Why you will struggle until you work out who you are as a leader

Hi {{first_name|there}},

When you take on a leadership role you are very focused on what you have to deliver. The question of how you want to lead tends to get pushed to one side until something forces you to confront it.

This is the first of a series of posts on that question. It matters because when you understand who you are as a leader, you give yourself a solid platform from which you can handle the tough times and hard decisions that leadership throws at you. Today is about leading authentically, in a way that is true to yourself, and we look at what the research says about how you can develop this as a default position. Next week we will get specific about your values, and how someone on your team would see them in the way you operate.

Leadership is hard, especially when you are new to it.

You find yourself in a constant state of uncertainty as you try to deal with the continual flow of challenges coming at you: Should I agree to this ask? Can I push back on this request? How do I get that person to listen? Why has this come across my desk? What do I do about the problems that X is creating?

Even if you are not new to leadership, the pace of change and the complexity of organisational life means that you will always be facing new problems, novel situations and fresh interpersonal dilemmas.

It therefore helps if you have some principles that you can draw on to help you deal with the challenges you face. Inevitably, you will be influenced by leaders you have seen or worked with in the past, and those influences are important and often incredibly valuable. But it is also important to learn to lead in a way that works specifically for you. So, in this and some following posts, we'll look at approaches to leadership that are grounded in you; your specific characteristics, values, strengths and beliefs, and we'll see how these can be some of the most effective leadership styles of all.

Today we will cover leading authentically and look at what some of the research says about the value of this and how you can tap into your authentic self more as a leader.

Leading authentically, in simple terms, means leading in a way that is true to your core beliefs and values. But there is more to it than that. Genuine authentic leaders are described as being self-aware, showing openness and clarity regarding who they are, and consistently disclosing and acting in accordance with their personal values, beliefs, motives, and sentiments (Walumbwa et al., 2008).

The evidence shows the value of authentic leadership, because it can lead to:

Walumbwa and colleagues (2008) identified four aspects of authentic leadership:

In practice, this comes down to being someone whose reasoning and standards your team can see. Here are four things you can practice in order to embed authenticity into your leadership approach.

Shamir and Eilam (2005) argued that a leader's authenticity rests on the meaning they attach to their own experience, and that this meaning is held in their life story. Bill George and his colleagues (2007) interviewed 125 leaders for Harvard Business Review and found no shared set of traits at all. What the leaders had in common was that they had examined their own experience and drawn something from it, seeing themselves as people who had learned from what happened to them rather than as passive observers.

You can do this quite simply yourself, if you haven't already. Write down four or five experiences that shaped how you think people should be led, and note what each one taught you about what you will and will not do. It is worth including the bad experiences here, since most of us learn a lot about the leader we want to be from the leaders we definitely don't want to be.

Self-awareness in this context is not just about introspection. It includes knowing how you come across to others, which is harder to get at, but important to try to understand.

Studies show that leaders tend to rate themselves more generously than others do on the relationship side of the job (Lee and Carpenter, 2018) and that the managers who over-rated themselves compared with the ratings of their direct reports came out lowest of all groups on both self-awareness and overall effectiveness (Van Velsor, Taylor and Leslie, 1993).

There is also another warning in the research: in one study some employees perceived a fully open leader as irritating and exhausting, particularly when leaders violated role expectations (Maunz et al., 2024).

So, you need to try to find a trusted person (peer, direct report or boss) who will give you an honest assessment of how you show up to others. And you need to be willing to act on what you hear, hard though it may be, if the feedback is negative.

Balanced processing is the habit of seeking out the information that does not support the answer you are drawn to. In my experience it is easy for this to go when things get pressured, because when you are anxious about an outcome it is tempting to want the discussion closed down.

So, make it a habit to ask the questions that will challenge your thinking and invite the contributions of others: "What is the strongest argument against doing this?" "What haven't we considered here?" "Whose voice has not been heard?" And make sure you do this before giving your own views on the subject, because if you ask after you have stated your position, you will likely get silence or agreement, and you will have learned nothing.

Relational transparency is mostly about the why. In a study of 476 employees, higher levels of transparency, moral perspective and self-awareness in the leader were all related to how much the leader was trusted, and it was that trust that linked to how engaged people were in their work (Baquero, 2023).

In practice this means that when you announce a decision, you need to be open and transparent. Give the reasoning, discuss what you weighed up, and where you are still not certain. People will generally go along with a decision they disagree with if they can see how you got there. This is also why admitting what you don't know or are unsure about tends to strengthen your position rather than weaken it.

There is an important caveat to be made here. Research shows that it is quite normal, when moving into more senior roles, to experiment with the way that you deal with things.

Ibarra (1999) found that newly promoted professionals often adapted by trying out what she called ‘provisional selves’. They watched people they rated, borrowed ways of operating from them, saw how people responded, and kept what worked. Much of it felt false at the time, but in reality it was unfamiliar rather than dishonest, and that is an important distinction.

So, the message is that you will inevitable need to act and behave differently in a new leadership role. But you can do so within the confines of what you are comfortable with. Remember, though, that if you treat every behaviour that does not yet feel like you as something to avoid, you will not progress, and your transition to leadership will stall.

Doing this work gives a solid foundation upon which you can build your leadership confidence. You don't become instantly indestructible, but your world gets less tiring, because you are drawing on your own intrinsic qualities and not working out what is expected of you from scratch every time. Your team also stops having to guess where you stand.

Nobody manages this consistently, including me. But the leaders people trust tend to be the ones who are predictable in the way that matters, so that their team already knows what they will do when it counts.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Coaching - I have a few spots available for 1 to 1 coaching. If you are finding yourself agreeing to things in meetings that make you feel uncomfortable, or you are not sure yet what kind of leader you want to be in a role that is still new, that is exactly the sort of thing we can work through together. There are more details here.