How To Lead As Your Authentic Self - Leadership Minute

Find your authentic leadership style to reach your full potential as a leader.

Newly minted leaders tend to follow one particular approach. Without the experience to understand what they value most as a leader, they wind up emulating practices and behaviors they’ve admired most about the managers they’ve had—or do the opposite of the managerial tactics that frustrated them most.

The problem with this approach is even effective leadership tactics can become ineffective if they are not authentic to the leader. Consider, for example, the kind, genial person who suddenly becomes intense and demanding because they believe that’s how to command respect.

It’s cliché to say you should be yourself, but clichés exist for a reason. If you don’t think carefully about your own authentic leadership style, you’ll find your approach will become a patchwork quilt of the best practices of others, some of which won’t feel right or authentic.

I speak from experience. I remember one specific instance where people on my team had partied way too hard at an industry conference and were unable to function properly the next day. Needing to address the issue, I spoke with another colleague at the same conference and adapted his hard-handed approach. That solution did not sit well with me; right away I felt like I was running someone else’s playbook.

This form of emulation is a logical progression of trial and error for managers, but it’s not a recipe for the highest level of leadership. This approach can leave you without a clear compass to navigate difficult situations or make tough choices. Few things feel worse as a leader than feeling like your actions or decisions are not authentic to you at your core. Likewise, few things erode team confidence faster than when a leader appears to barely believe in their own words or actions.

I’ve worked with over 100 companies as a speaker and consultant over the past few years, focusing particularly on leadership development. I’ve seen many cases where companies have clear leadership standards they expect their managers to follow and build their leadership training around those tactical principles. Some examples I’ve seen include:

• Communicate Transparently

• Reward Excellent Performance

• Make Timely Decisions

Guidelines like these are a good start. But while leadership standards can set a necessary baseline for what leaders need to do to help the organization grow, there’s no universal approach that can tell every person how they should lead. A person’s leadership style has to be authentic to be effective, and to be authentic, that leadership style must be unique and differentiated to that person.

The key to finding your authentic leadership style, as I’ve often written, lies in discovering core values.

Core values are the non-negotiable principles that are most important to you. And because each of us is the same person both in and out of work, it’s essential for you personal core values to form the backbone of your professional leadership style. While you don’t need your work to reflect all your core values, all the time, there ultimately has to be alignment between what you do at work and what you believe most deeply.

To that point, research has found that leaders who talk about and live their values are perceived as three times more trustworthy by their teams.

As implied above, I was leading a small team before I even had considered what my core values could be. I was just trying to do my best with the best practices and learnings I could cobble together.

But eventually, I settled on five values that summarize the non-negotiable descriptors of who I am as a person, and as a leader:

• Health and Vitality

• Find A Better Way and Share It

• Self-Reliance

• Respectful Authenticity

• Long-Term Orientation

Getting this clarity is what allowed me to approach my full potential as a leader. I used my values to lead authentically as myself, and to communicate what matters most to me to the people I lead.

For example, one of my core values, as mentioned above, is “Find A Better Way And Share It.” As a result, I am not someone who likes to keep the status quo. I expect people on the teams I lead to strive to improve both the business and themselves. Some people excel under this type of leadership, and some people do not. It’s crucial for the people I lead to know this about me upfront. That clarity is extremely powerful, and pays dividends for me, the people I lead and our organization.

If you are leading an organization, or even a small team, you’ve surely had moments where you’ve wondered if you were doing the right thing. Identifying your core values and aligning your leadership style to them is the best way to erase that doubt and reach your full potential as a leader.

If you need help doing this, my core values course can help. If you preorder the hardcover version of my upcoming book on values, The Compass Within, I’ll give you the course for free. And if you want to help your team get clarity on their values, reach out to me, as I often do this work with teams and organizations.

The Leadership Minute, available exclusively to Friday Forward premium subscribers, is a weekly newsletter that will teach you to become the leader you want to be and live a life aligned with your principles. It features tried and true strategies from my own life and from the best leaders I know, presented in a digestible format that you can read in 10 minutes and put into to practice today.