Authentic Leadership

Tom Paul — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:56:00 GMT

I recently helped put on a talk for the AeA Emerging Business Committee. It was entitled Authentic Leadership and it was presented by the leadership consultant Gordon Whitehead. His practice is Captus5 and he writes extensively on the subject of leadership.

Good leadership is what drives organizations. Leadership is first and foremost about people. More specifically, it's about influencing people to do the right things (with heavy doses of motivation and encouragement) and making them better (giving them opportunities to improve and coaching them). And, in a longer term way it's about creating an organizational culture that cultivates and rewards authentic leadership.

Authentic leadership is a particularly effective form of leadership because at its essence it fundamentally respects people. It embraces the connections within organizations, among them, and with communities at large.

Authentic leadership has four key principles:

Be True to Self
Be True to Others
Build Trust
Build Community

An authentic leader is deeply aware of self. This is not in an overly absorbed way, but rather in a way that understands one's own internal personal needs and drives. The ability to be aligned with the core of who one is and to make decisions based on one's internal value structure is essential to an authentic leader.

An authentic leader has empathy, understands the plight of followers. It is in understanding the motivations, the conditions and the pains of followers where leaders rise to benefit human causes and achieve great things.

An authentic leader builds trust. Trust engendered by consistency, fairness and propriety is one one level of trust. However a deeper, much more powerful level of trust is based on hope; this kind of trust binds a follower to the cause.

An authentic leader has a keen sense of community. Consistently solving problems within the context of the organization's history, or at least with history in mind, is important. Change is often the most difficult thing for the average working person to face. Change is what leaders are most often called upon to do. Change that is represented from the community perspective softens the blow and encourages participation.

So how do you develop authentic leaders within your organization? Here are some key principles and ideas:

Take risks! Let your team face adversity and don't bail them out. Let them solve their own problems.
Decentralize power and rotate assignments
Start a reading program and engage the team in learning
Analyze case studies as a team

The best leaders are the ones who focus on putting great people around them, and then work to make them even better. A large measure of humility is required to do this. In fact, of great leaders, humility is one of the most important attributes.

On Thought Leadership

Tom Paul — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:29:00 GMT

The term "thought leadership" is de rigeur, so fashionable that one can find it with increasing frequency in mission statements, taglines and core value summaries. Yet, can it be said that this term is being used honestly?

The term "thought leader" was first coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the magazine, Strategy & Business. Initially, the term simply meant anyone who had contributed new thoughts to business. Since then, the term has spread from business to other disciplines and has come to include someone who enlivens old processes with new ideas. (And so the inexorable dilution of meaning propels us headlong toward the abyss.....)

In interactive the playing field is still wide open; the channel is still emerging in so many ways. New tech, new media, new platforms, new...lots of things! The first online social network, the first auction site, the first whatever - if you come up with the idea first you're a thought leder. (no?) So our simple, if somewhat generous first try at a defintion could be: if you come up with something new, you're a thought leader - if only until someone comes up with something to one up you. And then you were a thought leader....

But hey, not so fast there, slick. This is a bad definition. First of all, diluted. But second of all, cardinal sin: misses the point.

Coming up with a new idea doesn't make you a thought leader. The term thought leader suggests something so much bigger, more important than just "we got there first." There's confidence in there, in that term - more, in the idea. You see, in my view what separates the truly great thought leaders from the merely "first" is two-fold: 1) you must be recognized among your peers for your innovative ideas (and by the way, they tend to hold back a bit on praise if you're their competition!) AND 2) demonstrate the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights. This is a tough standard to achieve - rightly so! The term should be applied rarely, as rare as those who have earned the honor to be called thought leaders.

There's actually a term for the concept "actionable distilled insights" (thinklets), but use that term at your own peril. Your audience will have to be rather pretentious for you to impress them with that one.

Thought leadership is not about expertise. Experts deserve praise, and they deserve your business (nice experts anyway). But thought leader is not synonymous with expert - thought leadership, to quote my favorite first line of a book is "a hallowed order, and elite sub-category."

Sometimes innovative brilliance emerges in combining old things in new ways that are both surprising and delightful. To be a company that exemplifies thought leadership, you need to have an idea engine, a concept forge, AS WELL AS an outward-leaning communication stance combined with a desire to raise the playing field - a capability to not only learn new things, to not only discover them for the first time, but to educate others - selflessly because to increase knowledge is an end in itself, and selfishly because you want tougher competition!

Michael Porter at Harvard is a thought leader in the highest sense. He's a consistent concept innovator in business thinking, truly next level stuff that better than being brilliant only is eminently applicable, and has impacted countless myriad business people (myself included)....

Would you define thought leadership differently? What thought leaders most impress you?

Tom Paul's Blog

Authentic Leadership

On Thought Leadership