What Makes an “Authentic” Leader?

An interview with Herminia Ibarra by Sarah Green Carmichael

How do you define authenticity, as a leader? If you associate authenticity with what feels comfortable, then you may be holding yourself back. Herminia Ibarra is a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. She says that if you want to grow as a leader, you must leave your comfort zone and try new behaviors. Eventually, she says, you’ll arrive at a more authentic version of yourself.

Idea in Brief

• The Challenge

Many executives want to lead authentically, but they struggle to adapt their leadership style to different situations without feeling like a fake.

• The Insight

Authenticity is a moving target. To lead authentically over time, you have to get out of your comfort zone, try new behaviors and approaches, and continually add to your repertoire. It can help to identify other leaders you admire and consider how they would handle different situations.

• The Payoff

By being willing to embrace change and adapt their leadership approaches, leaders can evolve and redefine their sense of authenticity throughout their careers.

Sarah Green Carmichael: In your work, you’ve identified a paradox of authenticity. What is the paradox?

Herminia Ibarra: A lot of times, in order to become more authentic or more fully yourself, you actually have to do things that don’t come naturally and that sometimes make you feel like a fake or an impostor. You can’t always just start out being “authentic” in a new role or position. But by getting out of your comfort zone, plowing through that discomfort, and trying some new and different things, you eventually arrive at a more authentic version of yourself. Yet that version may be different from how you were in the past, because the worst thing of all is to define authenticity in terms of how you’ve always been.

What kind of situations might bring out this paradox?

It really hits hard when you’re moving into a role that’s new and unfamiliar, or when the situation around you is changing so much that you fall into the classic dilemma of “what got you here won’t get you there.” A great example is when you start having to sell your ideas a bit more broadly, beyond just colleagues who have the same kind of professional training as you, who share your vocabulary and know where you’re coming from. To some people, having to adjust their delivery or style feels really fake and contrived, but sometimes it’s necessary.

What is behind the urge to protect ourselves and to not feel like that fake person? Because we like to be promoted and move up the ladder. So it doesn’t seem to make sense that we would protect our sense of self quite so tenaciously.

As you step up to something new, when you’re making a transition, there are a lot of unknowns. Of course you want to succeed, but at the same time, you don’t know if you really want to change in the way that the situation seems to demand. Oftentimes you have examples in your mind of people in similar capacities who you do not want to be like. And so you may feel a bit of avoidance, fear of not doing well, fear of getting out of your competency area and not performing as you always have.

That’s a good segue to another idea from your work, which is the need to develop yourself through trial and error. That would also mean you have to make errors to find that new authentic self. What if someone feels uncomfortable with that idea, or they don’t feel like they even have a margin for error in their job?

Carol Dweck, who developed the concept of growth mindsets, has this lovely idea about the difference between a performance orientation and a learning orientation. You need to have both, but when we get stuck on the need for excellent performance at all times, with no margin for error, then we don’t learn anything new. And after a while, you stagnate.

The trick is to use trial and error smartly—not to just try new approaches haphazardly, particularly in a context where you’re very visible. One of the things that I often suggest to people is to try out new and different behaviors on the side, in low-pressure situations or contexts where failing or looking silly isn’t the end of the world. It might be in an activity that you do on an extracurricular basis. One of the reasons people love to do things like role-plays when they take a class or go to a training program is it gives them a little bit of safety to try out something different, which they can then transfer back into more-visible situations in their day jobs.

Let’s say you’ve been moving into a new role, you’ve been doing some of this trial and error, you’ve been doing your best to expand and expand your comfort zone, but it feels like it’s just not working. Maybe you’re even wondering whether this new role or assignment isn’t quite right for you. Do you give up and try to go back to your old role?

You’re not always going to be in the right role for you. Sometimes we make mistakes, we stretch too far, we stretch too fast. On the other hand, it depends what you’re trying to stretch toward. In my work I talk a lot about how people move into bigger leadership roles. Sometimes that kind of move is a big stretch if you’ve been working more in an expert capacity, and sometimes you find that you actually do prefer the expert work, as opposed to leading and creating change and getting buy-in. So there’s always room, after the fact, to decide that what you learned is you prefer to do something else.

On the other hand, you do have to give it time, because leadership behaviors are not things that we learn automatically. Getting good at listening, getting good at delegating, getting good at communicating your ideas more powerfully—that takes some time. And part of the learning process is just sticking with it long enough. Something that helps a lot is not going at it alone. I suggest drawing on your network to get feedback on what you’re doing. If you’re going at it alone, it’s going to be a lot harder and take a lot longer.

When you say it takes a long time, in your experience as a teacher of teachers, how long are you thinking about?

It depends on how big the stretch is. But certainly when you’re moving into a role that’s really unfamiliar, it could take a good six months before you start feeling a bit more comfortable. And honestly, some of the things we have to learn take much longer. For example, how many people struggle with getting the balance of delegating versus directing to a team? You have to play around with it to get the formula right, and it’s going to be different with different groups. After a while you start to pick up a bit more judgment, but it can take quite a bit of time before you get it.

If you’re in a new role, you’re trying some new things, and you’re sort of aware that they’re not working, do you think it’s a good idea that you would then disclose some of these struggles to your team?

That’s one of the big questions that always comes up: How transparent should I be about what I’m going through, about the fact that I need help, about some of the doubts that I have? And you have the two extremes. Some people go too far and kind of wear their heart on their sleeve and share too many of the doubts. And that’s kind of scary for your direct reports because they’re looking to you for some guidance, so sometimes it’s better to have those conversations with a coach or a trusted peer. Other people, though, never express any vulnerability whatsoever; in fact, they respond to being in over their heads with overconfidence. And you can go too far with that, too, because then you don’t get some of the help that you need.

One term you’ve used in your work is “learning to be a chameleon.” What is a chameleon? How do you get better at being one?

So “chameleon” often has a bit of a pejorative connotation, meaning someone who just imitates somebody else, but what I mean is somebody who can shape-shift or adapt to be what a situation is asking of them. In a way, it’s not that far from what we call “situational leadership,” which sounds a lot more palatable. But being a chameleon simply means that you have a broad enough repertoire of skills and behaviors that you can adapt to different contexts. Maybe with one audience you can be a lot more directive and authoritative, and with another audience you can be much more participative and collaborative and ask lots of questions. That’s really what it means.

I think the best way to go about it is to learn from your role models. When you don’t know the best way to act, identify some people you respect who are successful and see what they’d do. Try to get inside their heads and figure out the elements of how they act. And remember, these are usually stylistic things—not what they do but how they do it. Then start trying to tailor some of those things to yourself.

The “authentic mode” of leadership is often taken to mean being transparent and confessional. You’ve said that that type of authenticity, in terms of global norms, is actually pretty American and has an element of conformity to it. What do you mean?

I think there’s a difference between the general notion of being an authentic leader that we all buy into and the more popular notions of how you become authentic, complete with training programs and seminars and so on. And what I have gotten from listening to people talk about all this is, the way you’re supposed to go about being authentic is to share as much as you can about yourself. Yet that is extremely uncomfortable for people from cultures that do not thrive on self-disclosure, or cultures where you’re expected to get to know someone before you become quite personal with them.

That’s what I mean by conformity—sometimes there seems to be almost a formulaic aspect to how we talk about being authentic. Some people feel like they need to know everything about you, even though that is really a process that takes time. Having lived outside the United States for so many years and taught people from so many different cultures, I’ve seen that for some of them, what we’d be asking is a very unnatural act, something that they have to learn to develop over time and in a way that is more tailored to their culture.

Being authentic does not mean being as you always have been. Being authentic means striving toward a future self that’s going to be more effective as a leader, that’s going to be more fulfilled at work, that’s going to be more confident, that’s going to have more impact. But you don’t necessarily know how to do authenticity in a way that feels right to you until you start trying.

Think of somebody who wants to become a better communicator—when they start out, they’re not going to be great at it if they haven’t been good at it before. They have to practice, they have to think about how to tell a good story, they have to think about how to touch people emotionally. When you haven’t done those things before, they may not come as easily as you wish they would—but with time and effort, you can get there. But you never would have guessed that years before when you were saying, Oh, I’m just not a good communicator, so I won’t get myself into roles that require that of me. A better approach is to say, I want to have more impact, but I don’t know how to do this, so it’s going to take me out of my comfort zone.

Just start trying and see what happens. In the end, that may be the most authentic view there is.