Here’s the bottom line at the top line; the more authentic people are at work, the more capable, powerful and happy they are. But in most business cultures, few people understand or promote authenticity. Therein lies the paradox: You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.
What executives think will happen if people are authentic is, “People will either spill their guts, or they’ll tell me their life story.” What follows is thinking like: “I’m really busy — and who has time for this kind of bullshit?” Even worse, if people are authentic with you, it almost demands you be authentic with them — and who wants to be that vulnerable?
Nevertheless, the payoff in raising the level of authenticity is you elevate loyalty, team spirit, and effectiveness of communication; you obliterate gossip, and you get far higher levels of focused intention and performance. Another benefit of boosting authenticity is within the culture; authenticity promotes caring and thoughtfulness that people have with and for each other.
What Are the Costs of Authenticity?
However, there are costs. Time — spent on people, not on business; spent on training and development; spent on practicing authenticity. It takes time to groom a culture in which authenticity isn’t storytelling, blaming, or assigning fault. It takes time to get to a place where people learn to share without despair or self-righteousness.
The greatest cost of all? The more people are authentic, the more true they are to themselves, and the more responsible they are. Commitments, results, and empowering relationships all surge when people are authentic.
Authenticity breaks down barriers — social, managerial, and interpersonal. Rather than forming an uninformed interpretation of the other person, or stereotyping the other person, when people are authentic — are willing to expose themselves — the levels of compassion, consideration, and commitment rise sharply.
Let’s be realistic. Authenticity is the idea that we should make the way we behave on the outside match what we feel on the inside, but really, a highly functioning business depends on keeping a healthy distance between the two. This is the conundrum of the paradox: keeping the two poles farther apart yet allowing them to coexist.
André Berthiaume said: “We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our skin.” We wear certain masks at work. Masks of effectiveness, masks of power; masks of “I’ve got myself together.”
However, the masks we wear often carry some pretense, some hypocrisy, some false behavior. Ultimately, masks are a fabrication, because underneath them are the other parts of you — those parts that are ineffective, those parts that are weak, those parts where anxiety resides.
The masks we wear might seem reliable, but they are merely our business disguises, our camouflages at work that we don so as not to reveal our full selves. The masks we wear are designed to cover insecurities, vulnerabilities, and apprehensions. But insecurities, vulnerabilities, and apprehensions aren’t erased by wearing masks — rather, these qualities are often exaggerated.
What Can You Gain from Authenticity?
You can’t have up without down; in without out; good without bad. You can’t have whatever the mask is trying to portray to others without the opposite existing as well. And the energy it takes to guard what you don’t want people to know about you is very taxing. Authenticity, ultimately, is energy-giving.
For nearly everyone I’ve encountered, it takes a huge amount of courage and chutzpah to be authentic. The real lock on the door to authenticity is in everyone’s own hands, but if the culture doesn’t foster authenticity, if the company doesn’t honor authenticity as a value, if leadership is unable to be authentic, authenticity quickly becomes nonexistent.
— Marc
Excerpt from “The Business Book of Wisdom,” available March 2019 at your leading booksellers. With permission from the publisher.
