The Burden of Authenticity: An Excerpt from “Nobody Believes You”

by Jenni Field

Peter is the operations manager for a recently merged and rapidly growing global consultancy. He has read all the leadership books. He hosts team-building events, practices empathy, prioritizes authenticity, and still, his employees do not seem to be doing what he needs them to do.

Why? Because Peter has not done the hard work of establishing connection beyond performative action. Peter is not a credible leader. It’s not that nobody is listening to Peter. It’s that nobody believes him enough to follow him.

Behavior and communication is at the heart of credible leadership. We can gather a lot of information from the books we read and the seminars we attend, but knowledge without action leads to Peter’s problem, to a place of frustration with our team and with ourselves.

Each of the books Peter has read demands something different of him: that he is vulnerable, that he is honest, that he is humble and authentic and so much more. He has to divide his time between those in his team, his peers and his managers, all of whom continue to fill his voicemail, his inbox, and his chat messages every single day. His time is not always his own, and the recent merger is only making it more challenging to stay on top of the work, let alone the relationships.

Peter is struggling. He has so much good intention that gets buried in the day-to-day workload. The outcome? A team who disengages with him, distrusts him, disrespects him, and worst of all, doesn’t believe him.

Even if he had the time to take action based on what he was reading, where does he start? Focusing on just one thing like vulnerability, humility, or authenticity isn’t enough to get people to follow you. It’s not enough for them to believe that you are a leader worth following.

Peter is like many leaders who think they are doing everything right but they are running ineffective teams and organizations. We see this in retention numbers, profitability, innovation, productivity, and broader employee engagement scores. If a leader wants to succeed, they have to look at their behaviors, their communication style, and their ability to build relationships with those they lead.

Those in the workplace have spent years telling people to bring their whole selves to their work. To be more authentic with those around them. This has been a narrative told to leaders for decades.

It’s wrong.

We don’t want leaders to be authentic. We want them to be genuine, but that isn’t the same thing. It might feel like a nuanced difference, but it’s an important distinction when we are looking at how you get people to follow you, and it’s one I explore later in the book.

Being authentic has been the answer to every leadership problem in recent years. Articles say that it will enhance trust, encourage innovation, and boost employee engagement, but it can do the exact opposite. And in a world that is more divided than it has been in modern times, being authentic can become a dangerous weapon.

If you think about the leaders in the public eye, you might start to consider whether they are authentic and whether you want to follow them. Politicians and high profile business leaders are excellent examples—some are very authentic, but does that make people want to follow them?

“I’m just being my authentic self” is an easy statement after you’ve shouted at someone, sworn at someone, disrespected someone, or isolated someone. It’s an easy excuse for behavior that is not acceptable for those who lead others. Authenticity is fine for a lot of people, but it’s not if you’re looking to lead.

Think about the leaders in your organization. When it comes to following them, their authenticity isn’t actually that important.

In my research that helped me shape this book, we asked people:

“Why do you follow a leader?”

The word authentic came up once. There were other things that were more important and more consistent in the research. And one of the main things I learned was that it really isn’t one thing like vulnerability or empathy that makes people follow others. It’s a lot more than that, and it’s getting the blend right that is important.

If we want to lead, we need people to follow us. That’s the outcome we are looking for.

We want to follow people we believe. Being credible is the only way to make sure others will genuinely want to follow us. Credibility is what happens when effective  communication meets true accountability.

In my definition of credible leadership, I include a blend of traits and behaviors that make someone believable. It is those traits and behaviors we will explore throughout this book, referring to them as “practices.”

When I was, for example, interviewing Frank, a director in a professional services organization, we were discussing the challenges around communication in his organization. Frank had people in his function looking after their communication with different stakeholders alongside a central team of communications, and he wasn’t alone. Almost every other director had the same set up with people in their teams responsible for communicating with different stakeholders. It was chaos with over fifty people across the organization doing almost the same thing.

I asked him why the communication wasn’t going well and why things were so disparate.

As we chatted, it came down to one thing: the credibility of the communication leader for the central team. Frank spent around ten minutes of the call, discussing things like skills, trust, and reliability. Then, it was as if a lightbulb came on, and he exclaimed,

“They just aren’t credible!”

For this organization, the implications regarding the lack of credibility were huge. It was having an impact on relationships everywhere, inside and outside the organization. It also meant that any structural changes inside the organization wouldn’t happen, because it’s impossible to create a well-functioning team under a leader who isn’t credible. I asked Frank, “What if we moved some of the people in your function who look after communication to the central team?”

“No,” he said. Simple, quick, and to the point.

“Why not?”

“Not with that person leading the team.”

And so the difficult conversations began as we explored development and changes in roles for individuals in the communication team.

When leaders of any function aren’t seen as credible, the organization stalls. Things don’t move forward, and there are inefficiencies and frustrations everywhere. Being credible has a direct link to the financial performance of a team or organization, and if we hire people who are credible to lead, we will save organizations unnecessary expenditure and time.

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To order your copy of Jenni’s book, “Nobody Believes You”. click here.

Written by: Editor