Being authentic
It’s simple but not easy
“It is tragic how few people ever “possess their souls” before they die. “Nothing is more rare in any man,” says Emerson, “than an act of his own.” It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”. — Oscar Wilde 1
You’ve probably encountered the online meme “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken”, usually attributed to Oscar Wilde despite no evidence he ever said it.
Kind of ironic really — using a falsehood to promote authenticity.
But that’s the thing about authenticity. It’s much easier to pretend to be authentic by focusing on Impression Management as opposed to making the deep inner effort required to actually be authentic… 2
Inauthentic authenticity is rife in the worlds of marketing, advertising, and PR.
In her article Authenticity, Purpose and Fakery — The Challenge for Brands, Kate Richardson observes that “brands are confusing the need to stand for something genuine with standing for something worthy. Part of the motivation for this is to increase appeal with the so-called Millennials — the ‘authentic generation’. ” 3
She points out that:
“Too many brands are making the mistake of orienting themselves around a lofty, higher purpose that goes beyond the goal of profit, straying too far from their unique value and the realm of their category. Brands are getting distracted by standing for [insert important or worthy or socially conscious aspiration here] at the expense of standing for something relevant in the minds of their audience. In trying too hard to be responsible and caring, they’re coming across as tediously homogenous and utterly disingenuous.” 4
Bud Light anyone..?
Inauthentic authenticity is also a major problem in the organisational domain, where it’s not helped by claims from people who really should know better, such as:
“Being authentic is pretty much the opposite of what leaders must do. Leaders do not need to be true to themselves. Rather, leaders need to be true to what the situation and what those around them want and need from them”. 5
I was semi-stunned when I read the above from Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer in his 2015 book “Leadership BS”.
How on earth could anyone, let alone a professor at a prestigious business school, advocate blowing around like chaff in the wind, flip-flopping hither and thither, adopting a sheep-like follow-the-herd mentality and claim it has anything whatsoever to do with leadership..?
What kind of “leader” merely adapts chameleon-like to whatever’s going on around them..?
Would you follow such a “leader”..?
I certainly wouldn’t…
The reason I was only semi-stunned when I read the above is that I found Pfeffer similarly disappointing when he co-authored, with fellow academic Bob Sutton, “The Knowing-Doing Gap” (2000) subtitled “How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action”. 6
Despite the promise of the subtitle, they confessed: “We found no simple answers to the knowing-doing dilemma” concluding that “given the importance of the knowing-doing problem, if such simple answers existed, they would already have been widely implemented.”
Are you struck, like me, by the irony of a book that claims to illuminate the gap between knowing and doing getting no further than concluding that if we knew why the gap existed we’d have done something about it..? 7
Being Authentic
If we want to make progress with authenticity, not as an academic theory but for real-world impact, we need a more solid foundation.
The etymology of authentic is a good place to start, coming from two Greek roots: 8
autos — meaning self
hentes — meaning doer or being.
The ancient Greeks recognised the vital importance of being oneself, with the inscription at the Temple of Apollo, Γνῶθι σαυτόν — know thyself, being the most famous of all the Delphic Maxims. 9
But what does being authentic in this way actually entail?
Here we’re helped by insights from perhaps the most pragmatically useful approach to the psychology of human behaviour and motivation — Self Determination Theory (SDT) — and specifically the aspect of Organismic Integration Theory (OIT). 10
OIT describes how we become inauthentic as we internalise influences imposed on us from outside by:
other individuals — e.g. parents, siblings, friends, teachers, bosses;
social groups — such as friends, family, religions, politics, organisations;
wider society and the world at large.
In essence, OIT describes how we are coloured by the company we keep, internalising external influences through a sequence of four stages: 11
External regulation. This is where we’re aware of outside influences making us behave as we otherwise wouldn’t.
Introjection. This second stage is “a process in which an individual unconsciously incorporates aspects of external reality into the self, particularly the attitudes, values, and qualities of another person or a part of another person’s personality”. 12
Identification. The third stage of internalisation is “the process of associating the self closely with other individuals and their characteristics or views”. 13
Integration. This final stage of internalisation is where we’re no longer aware that the influences originally came from outside the self — they have become so deeply embodied and integrated they seem to originate within the self.
You can see how organisations have employed OIT, if only implicitly, to indoctrinate and control employees.
It’s at the heart of how “culture” has traditionally been used as a normative behaviour control methodology for turning uniquely diverse human beings into corporate clones and drones programmed to do the bidding of their lords and masters.
But in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, organisations don’t need cultural fit — they need cultural fitness, which requires the creation of conditions in which people rediscover and combine their unique skills, insights, and inspirations to develop innovation, agility, and adaptiveness muscles throughout the organisation.
Encouraging people, by example — not exhortation, to be more authentic helps them break free from the internalised top-down command and control culture of the past in which senior people made disconnected decisions, and everyone else was expected to do what they were told. 14
This shift is essential if organisations are to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, and requires those who aspire to a leadership role to lead the way by being more authentic themselves.
Einstein strikingly articulated the impoverishing consequences of cultural internalisation when he famously observed:
“Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.” 15
Being authentic involves reversing this process of internalisation — looking within to see where the self has been bent out of shape, removing these internalised external influences, rediscovering our own genuine personal values, and cultivating these into character traits so we come to see with our own eyes and feel with our own hearts. 16
As Kate Richardson points out: “In its simplest form, to be authentic is to live life in a way that’s congruent with your values, regardless of external influence”. 17
Being authentic in this way is also the key to wisdom, as the Dao De Jing succinctly states:
“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” 18
It’s simple enough in theory, but being authentic is not so easy in practice, for several reasons:
1: Old habits die hard — and many of us have become deeply habituated to being inauthentic so we fit in and others will like us. 19
2: Others want us to remain inauthentic — it suits their purposes for us not to be true to ourselves — we can then be more readily co-opted to further their agendas.
3: Mistaking authenticity for truth — as we begin to see with our own eyes and feel with our own hearts we can be so profoundly moved by the experience we risk, in our new-found enthusiasm, ramming our perspectives down everyone else’s throats. The life-affirming clarity we gain by being authentic can be so compelling we can easily mistake our 2D perspectives for being in sole possession of the truth. That’s why 2D3D mindsets are so central to future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness — because they demand two essential and inseparable things: that we progressively see our own genuine 2D perspective ever more clearly with our own eyes, and, at the same time remain intensely curious about, and deeply respectful of, the different 2D perspectives of others. 20
4: Life tests our resolve to being authentic — because when we commit to being authentic, attractive opportunities will come along that just require us to be a little bit inauthentic…
I had a powerful experience of this when I left a lucrative consulting role with Arthur D. Little. 21
The firm had undergone a recent change in direction having dispensed with the forward-thinking CEO and his team and decided to default to the finders, minders, grinders business model operated by its mainstream consulting firm competitors. 22
As a Corporate Director, I’d be expected to stop helping clients and instead become a finder — schmoozing senior executives to seduce them into buying one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter assignments designed to mobilise large teams of consultants to suck maximum cash out of their bank accounts whilst simultaneously undermining their capabilities for shaping their own futures…
It was an easy decision to leave and set up my own private practice, which I did in April 2001.
It was then that my commitment to being authentic got properly tested.
Rashid, a friend who ran a successful boutique consulting firm out of the US, had landed a lucrative contract with a client in London, and as I’m based just up the road in Cambridge, he offered me the work. 23
The assignment basically involved holding the client’s feet to the fire to implement an organisational design Rashid had come up with.
Whatever the merits of this work, it would have been inauthentic for me to take on, as I’m strongly opposed to work that undermines a client organisation’s own capacity for sense making, decision making, and action taking.
Had I taken on the work, I could foresee a conversation in which the senior executive sponsor asked me if I thought Rashid’s plan was the right way for them to proceed.
I would then have either been obliged to lie and say “yes”, or tell the truth and say “no” — the latter inevitably prompting the question “so why are you doing it?”
To which the honest answer would have been “I’m undermining your organisation’s future for the money”.
So, even though I didn’t have any other substantial work lined up, I turned Rashid down. He’s never asked me to work with him again.
Although the decision was simple, it wasn’t easy.
Then, a few weeks later, I was having lunch with Sven, a former client based in Sweden and now CEO of a company with a research and development lab in the UK.24
The lunch was purely a social catch-up, so I was surprised when he asked me if I’d help him get the different parts of the organisation working together with greater innovation, agility, and adaptiveness — work that’s right up my street.
From the many conversations I’ve had over the past 30 years or so with others who strive to be authentic in their life and work, this kind of test seems to be woven mysteriously into the fabric of life.
You commit to being authentic, and a big juicy carrot gets dangled in front of you which can be yours if you’ll just compromise on your commitment.
However, if you refuse to be seduced, something unexpectedly comes along from left field that’s far more appropriate and moves things forward.
You just have to keep the faith in being authentic.
The bottom line: being authentic requires attention and effort, which is why it’s tempting to avoid it — even at the cost of not seeing with our own eyes and feeling with our own hearts.
And there are a couple of easy options available if we want to absolve ourselves from making the effort:
The first is to claim there’s no such thing as an authentic self — because then there’s no point in making any effort.
The second is to claim that everyone is being authentic all the time — because then there’s no need to make any effort.
Both turn out to be convenient excuses for letting yourself off the hook…
Questions for reflection
How are you working on yourself to be more authentic?
Which internalised inauthentic attitudes and behaviours have you successfully jettisoned?
Which ones do you still need to address?
De Profundis — Latin for “from the depths” — is a letter written by Oscar Wilde in 1987 during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas.
Social psychologist Erving Goffman (1922 - 1982) called this Impression Management in his seminal 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Eat Your Greens (2018) chapter 28.
Ibid Eat Your Greens chapter 28.
Jeffrey Pfeffer (Stanford Graduate School of Business) Leadership BS (2015) p87.
Ibid Knowing-Doing Gap p5.
Authentic at Etymonline.
Ibid Organismic Integration Theory (OIT).
American Psychological Association definition of introjection.
American Psychological Association definition of identification.
See the previous article The Double Disconnect.
Letter to a Friend of Peace in the book The World as I see It (1934) - on Goodreads.
For more on this see the previous article Values, Virtues, and Virtuosity.
Ibid Eat Your Greens chapter 28.
I’m using the spelling “Dao De Jing” guided by my colleague Dr Gemma Jiang who was born in China and studies and practices Daoism. I’m also not attributing the Dao to Laozi as the authorship of the Dao is unclear.
I did this myself up to my 30s — and was truly shocked when I saw it for the first time.
For more on this see the previous article Unlocking the innovative mindset.
I was Corporate Director and Global Head of Organisational Learning and Innovation Leadership when I left ADL in 2001.
For more on the traditional finders, minders, grinders consulting model see the previous article Veni, Vidi, Invoici.
Rashid is a pseudonym.
Sven is a pseudonym.