i might not be very coherent sometimes so or articulate so excuse me for that but this vulnerability please take that with a pinch of salt when i'm talking about that because when myself and a lot of consultants or people who talk about stuff all the time we usually talk about um a lot of issues and concepts in the context of things going really well so obviously that was not very well put but basically yes it's great we can be authentic we can be vulnerable all of this if we are in a context in a supportive context but if we are in a difficult environment then we need to be really careful so just just say that so vulnerability uh this might mean anything from as i said uh showing and admitting when we don't know something admitting when we're wrong etc but it can also go to other extremes so i'll bring an example in that i found in adam grant's book originals which i recommend i really enjoyed it's really well written etc and in the chapter uh rethink groupthink he talks about an example i'll just read it out so i'm quoting it's on the kindle it's location 3152 so at the software company index group ceo tom garrity asked a consultant to tell him everything he did wrong in front of his entire staff of roughly 100 employees by role modeling receptivity to feedback employees across the company became more willing to challenge him and one another so that's an extreme example i think for me of vulnerability and also he was making a point he really wanted to encourage a culture of feedback and he said look i'm gonna start with me let me be quite transparent here you go so that's a that's a one one way and we'll come to another example later on in this episode so yes flexibility self-awareness and a degree of vulnerability i think are all part of authentic leadership and going back to the self-awareness um issue so let me go back to a book that you might or might not have read called reinventing organizations by frederick lalu where he talks about the way forwards uh the way forwards of people employees working in companies and one of the things that he's saying is that companies if companies are to thrive we need to be able to bring our whole selves to work now i had a conversation once with someone around he said how can we do that i don't want you to see like the self of you when you're screaming at your four-year-old kid um i don't want to see that at work yeah bringing our whole selves to work doesn't mean that we are what we are with everyone because we are all different people depending on who we are with and we adapt to context we just most people do that because i can't be well i've decided no i can't be i've decided not to be the same person i am with you as i am with my mother or as i am with my best friend or as i am with a group of 16 year olds that i used to teach some time ago so but still me it's just i'm letting some parts of my personality um come through more strongly and i'm deciding not to share some parts of my personality this is where self-awareness comes into place unless we know ourselves relatively well it's really difficult to decide what parts we want to let shine through which parts we want to be authentic about so i find it very useful that in this article the truth about authentic leaders they talk of low self-monitors and high self-monitors they say that low self-monitors tend to say whatever comes to mind whereas high self-monitors watch carefully what they say for its impact on others so i don't know i quite like that um and although the article says that it creates a false dichotomy because low self-monitoring is the opposite of being authentic and is a sign of immaturity and insensitivity to the feelings of others and this is where i have the problem with this authentic leadership term is that we're only viewing it through the eyes of we are wonderful and so we can be authentic there are also people whose who might whose authenticity might not be that useful because of for whatever reason um because their values are not in line with the organization because they are in it for themselves so if someone is completely egocentric and i bring my whole self to work and i'm authentic at work i'm going to be egocentric so this is where we have to this is where i think we have to be careful about what we are saying and what we're suggesting people do and how we're suggesting people act so yeah yeah i think that that needs to be said i think that is the last the last section of this is this bit about we're always associating authentic with good but this is one of the things you remember i was saying first time i came across this term was in that cipd um uh event someone said yeah but what if uh you know what if hitler was authentic he was completely true to his values so this is where i think yes but what we mean and it's a better word actually i don't know values left but it's the same thing again so let's not get stuck on these things one last thing i want to mention which i found quite funny and it's it's going back to just to leave your high note it's going back to the point on vulnerability and i found another article on inc.com from september 21st 2017 which was headline jack ma made a fool of himself last week smart move and it tells the story of jack ma who's the chair of the alibaba group which is a bit like amazon in china i hope i can say that and he basically just went on stage in a whole fourth in front of 4 000 employees and did like a michael jackson dance with a wig and everything apparently a few years before he does something from the lion king and the article says the more human he is the more empathetic he becomes and again he can jack ma can do that because he's proved himself to be a good leader and a good businessman so this is also important is to understand what some of these actions the repercussion they might have and what we need to have behind us so i can act like a fool in like the company event but then i have to be very professional with my decisions i have to that has to be backed by actions that are beneficial to the company so and it also depends on what kind of reputation you have if you already have a solid reputation like this man like this gentleman then you can do that and then that helps you look more approachable i think this is quite interesting for those people who have a very good reputation and a solid reputation as very successful to know that sometimes that success can make people feel like they can't approach us like they can't be open with us so if we can do something that shows our human side at the same time don't have to be as huge as getting on a stage but you never know then then it's really worth remembering what can i do because you might be very approachable you might be um very human indeed you might be open to feedback but people might not see you as that because of your degree of success you might be people might think you are far removed from them and this can happen at any level it's not just about ceos it can also be about managers especially in a virtual team if people don't know you that well if people are used to something different if you're working across companies so this is all worth remembering so let me wrap up i'm going to leave you with some questions but before that i want to just pull out a few more quotes from from the article which i quite liked and it's talking about authentic leaders of people i suppose it's not just authentic but i imagine they're also successful they are sensitive to the impact the words and actions have on others not because they're messaging the right talking points so they're sensitive to the impact the words and actions have on others we need to know that again self-awareness and also self-awareness of our impact on people they don't hide behind flaws instead they seek to understand them so again i like this because it's pulling us away from that heroic image of the leader and even the manager sometimes and one of the hardest things for leaders to do is to understand how other people see them which is often quite different than how they want to be seen that's difficult and the final one it's about adapting the style without compromising character i think this is really good it doesn't mean that because we are caring that we always have to be patronizing or that we always have to be very careful in our approach to communication we need to adapt how we communicate with others goes back to the being sensitive to the impact and being sensitive of the context but without compromising ourselves deep down right well i hope you're listening to this at a time of the day when when this goes well so before i go into some questions um And I'd like to leave you, yeah, before I get into some questions, I'd like to leave you with, do get in touch. Get in touch with your own thoughts. I would love to hear from you. Managementcafepodcast.com.
There's a contact form there, at Pilar Orti on Twitter. I think, yeah, that's probably the best thing for now. I'm going to fill your head with ways of contacting me. So, yeah, so some final thoughts.
Before I go into the more retrospective stuff, if you want a culture of authenticity, then you need to look out for values of the people you recruit, and especially when you recruit people in positions of authority. Because if we are recruiting people whose values don't align with our organization, or whose values are not going to help the organization or those around them, then we might be in trouble. So, just something to think about. So, some more reflective questions to leave you with, bearing in mind that a lot of communication has gone electronic, and that we are having more setups that are remote, flexible, etc.
In the office, we can be ourselves if we are comfortable, but what happens in a remote space? How can we be ourselves in that space when we're not necessarily face-to-face in person with other people? So, think about how you can be more deliberate in your communication, for example, making room for synchronous discussions, by which I mean, if you are indeed in a remote team, when can you have conversations on video or on audio so that you can really let, so that you can let your personality come through when you're talking to other people. So, if you're still in the office, then again, find those times, because just because we're in the office together doesn't mean we're finding time for these conversations.
So, I think this applies to both spaces. I think it's also about, in our communication, explaining our decisions, explaining the reasoning behind our decisions. And this is quite difficult, but it's asking questions to understand others before you try to understand actions through your own values. I think this is part of being that authentic person, because it's part of knowing where you are different to other people, but also seeking understanding.
So, because we tend to see the world through our own eyes and through our own values, and other people might also want to be authentic at work. And if we're not letting them, because we're not seeking to understand them, what is that doing to our culture? So, another question, what parts of me would be more useful to bring to work? What parts of you are more useful to bring to work to your communication, your interactions, and your decisions?
How much is your own behavior encouraging or deterring people from bringing their whole selves to work? Point I was making earlier. It's not just about us being all authentic and wonderful and bringing our whole selves to work. What about others around us?
Because I imagine that part of wanting to be authentic is also to role model that it's okay to be yourself. I hope so. And finally, how can we constantly remind ourselves that we are human, ourselves and others? Because I really think that that's the core of authentic leadership.
It's showing that we're not superheroes, but human beings. So, I will leave you with that. This has been a very one-sided coffee. I would love to hear from you.
Managementcafepodcast.com is the place to look for the contact form. You can also look at the show notes there in larger font than in your app. Twitter, at Pilar or T. And if this has been useful at all, or even if it has entertained you over your cup of coffee, then do leave a review in the podcast app or iTunes.
It will help other people find something that they can listen to while they're having coffee. And if you're interested in the world of work and how our attitudes to work are changing, and if you feel like you need a little bit of guidance when introducing remote work into your team or your organization, then check out the other podcast that I host, 21st Century Work Life. Well, I'll be back soon here on this podcast feed with another episode of Management Cafe.