Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones in their book Why Should Anyone Be Led By You discuss what it takes to be an authentic leader.

Traditional approaches view leadership as a series of competencies to be learnt and developed. Whereas authentic leaders rely on being themselves and being responsive to the people and situations they encounter. Here’s a comparison of traditional and authentic leadership.

Authentic

The dictionary defines authentic as having “undisputed origins”. As a leader, this means that your actions are consistent with a common source. And, that common source is you and your sense of self. It’s demonstrated by a coherence between your words and your deeds.

Traditional Versus Authentic

Traditional Leader

• Strong psychological bias that aims to identify the characteristics of leaders
• Leadership qualities are inherent to the individual
• Ongoing search for the Leadership Recipe
• Does not consider the changing leadership context
• Compare yourself to list of competencies and improve your weaknesses
• Learn by imitating other leaders
• Excessive focus on inner drives of the leader – emotional intelligence
• Knowing yourself is important and not enough

Authentic Leader

• There are no universal leadership characteristics
• Leadership is something we do with other people
• Identify and deploy your own personal leadership assets
• Leadership fits the context
• Leadership is a relationship between the leader and the led
• Effective leaders have an over-arching sense of purpose, with sufficient self-knowledge.
• Effective leaders don’t know it all and they do know enough.

Derived from the Book Rapper issue: Authentic.

Next in this series: Three Leadership Axioms